Where all of this comes from

In Indonesia, people call the coconut palm pohon kehidupan. The tree of life. That's not just a nice way of putting it. Almost nothing about the tree goes to waste. The fiber becomes rope and mats. The pith becomes growing medium for greenhouses on the other side of the world. The shell turns into charcoal. Even the sap gets boiled down into sugar. One tree, this many uses. It's a fair answer to why Indonesia ends up with so many coconut products in the first place.

Indonesia grows more coconuts than any other country on earth. About 17.2 million tonnes a year, more than a quarter of everything the world produces. The Philippines comes second, well behind that. It isn't close.

Part of why the supply barely slows down comes down to where Indonesia is. It's thousands of islands, most of them close enough to the sea for coconut palms to grow right along the coast. The climate stays warm and wet all year, so there's no single harvest season everyone waits on. Somewhere in the country, coconuts are always coming in.

Riau grows the most, followed by North Sulawesi and East Java. But the more interesting fact isn't the list of places. It's who's actually growing the trees. Nearly all of Indonesia's coconut, close to 98 percent, comes from small family farms, not big plantations. Around 6.6 million people depend on coconut for their income. Many of these families have worked the same trees for generations. This isn't a crop somebody discovered was profitable last year.

That's the origin behind everything you'll find here. Not a factory somewhere, but islands full of small farms, run by people whose parents and grandparents did the same work before them.