Chocolate
comes from cacao beans which were originally found only in Central
and South America.
Cacao was
so special to the ancient Aztecs that they told this legend:
Their
god, Quetzalcoatl, brought the cacao tree from Paradise to earth,
traveling on a beam of the Morning Star. He gave the tree as an
offering to the people, and they learned how to roast and grind
its beans into a paste. They added spices and mixed it with water
calling it "xocolatl" or "bitterwater". They
believed that it brought wisdom and knowledge to those who drank
it.
Today, cacao
is an important part of agriculture in the tropics all around
the world. The legend of chocolate lives on!
More information
on cocoa trees:
www.cocoatree.org
or
www.worldcocoafoundation.org
Lucía lives in a hot and rainy part of
Costa Rica. Her parents and neighbors grow their own food to eat,
and they also grow some crops to make money. In the tropics, many
crops are grown on large plantations with lots of chemical pesticides
and fertilizers, which can hurt other plants and animals in the
area.
But here, people are tending cacao trees
organically, without any chemicals, so that they can keep their
forest green and productive. A healthy forest has lots of different
levels, which makes it possible for many different animals and
plants to live together. Cacao has an important role to play because
it is an understory tree, which means that it grows in the shade
of taller trees.
Lucía helps to take care of the cacao
trees and harvest the pods. She breaks open the pods, and puts
the beans into big, burlap bags so that they can ferment for three
days. Then, she spreads the beans out onto a cloth on the ground,
and lets them dry in the hot sun for a week. When the beans are
ready, she goes with her father to sell them. They get paid extra
because they are growing organically.
Meanwhile, far across the ocean, the cacao
is made into chocolate. When we buy candy bars, part of the money
goes to pay for the shipping, part for processing, the candy wrappers,
the advertising, the store owner, and lots of other stuff. Lucía's
family really gets only a small part of the price we pay for chocolate.
Chocolate as we know it has only become
available in the last 100 years or so, even though cacao beans
had been growing in Central and South America for a long time.
When the Spanish explorers came to Mexico
in the 1500s, they found the Aztecs drinking "xocolatl"
(pronounced "ho-ko-la-tol"), made from cacao beans,
water, and sometimes, spicy peppers. Montezuma, the last king
of the Aztecs, was known to have drunk 50 pitchers a day! The
Spanish brought it back to Europe, but since they found it too
bitter, they added vanilla and sugar. They wouldn't let anyone
in Europe know how or where it grew, and guarded their secret
for about 100 years, growing it on plantations in their colonies.
You have to remember that there weren't
a lot of different drinks available then, as there are now. So
eventually, when other people did find out about it, drinking
chocolate became a very fashionable thing to do. Fancy clubs,
just for drinking hot chocolate were opened.
It really didn't taste that great, however,
because cacao beans are about 50% fat. Chocolate became much better
when, about 150 years ago, the Dutch chemist, Conrad Van Houten,
invented the chocolate press. Then people could separate cocoa
butter, the fatty part of cacao, from cocoa powder, and in turn,
make hot chocolate and chocolate candy, as we know it today.
Today, the huge demand for chocolate has
turned cacao into an important cash crop, world wide. We hope,
by including organic cacao in our Chocolate Kit, that we can help
make it possible for both Lucía's family and the forest to keep
flourishing.
Want to learn more?
