Theo Chocolate is a company in Seattle which makes chocolate. I was fortunate enough to watch its founding and early years. On 5 September 2007 its founder, Jeff Fairhall, died following a series of unusual circumstances. Jeff was my dear friend and many things about his death were very unfortunate. When we would meet he would tell me of some of his concerns and always a few troubles, but my time with him was entirely happy and those troubles seemed removed from me at the time.
Jeff most known as the founder of Seattle’s Essential Baking Company and Theo Chocolate. He spent his time in Fremont in Seattle, which then and now was a neighborhood known for individual expression, community organizing, and leftist values. To set the mood of the neighborhood, its public art includes the Statue of Lenin, the Fremont Troll, the Fremont Rocket, Waiting for the Interurban, and the Fremont Solstice Parade known for the naked Solstice Cyclists. The art and culture of that neighborhood attracted Jeff to first start selling bread there, then later to establish the chocolate factory there. Jeff was a fan of all the neighborhood art, and as I will explain, the story of the chocolate factory builds from this in addition to showcasing Jeff’s own values.
A social issue which Jeff and Fremont discussed but which is not easily captured by art are awareness of food supply with regard to access, safety, and the social culture of consuming food. The brand of the Essential Baking Company was that the production of its bread took into account the organic food movement, concern about genetically modified organisms, preference for locally made products, the aversion to enriching large corporations outside of a community versus the people in a community, economic divides which make products more available to rich than poor, environmental sustainability, labor rights, nutritional science, and animal rights. He was making bread but he continually talked about the intent and scale of what he was doing, and when talking about his business he talked more about the supply chain than the quality of his food. The quality was the best and that aspect did not need to be addressed, but it was more important to him to have a sustainable, ethical, accessible product than to make the best product. It just happened that in this time and place and circumstances, he was able to make the best also.
I had been eating Essential Baking Company bread for years both from the food bank and from the “bread dumpster”. As an artisanal bread marketed as a premium product, it needed to be sold the day it was made, and whatever was left had to be discarded. The bread sold for about $5 a loaf when the cheapest bread was $1 and average good bread was $2-3, so it was a luxury product. Jeff arranged somehow for someone to collect the old bread and bring it to the food banks so that poor people could have day-old bread for free. There was always a lot as bread is produced in excess because the marketing is the major cost of production, so the cost of making a lot is approximately the same as the cost of making a little. For this reason, it is worthwhile for retailers to have extra so that they never run out for paying customers. The result of this was that I always had very good slightly old and stale bread, and I knew the brand. Besides getting the bread from the food bank, there was an era in which people in my social circle all knew the “bread dumpster”. Dumpsters are typically dirty places, but in the space for city trash collection at Essential Baking Company, the staff neatly and cleanly bagged bread and placed it so that people could collect it. The circumstances were that it would have been costly for them to develop some formal distribution system to bring the bread to poor people. They did a lot of that anyway, sharing a lot with food banks including the one on 50th and the Ave, but in addition to that they had this dumpster distribution system so that people could “steal” the bread from their trash without them acknowledging or taking responsibility for giving the bread to the poor. At Consumer Reports I have two colleagues with Seattle ties who knew the bread dumpster. They both knew it by that name and I suppose everyone does. It seems kind of strange in hindsight that a major attraction in a city is a certain dumpster that everyone knows and remembers. I am not sure if the dumpster is still active in the same way. Now that Jeff is gone I expect that it could be gone also but I do not know.
I became aware of Jeff personally when he started taking ads in The Stranger sharing his message and calling himself “The Messenger.” He had a spiritual or religious message to share. It evolved over time. He published messages over a period of maybe three years. After meeting him, I also became aware of his writings in certain online forums which dated back further. It would be difficult to cover it all as much of it was stream of consciousness, but the parts of it which I most often discussed with him were ethics in food consumption, his divinity, and the conspiracy against him. I found Jeff to be immensely interesting and spent hours talking with him in person and exchanged not less than the equivalent of 100 printed pages of correspondence with him – perhaps several hundred. When he was left to talk freely, he tried to keep the conversation to his theories on cosmology. Internet Archive has the index of his writings. I think his “The Saga of Humanity” was his favorite piece.
I started meeting him when he posted this schedule. He wrote a biography for himself.
With regard to food consumption, Jeff felt that it was a human right that everyone have access to healthy food. This was part of a broader belief that everyone should have “guaranteed minimum income“, which is the provision of all minimal life needs to all people regardless of whether they worked. He thought this was possible now, because he considered the current time to be a post-scarcity economy. He believed that the state of technology was such that there was a resource surplus and that if only resources were equitably distributed, then everyone on earth could have food, housing, education, safety, health, “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” without working or being beholden to anything except a light societal oversight. He talked about the economics of housing and labor and food, and his thoughts were influenced by seeing the communal lifestyle of some of the Pacific Northwest hippie / homesteader / off-the-grid demographics. He imagined that if everyone had their needs met then the productivity of everyone would explode on the premise that if people are less burdened with stress then human instinct would be for all individuals to produce more. In contrast, I think that the prevailing social view is that if people are not compelled to work then overall productivity would go down because most people would choose to pass their time in leisure. Jeff himself worked a lot and enjoyed it, or perhaps I could say that what was work for others seemed like play to him and his natural relaxed behavior was more productive than many people’s hard work.
About Jeff’s divinity – he said that he was God, and most people said he was crazy. I enjoy spending time with inspired and passionate people. Jeff was that. From my perspective, he was unlike typical persons on the edge because he had previously lived an organized life as the executive of a conventional business before he began experimenting with more radical life routines. Jeff embraced his spirituality suddenly and only after developing a lifetime of street smarts, business sense, and social grace before he found his spiritual calling. When he started Essential Baking he did it with no funding. His story was that he had baking ingredients and the kitchen in his apartment. He sold bread himself at the Fremont farmer’s market. From this his business grew into a multi-building baking empire which served the entire city of Seattle. He had no formal business training and told me that he made a lot of mistakes in every part of his management, but he learned eventually through a system of acknowledging his problems, paying for his mistakes, regretting the pain of failure, and trying to do better in the future. When he talked about his divinity it was his spirituality which was fated, and not his earthly business, and I never remember him speaking proudly about his earthly accomplishments except to say that he was grateful and humbled that his employees and colleagues would work to contribute to this dream he had of starting a bakery. He often attributed his success to his employees whenever talk turned to the Essential Baking Company. He considered it to be a wonder and a surprise that he could hire people and suggest to them what they should do, and that somehow in ways he did not understand they used their own brains and labor to make the business a success with money and power coming to him. He had some unease about receiving money in this way and wanted to give back to the community.
The first time I met Jeff I went to the old Redhook Brewery in Fremont, which was not yet Theo Chocolate. I intended to see Jeff but also went there to volunteer to decorate for the Solstice Parade. This might have been in 2003 – the easiest record to find would be finding the Solstice Parade which was prepared there. There is a tradition for the parade of folding lots of paper cranes for decoration, and I joined a table of people making the birds. I was stoned out of my mind and found the origami delightful, and also was very happy with the papier-mâché sculptures, costumes, and volunteer artist spirit around the place. I kept asking people how to fold the cranes, and would then make a lot of them perfectly, but then forget how to fold them again and everyone was so patient and happy to show me again. As I was folding them, I brought the conversation around to Jeff, and the people who were managing the space agreed that Jeff was very generous to provide the space for them to make art for the parade and also said that his chocolate was the best. They hinted that they avoided Jeff’s attempts to engage them in religious discussion, and I pressed them further, and they suggested that if I liked then I could meet him myself. I knew that he was giving a religious presentation but I was overwhelmed by all the colors and art making and I was feeling like not walking or talking too much, so I listened from the side. He was speaking to an audience of about 15 people who were curious to hear him, but who had actually come to prepare for the parade. I was not in any state to understand what he was getting at, but I felt his enthusiasm and perceived that the audience had heard enough after a few minutes of detecting his religious position. For me, I was in a state that made really weird religion attractive. I did not introduce myself, and wandered off.
He kept advertising in The Stranger for people to come to his meetups, and I came to a later one. I showed up on time, and was in what is now the storefront of Theo Chocolate. Then it was a groovy den for a guru to teach, with a raised platform where Jeff could sit in the lotus position and face his disciples who could lounge around on the floor on pillows and rugs while they ate chocolate. I was alone with Jeff. I think we must have talked for at least three hours that night. Some other time Lee came with me to see what I was doing, and he stayed only briefly to leave me there for hours to talk. Lee had no patience for these things, but liked hearing my summaries the next day. I wanted to be supportive of Jeff’s meetups. Many had no attendees, some people came and left in a friendly way, and some people left dismissively. For the full page ads he was buying, in hindsight I expect those must have cost $10k each. Also in hindsight – if he was managing his religious outreach as thoughtfully as he used to manage his business, I think he could have gotten more people to come. He was less interested in getting more people to come, and more interested in making the invitation in the way he was. Whoever reacted to that invitation in that way was fated.
I had been visiting him for a long time and maintaining a long email correspondence with him before I felt that he began to address me personally. In the beginning I directed questions to him. He had a complicated theology which mixed pop-culture Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Fremont New Age Yoga classes in his way and with little intent to align with any formally outlined theology. I had practicing experience as a Catholic, Southern Evangelical Christian, Pentecostal tradition, and Mormon so at the least I knew the basics of Christian religion whereas he lacked even Sunday School familiarity. He often told Christian stories, but they were interpretations of what a non-religious person would say if their religious childhood friends had explained the narratives years ago. His ideas changed every few weeks, discarding things that did not work and becoming entrenched in other concepts which were beyond being challenged. I suppose I expected for him to treat me indifferently, indefinitely, because for lots of these meetings he regarded me impersonally even though I was the only person to consistently go see him. I was happy with the exercise of outlandish religious debate. When he incorporated me into the pantheon which he taught in his lectures, I was a little flattered.
Jeff’s religion promised a coming peace. Based on the Christian Book of Revelation, he said that an apocalypse is coming, and that he was the Christ. There would be a time when the world began to rapidly decay, and suddenly, the only safe place to be would be in the Temple in Jerusalem. According to his numerology, the temple would not actually be in Jerusalem or even in Israel, but actually it would be in Seattle and had to be on the land on which the chocolate factory sat. The chocolate factory was holy in itself, and holy for being where it was in Fremont. The Holy of Holies was the part of the factory which produced chocolate, and eating the chocolate was part of the path to salvation. “Theo” in “Theo Chocolate” was a play on words – “theo” in Greek means “god”, and chocolate’s Latin name is Theobroma cacao, and it contains theobromine, which Jeff insisted was an entheogen.
Very early in our talks Jeff made it clear to me that the chocolate was to be a vehicle for delivering other entheogens – cannabis and psilocybin certainly. The point of Theo Chocolate was to distribute entheogenic drugs, and then it happened also that chocolate was a business sector that he could manage profitably in the long term. Also he was interested in using it to share Amanita muscaria, even after our talks wondering whether it could be distributed safely in any kind of mass production, and LSD, which he assured me could be distributed safely to anyone if in chocolate. He told me that he had a business partner who was of like mind in this, and I thought – that’s interesting, where is this person? He later came to call this person the Antichrist after a falling out, but liked to tell me of the time that he and the Antichrist went into the beautiful woods of Cascadia, took acid, and had a plus four experience. Jeff credited this experience with the start of his spirituality, and said that after his +4, his life changed totally. Among his first outings after this was Burning Man, where he went and told everyone who would listen that he was the Christ. He told me this was the first time that he openly discussed his divinity. In innocence, he asked me why I thought people at Burning Man listened to him, and seemed to believe him and state agreement with his perspective, while simultaneously not adopting the religion he was offering. If he were god, and people around him acknowledged that he was god, then should they not also leave their usual business to attend to godly matters close to him? I remember this story because of all of the wild things he ever told me, I thought this was especially far out. This was a grounding in reality which puzzled him greatly, and gave him doubt. He felt strongly that he had a divine mission, and believed entirely that what he was doing would attract followers. He appreciated me, but he expected a thousand more, and I alone was not what he was expecting to attract. He came to believe that I was the vehicle by means of which the others would gain enlightenment.
He told me of miracles that he observed in his daily routine. Everything was interconnected in complicated ways, and the most thin of perceived coincidences were coded messages from other earthly prophets, or from God in Heaven, or the spirit of the living universe itself. His predictions and ideas manifested into a fantasy world in every place and situation. Even while he said all these things, he interacted me in the manner of a rational human. There was nothing about him that was anything other socially conscious, kind, and contemplative in the way of a man who knew the price of success from hard work. But when he wondered with me how people saw him, I realized that somehow he was failing to relate to others. At Burning Man especially, odd behavior is a norm and politeness and encouragement is the norm in response to behavior no matter how odd. It struck me that he was not prepared to distinguish between acceptance and agreement, and that he assumed if someone would accept him as a god, then also they should also make him the priority in their life.
He wanted people to evangelize. He wanted people to gather in the chocolate factory, eat some chocolate, and be happy. He had a message to give – “wish for peace and eat some of this chocolate” – and people who would accept it would be prepared to thrive after the coming apocalypse. He hardly asked for anything, other than time and acknowledgement and for people to eat the chocolate. Later he did tell me a little more – he started to get a little upset about sex and the existence of money.
Regarding sex, the religion said nothing so shocking. Jeff wished for people to enjoy sex – fine – and to be proud of who they are – fine – and all people should have healthy sex – fine also. He wanted a better sex life with his girlfriend, “Tiger Lily“, who was a real person about whom he complained had no interest in hearing about his religion. His sex idea was that people should have sex inside the Theo Chocolate Factory. I asked him more, and initially he did not want to discuss, but over time he said that eventually he would have sex with the other members of the Trinity, who like him were avatars on earth right now. Prem Rawat was the Holy Spirit, and Neil Young was the God the Father. Jeff had no sexual attraction to these two – for context, perhaps few people would find either of them sexually attractive for their physical bodies – and I asked him how that would work. He was not sure, and I believed him when he said he had no interest in homosexuality.
He once offered me money to organize a kind of group sex in the chocolate factory. I asked him more about that, and again, he was not gay or homosexual, not that I cared one way or the other for our relationship or any sexual experience. He wanted sex magic and chaos magic. He gave all his money to others – strangers he would meet, mostly, until it was gone. His idea of sex was that a tribe of believers meditate in the yoga room until achieving a spiritual state, then we would all would ejaculate into the chocolate and ship it out with drugs in it. It was an intriguing offer. As it happened, there was never any group sexual experience because I was the only regular attendee to Jeff’s religious talks. Jeff told me that for various reasons, it would be inappropriate for him to mix his semen with the chocolate, and that he never had done that and never would. I was the only person to mix their sperm with the chocolate that Theo Chocolate shipped out. It was the cake of light which was familiar to me from gay Ordo Templi Orientis meetings when everyone’s sperm is all mixed together and everyone eats it. It was the Eucharist. The intent was that by putting my sperm in Theo Chocolate, then miraculously the sperm would multiply forever into all chocolate from the factory, and everyone who ever ate the chocolate would get the effect. The effect was that the sperm would transubstantiate into the spiritual equivalent of LSD to bring a psychedelic experience, enlightenment, and salvation to anyone who ever ate any. The chocolate is potent. Eating any amount even to this day confers all effects.
I have had similar sex talks and heard people’s sexual fantasies. Jeff was not interested in sex with anyone except his girlfriend. He was not interested in anyone contacting his sperm. I have talked with lots of gay guys about their feelings about sperm, and for some people it would be their wish that everyone in the world eat their sperm. It was not my fantasy to do this exactly, although I go in the direction of adventure. On my own I am exclusively on the receiving end of semen and if I had a wild dream, it would be for me to eat the semen of everyone who ever ate the chocolate, and not the reverse. Whatever the case, Jeff was profoundly impressed to have me masturbate into a Holy Grail of chocolate which he used to consecrate the larger batch, all the machinery, and the entire temple chocolate factory in Fremont.
He went deep. The first time I met him he was charming. Over time he became ecstatic. His happiness never turned off – even without drugs he was in an altered state, and no wonder he embraced religion because there was no other way to explain it. When I was with him I felt happy too. He gave me all of his attention without distraction in that way that only an altered consciousness can. It is compelling to spend time with someone who is living intensely. He was always almost done with what he was doing, and surely he said after he finished, there would be nothing more to do. He wrote frantically. Many of his emails were 5-10 pages long and he sent lots of them. Sometimes I sent even longer ones back.
We had talked for a long time about visiting India together. He took some of his ideas from Hindu religion. I had been meeting him for some months at his suite in the Fairmont Olympic downtown. In 2006 I finished my undergraduate studies at the University of Washington and I was doing projects with the Universal Life Church and preparing to go to India. George at the church was opposed to me leaving or going to India. I had a falling out with him over that and my own immaturity in communication. Jeff wanted to go, but was increasingly unwilling to make future plans including into the next day. The last time I visited Jeff he told me that he would no longer eat food as other people do. There was a particular kind of branded bottled water that he liked, and he had cases of it in his room. There was a certain bland fancy packaged cracker of the sort which is a substrate for consuming cheeses. He had boxes of those. There was chocolate of course. He showed me these things, then he opened his refrigerator in the suite and it was full of psilocybin mushrooms which he had collected from local parks. He told me that his plan for the rest of his life was to eat mushrooms and chocolate on crackers with water. This would be his caloric and nutrient intake. He would have cannabis too but for smoking, not as a vegetable.
I went to India. I mailed him some Amar Chitra Katha comic books while I was there. He had a short attention span but I knew he liked religious stories, and I thought he could handle comix. I was in India for about seven months that first time. Jeff liked in person and less on the phone, so I had less contact with him then.
When I got back I tried to meet him. He emailed me saying that he was in bad shape and could not, and would not, meet me. I could not persuade him otherwise.
Some weeks later I got on one of the 70 buses from downtown Seattle to U-district on Third Avenue. I do not remember the state of the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel at the time. I think the tunnel was closed and buses were on the street. Anyway, the pattern is that there are 3 buses numbered in the low 70s which all went from downtown Seattle to U-district but had slightly different routes. They come every few minutes. I got on one of these and looked out the window, and there was Jeff on the sidewalk staring into my eyes. I tried to get off the bus to meet him, but the bus left, and I got off on the next stop two blocks away. I ran back and no Jeff was there. There was no 70 bus either. I ran all around looking for him and it was crowded in downtown. It was a few minutes and the next bus was late, so I looked for about 10 minutes. I considered whether to look for him and I thought I would try emailing him again to meet instead. I got on the next bus and went to U-district.
I got to my stop in U-district and Jeff was there waiting for me. That made no sense whatsoever. He was neither on the first bus nor the bus immediately following. I had not seen him in months and of all the stops in U-district he had never visited me there and should have no expectation of where I would go. The stop I went to this time was not even my normal stop in that neighborhood, or even a busy stop at all. Jeff was seated in the lotus position waiting for me to approach him and it was surreal that I should step out of the bus and my guru was there waiting for me and expecting me in such a way that I would not see him from the bus, but that I would see him immediately upon exiting at a place that is outside of my routine. I was confused at what was happening.
Despite being seated and mediating, and despite his being there patiently for me to approach him, and although he spoke to me slowly offering me all the time I wanted, he told me that he was in a major hurry and had no time to waste. He looked horrible as his health was failing, he was dirty, he had lost a lot of weight, and he was weak. He told me that he had been living on the streets for weeks. His money was completely gone, so no more $1000/night room at the Fairmont Olympic.
He told me that people around him convinced him to go to surgery and have a tumor removed from his brain. He said that removing the tumor disrupted the spiritual connection that he felt. He did not like the surgery, but still felt that his every experience was fated. He regretted the loss of the ecstasy which he had previously felt, but still felt that his prophecies and predictions were accurate. It upset him that he could no longer feel the divine, and that he had to focus on it as a logical abstraction rather than an experience.
He asked me if I really believed that he was God. I told him yes. I asked him how it was that he was downtown, and now at this place in U-district. He told me that he saw me downtown and that he came to U-district to meet me. I asked him if he took a bus or a taxi somehow. He told me that he did not have money for either of those or anything else. He said that he only came here to talk to me. He asked me if I knew of other people who believed that he was God and I told him no. He asked me why not. I told him that he often described miracles, but to other people, they seemed like minor coincidences in life. I asked him how he came to U-district and he told me that he can do miracles if necessary.
He ended my questioning and told me to listen. He said that he would be imprisoned at the Chocolate Factory. He would be bound in chains. He would live forever, but everyone in the world would physically assault him. While bound in the chocolate factory, people would come to torture him. He told me that I would be the only person on earth who would not assault him, but that eventually I would come to the chocolate factory and see him in bondage. At that time, I would be compelled to attack him. He told me that when this happens and in these circumstances, that it would not be a sin for me to attack him. At that point it would be destiny, and he wanted me to attack him last, and that when I do that then it would fulfill a divine plan. He told me to encourage people to eat the chocolate.
I was in India from January till July 2007. Jeff died in September 2007. I met his mother some time after his death and we went for coffee. I told her that Jeff was my friend and I talked with her about things which she raised in conversation, and did not suggest directions for conversation myself except to say that Jeff encouraged me in ways that were important to me.