The History Of Chocolate
Yeah it might seem doubtful that why would such an amazing and delicious sweet which is next level famous around the globe, has a dark past? Yeah! it is indeed an amazing sweet but it has a dark past which will make you think before eating or buying them.
Origin
Chocolate’s 4,000-year history began in ancient Mesoamerica, present day Mexico. It’s here that the first cacao plants were found. The Olmec, one of the earliest civilizations in Latin America, were the first to turn the cacao plant into chocolate. They drank their chocolate during rituals and used it as medicine.
Centuries later, the Mayans praised chocolate as the drink of the gods. Mayan chocolate was a revered brew made of roasted and ground cacao seeds mixed with chillies, water and cornmeal. Mayans poured this mixture from one pot to another, creating a thick foamy beverage called “xocolatl”, meaning “bitter water.”
By the 15th century, the Aztecs used cocoa beans as currency. They believed that chocolate was a gift from the god Quetzalcoatl, and drank it as a refreshing beverage, an aphrodisiac, and even to prepare for war.
Archaeological Evidences
Nature Ecology and Evolution reported what is believe to be the earliest cacao use from approximately 5,300 years ago recovered from the Santa Ana site in southeast Ecuador. Another find of chemically traced cacao was in 1984 when a team of archaeologists in Guatemala explored the Mayan site of Rio Azul. They discovered fifteen vessels surrounding male skeletons in the royal tomb. One of these vessels was beautifully decorated and covered in various Mayan glyphs. One of these glyphs translated to "kakaw", also known as cacao. The inside of the vessel was lined with a dark-colored powder, which was scraped off for further testing. When the archaeologists took this powder to the Hershey Center for Health and Nutrition to be tested, they found trace amounts of theobromine in the powder, a major indicator of cacao. This cacao was dated to sometime between 460 and 480 AD
Cacao powder was also found in decorated bowls and jars, known as tecomates, in the city of Puerto Escondido. Once thought to have been a very rare commodity, cacao was found in many more tecomates than once thought. However, since this powder was only found in bowls of higher quality, it led archaeologists to believe that only wealthier people could afford such bowls, and therefore the cacao. The cacao tecomates are believed to have been a centerpiece to social gatherings between people of high social status.
Early History
Until the 16th century, the cacao tree was wholly unknown to Europeans.[3]
Columbus encountered the cacao bean on his fourth mission to the Americas on August 15, 1502, when he and his crew seized a large native canoe that proved to contain among other goods for trade, cacao beans. His son Ferdinand commented that the natives greatly valued the beans, which he termed almonds, "for when they were brought on board ship together with their goods, I observed that when any of these almonds fell, they all stooped to pick it up, as if an eye had fallen."[19] But while Columbus took cacao beans with him back to Spain, it made no impact until Spanish friars introduced chocolate to the Spanish court.
Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes may have been the first European to encounter chocolate when he observed it in the court of Montezuma in 1519.
The Dark History
As the demand for cacao increased, more European countries such as France, United Kingdom and Holland started cultivating cacao in their colonies in the Caribbean, Ivory Coast of Africa and a few parts of South East Asia (Simmons, 1976; Baker, 1891). The expansion also meant slavery and privation.
Many of the top cocoa-producing nations in West Africa continue to allow slavery, epecially in the agricultural sector. In all of these nations, slavery is officially illegal, but it is still often practiced, and enforcement of the law is limited. Real life on a Wes
t African cocoa plantation is a far cry from the rosy picture painted by the Chocolate Manufacturing Association. The truth of the West African slave trade and the complicity of chocolate producers is beginning to emerge.
In many chocolate-producing West African nations, and espcially the Ivory Coast, slaves (mostly children) are used on cocoa plantations. Every year, thousands of Malian children are sold into slavery and brought into the Ivory Coast to work Unfortunately, the plantations involved are small enough and isolated enough that this practice remains under the radar of law-enforcement officials. The tragic stories of the children involved came to light when Knight Ridder newspapers published a series on these slaves. In response to these allegations, the government of the Ivory Coast has tentatively agreed to form a task force to mitigate the problem.
Conclusion
Today chocolate has established itself as a ritual of our modern culture. Due its colonial association with native cultures, combined with the power of advertising, chocolate retains an aura of something sensual, decadant and forbidden. Yet knowing more about its fascinating and often cruel history, as well as its production today, tells us where these associations originate and what they hide.
So as you unwrap your next bar of chocolate, take a moment to consider that not everything about chocolate is sweet........
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