Sarah Moss - Chocolate: A Global History

Chocolate is complicated. The chocolate tree, Theobroma cacao, grows only within twenty degrees of the equator, only below about 1,000 feet (300 m) in altitude. It requires shade, which must be provided by taller trees, and humidity, and a temperature that remains above sixteen degrees Celsius, all of which mean that it does not grow within thousands of miles of the countries that consume the most chocolate. The tree does not take well to being farmed, and is prone to diseases which destroy entire plantations in a few weeks. It depends on midges, which breed best on the floors of uncultivated rainforests, for pollination. The cocoa bean, a pod which grows out of the trees trunk, must be harvested with a carefully wielded machete to avoid damaging the buds from which more beans will grow, and the process of converting the resultant wrinkly pod into the shiny brown bars we eat is longer and more exact than any other in culinary history, involving a mixture of hand-work and high technology which do not exist in the same economy and, ideally, time spent in at least two climates; the warm, damp environment where it grows and the arid heat required for drying. The chocolate we know is intrinsically modern, the product of a world divided between low-paid manual labourand mechanized food preparation, between hungry labourers and sleek consumers, and between the ecologically rich Equatorial nations and the economic powers of Europe and North America. It could not exist, in its familiar form, in any other era.

Cocoa tree.

In the beginning, then, there was no chocolate. There may have been wild Theobroma cacao trees in Central America before human beings reached that continent there were, and are, other species of Theobroma but in any case there is evidence that the tree was domesticated by the earliest civilization of the Americas. Sophie and Michael Coe argue in The True History of Chocolate that there is linguistic if not archaeological evidence linking Theobroma cacao with the Olmec, the people who inhabited the Mexican Gulf Coast between 1500 and 400 BCE. Partly because of the warm and humid climate which created the fertile lands on which this complex culture was based, little material evidence of Olmec life survives, but traces of cacao have since been found on ceramic vessels from Olmec-era, pre-Classic Maya sites in Belize. Descendants of the Olmec, the Izapan, are the mostlikely bearers of cacao to the Maya, whose magnificent cities were established in the cacao-growing lowlands by around 250 CE. It is in the context of the Classic Maya civilization that we begin to encounter the origins of the modern myths of chocolate deployed on wrappers and in the more enthusiastic popular histories.

Cocoa harvest in West Africa pods being opened with a small machete.

Mayan stone with relief carving depicting the ruler Itzamna sitting on a throne holding a vision serpent.

Both traces and images of Maya cacao consumption survive. Maya writing was decoded in the second half of the twentieth century, and although nearly all of the bark books and codices were destroyed either in the Maya Collapse of the ninth century, when the civilization entered a rapid decline, or by the Spanish in the years following the Conquest, hieroglyphs and pictures on vases attest to cacao use in the Classic era. Many of these vases were found in tests at the Hershey Laboratory in Pennsylvania to contain traces of the chemical theobromine, a component of chocolate that can survive for centuries. Four books survive from the post-Classic era, giving more detail about the first chocolate.

Maya vases depict the harvest, preparation and consumption of chocolate. The beans were picked, fermented and dried near the groves where they grew, after which they could be transported long distances, often up into the highlands, where consumption, at least among the rich, seems to have been untrammelled by distance from the raw material. (The distance between consumers and producers has beenpart of chocolate history from the beginning.) After that, women it was always women roasted the beans and then ground them with a pestle, a mano