Chocolate: A delicious and sweet brown candy, loved by millions and eaten by even more. It competes with the many candies of today, and still comes out on top.
Unlike the newer Starburst and Jolly Rancher candies, however, chocolate has a history of over two or even three millennia. The earliest version of chocolate appeared in Ancient Mesoamerica. The Aztecs and Mayans used ground cacao (ca-cow) beans and certain spices to create a frothy and spicy drink. Sugar was unavailable in Ancient Mesoamerica, so the drink was also bitter. People harvested the cacao pods from cacao trees, which were grown even in the ancient people’s yards.
The cacao beans that were used in the chocolate drink were considered very valuable. Cacao beans had been used for religious practices, such as offerings to the gods, and in the Classic Period of Maya, the beverage was only commonly drank by royalty. Aztec rulers had used the popular beans as tax, and many people used it as cash to buy and sell things. Dishonest Aztec merchants were even suspected for making counterfeits of cacao beans!
The third party of people who discovered the delicious secret of chocolate were the Spanish. When Spain conquered the Aztecs, the Spanish demanded for all the Aztec nobles to hand over their treasures. These treasures included cacao beans. The beans were brought to Spain, where people started adding sugar and cinnamon to the drink. The church recognized the energy restorative properties of chocolate very quickly, and in the 16th century, chocolate became known as an appropriate fasting beverage.
About 100 years passed before the rest of Europe found out about chocolate. As chocolate became more popular, the shipments of cacao beans could not keep up. People started chocolate plantations, and enslaved Mesoamerican people to work. Many Mesoamericans died from European diseases, so Europe looked to Africa for slaves and wage laborers.
The creation of the modern chocolate bar was split into two parts. In 1828, a Dutch chemist named Van Houten transformed the chocolate drink into a powder, which is now known as “Dutch cocoa”. This was made by removing about half of the natural fat, which is also known as cacao butter, from the chocolate liquid, pulverizing the rest and treating the mixture with alkaline salts to cut the bitter taste. The creation of the first chocolate bar was in 1847, and is credited to a man named Joseph Fry, who had added melted cacao butter back into Dutch cocoa and made it into a moldable paste.
In America, the marketing of chocolate started in 1868, when a small company called Cadbury started selling little boxes of chocolate. A couple years later, Nestle brought milk chocolate into the market. Every year, chocolate got more and more popular. The process of making chocolate also got easier due to the machines invented and many companies began to mass-produce. In result, the general public could finally afford the delicious treat. The machines also helped in making the chocolate bar smoother, creamier, and a lot more tasty in general.
Although machines were created for the process of making chocolate, people were still enslaved to harvest the cacao beans. It wasn’t until 1910, when William Cadbury invited several chocolate-making companies to refuse to buy chocolate from plantations with harsh working conditions that the situation improved. That same year, a United States Congressional hearing resulted in a U.S. ban on any cocoa that was a product of slave labor from plantations.
Since 1910, much of the process of making chocolate and the uses of chocolate has stayed the same. People harvest the cacao pods, and machines make the chocolate itself. Chocolate is eaten as well as used in makeup, medicine, and more. Companies that were formed in the 1900’s still make chocolate today, and the delicious treat is as popular as ever.
For more information, check out: http://archive.fieldmuseum.org/chocolate/about.html
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