Chocolate: A Passionate History of America’s Favorite Sweet

Ah, chocolate! So many different kinds to choose from, and all of it delicious! But where did it originate – and is it really an aphrodisiac?

The average American consumes 11.7 pounds of chocolate a year. To get an idea of how much – imagine almost 12 packages of butter as being made of solid chocolate – or about the size of your average well-fed house cat. That is a lot of chocolate! (And it won’t stop meowing for some reason.)

The treat so loved worldwide has very humble beginnings. The cacao bean begins life inside a fruit, called a pod, on a tree in the tropics, primarily in remote areas of West Africa, Southeast Asia and Central and South America.

These delicate, flower-covered trees need much tending and, when farmed using sustainable methods, grow in harmony in tropical forests beneath other cash crops such as bananas, rubber or hardwood trees. Grown on small family farms, the beans leave cocoa farms by hand, in carts, on donkeys or rugged trucks to be sold to a local buyer and then to processors abroad. Once in the factory, they are ground, pressed, heated and stirred to create luxurious chocolate.

3,000 years ago, the ancient Meso Americans discovered the seeds which would be processed into what we now know as chocolate on the cacao tree, found in the tropical rainforests of the Americas. They mixed the ground seeds with seasonings back then, to make what they believed to be a health elixir – a bitter, spicy drink that could be considered the World’s first Cocoa drink.

The pods that the cacao seeds grew in were considered by the Mayans to symbolize life and fertility, and so the Mayans often used the symbol of the pod in their religious rituals. They called cacao “The Food of the Gods”. The Aztecs also believed the plant had magic properties, and that it could bestow wisdom and power. They also thought it to be a great source of nutrition – and most interestingly, used it as an aphrodisiac, which today’s science says isn’t so far off!

The Spaniards were the first to introduce sugar to chocolate – and thank goodness they did, or else we wouldn’t be enjoying all of the sweet confections available to us in the present. They also added new spices to the health elixir the Mayans and Aztecs enjoyed, and the modified beverage quickly spread throughout Europe like wildfire, enjoying a reputation as “the drink of the elite” for centuries.