Until our first location opens, you’ll need other ideas for fun, unique, memorable, intellectually rewarding activities you can do with family and friends. Well, we have one such suggestion:
Hang out with our celebrity goats.
We’ll explain more in a moment. For now, just trust us that on Governors Island there's a pair of famous Voilà Chocolat-affiliated goats you must visit. And there is so much else to do on the island that we couldn’t even list it all here, so check out their website.
Specifically, there is an organization on the island that we like a lot, called Earth Matter, which seeks to preserve soil quality and reduce organic waste in landfills through composting education and initiatives.
Now, the Voilà Chocolat team is really into our composting. For years, several of us have recycled our food scraps with the Lower East Side Ecology Center, the Grow NYC Greenmarket Food Scrap Compost Program, and even on an apartment balcony here on the UWS.
More importantly, among the core values and mission of Voilà Chocolat are some ideals that Earth Matter also upholds:
- We take responsibility for conducting our business in an environmentally sustainable way, all along our supply chain.
- We care about the nutritional value of the foods we consume (much better to use compost whenever possible than to eat chemical fertilizers!)
- We love sharing our knowledge and skills – and we believe we can inspire small changes in behavior and consumption that can add up to great impact.
- We know that working with your hands – whether making beautiful chocolates or tending an organic garden – is fulfilling and therapeutic.
But not only does Earth Matter share some of our ideals, they have adorable 6-week old baby goats who eat farmer’s market scraps and produce, um, compost. And Voilà Chocolat got to name them! Governors Island held a goat-naming contest, and Voilà Chocolat submitted the winning entry:
So now we feel understandably proprietary about these cuties.
New York Magazine even gave “our” – well, sort of our – goats a shout-out in their weekly Approval Matrix. We’re glad NYMag agrees that keeping composting goats rates as “brilliant,” but we’re not sure why they deemed poor Cocoa and Butter more “lowbrow” than Jimmy Fallon and J.Lo engaging in a tight pants dance-off. Hmm.
Regardless, we feel proud of having given chocolate-themed identities to a pair of composting goats. We have visited with Cocoa and Butter, and we encourage you to do the same. Especially on Earth Matter’s Friday Work Days, when they organize volunteer opportunities at their composting center.
Maybe we need to host a Voilà Chocolat field trip to visit Cocoa and Butter?
