A SLAVE TO CHOCOLATE

 

I am told that 8,000 years ago stone age residents of the Caucasus mountains (above), stretching between the Black and Caspian seas,  "invented" wine.  See; there was a yeast fungus in that region, which naturally grows on grape skins. When you crush the grapes, that allows the yeast to start eating the sugars inside the pulp and they start pooping out alcohol. And as we all learned in paleolithic chemistry 101, you can only spell fun with fermentation - in the case of wine, 16%  alcohol by content.

But the western hemisphere lacked two things which taken together meant getting high in the new world would be harder.  First, new world grapes had different fungi and as a result new world humans never developed the two enzymes which internally detoxify alcohol. So the best native Americans could do was brew beer with about a 4% alcohol content. 

Now, according to their genomes,  at this same time two trees were thriving in the shade of the rain forest canopy where the Andes Mountains gave birth to the headwaters of the mighty Amazon River (above), And humans started cultivating them both, also about 8,000 years ago.

The first tree was the Coca plant (above). It's leaves, when chewed, suppressed hunger, thirst, pain or fatigue. In this form it was not addictive. Because the leaves were easily transported, and worked wet or dry there was no need to transplant the Coca trees themselves. 

Not so the second tree in our pair,  which was the Cacao tree, which produces an array of 14 ounce seed pods.

When the pods ripened, Meso-Americans cracked them open and then left them piled on the ground for a week or so.   As the pods decomposed in the tropical heat, they began to liquify. This was called "sweating" the pods.

Collect and then cook the sweat and the pods and you get a beer. Left behind to rot in the damp were the 8 to 10 seeds or nubs in each pod.

Then, probably during a drought, some connoisseur noticed the piles of the now dry Cacahualtl nubs (above) gave off a faint yet delightful aroma. All they had to figure out was a way to get that wonderful odor out of their noses and on to their tongues.

Removed from the pods before sweating, the seeds were spread out on leaves for 3 - 5 days,  to dry. 

Then they called in the old ladies and kids, who walked all over the beans, gradually crushing and mixing them into a soft brown powder, called cocoa. It takes some 600 beans to produced 2 pounds of cocoa. For the higher end market a variety of flavorings were then mixed into the bitter Cocoa powder, such as cinnamon, chili peppers or almonds. 

Dissolve that powder in water, and you get a bitter liquid.  Simmer that over a low flame and then let it cool and solidify and, viola, you have cocoa pas, or chocolate liquor, with an alcohol content of up to 20 to 25%.  Given the labor required to produce a mere two pounds of solid cocoa, the drink was clearly intended for the elite.  

Now, besides yeast, the second thing the new world lacked was the wheel. This meant the Amazonian farmers had to walk the seed pods on the backs of lamas, at about 1 and a half miles per hour over the 22,000 foot high Andes, 600 miles to their elite Inca customers on the Pacific coast.  But the  Cacahualtl pods and seeds would rot long before they got there. 

As would the chocolate liquor on the 3,000 miles journey (at 4 miles an hour in a canoe) to their upper crust Mayan and Aztec customers to the north.  Cocoa powder would survive that journey, but the lack of wheels limited the volume which could be transported. It proved far simpler to transport saplings or Cacaualtl seeds for replanting in the welcoming jungles of the Gulf Coast of Mexico, or the plains of the Yucatan Peninsula.

But even  given these limitations, the construction of such wide ranging trading system indicates an advanced culture in the Amazon basin, and recent survey work on the ground shows the 230 million square miles of what later appeared to be virgin rain forests were in fact, as one archeologist put it, "...abandoned gardens” which once supported almost 10 million people.  And yet, a century later, when Spain and Portugal finally penetrated to the core of the Amazon basin, there were barely 2 million people left in isolated villages, living hand to mouth along the muddy Amazon. 

What caused the collapse of this new world fertile crescent were plagues of measles, chicken pox, mumps, and whooping cough (European infections) which following the trade routes back to their source. Most natives in the Amazon died without ever seeing a white face. They left behind unobtrusive earthworks and over grown canal systems of the abandoned gardens, all of which went unnoticed by the Europeans for another 600 years,  

So the Spanish conquistadors might be forgiven for thinking it was the Aztecs who invented the cocoa which Moctezuma II drank from his golden goblet 60 times a day - at least until  Hernan Cortes set fire to his place in 1520.  It was about the only thing for which Cortes can be forgiven, because the Europeans not only imported diseases, but they also enslaved the entire native population. And they exported bananas, potatoes, cocaine leaves and cocoa.

So, like Moctezuma before him,  Pope Pius V became addicted to the taste of cocoa and the taxes it paid. In 1569 the Catholic ruler decided that drinking the bitter dark liquid did not break Lent. 

That other Catholic Giovanni Casanova recommend the drink as an aphrodisiac. But then, if you believe his book, he didn't really need one of those. 

 The Protestant Reformation tried to redefine cocoa as a sin, when, in 1624 a Viennese professor, Johan Rauch, called for cocoa to be banned. 

But by that time the Protestant Dutch had begun working their own chemistry.  By adding the alkaline agent of cow's milk, (meaning fat) as well as sugar, they produced a more delicious darker cocoa powder and called it "Dutch Chocolate".  There was no stopping the revolution now. All European royalty now had wine and chocolate, and wanted more of both.  

Even chocolate’s role in masking the poison which killed Pope Clement XIV (above) in 1774 could not shake the church’s addiction to the taxes paid to license the delicious cocoa bean which was only grown in central and south America.

The 19th Century was a major turning point in the history of chocolate. In 1821 Mexico and Venezuela became an independent nations. In 1823 the Republic of Central America was formed, In  1824 Peru overthrew it's Spanish occupiers (above).  In 1825 Brazil. became independent of Portugal. 

And the first thing all of these new nations did was outlaw slavery.  And more than the revolutions themselves, it was this loss of free labor which cut profits in the chocolate trade. 

Thrown out of their Central and South America colonies, the Europeans saved what they could, in this case Cacahualtl seeds and saplings. These were transplanted across the Atlantic to a chain of 6 volcanic islands which extended into the Gulf of Guinea. The northern most island, just 20 miles off the coast of Africa, was eventually claimed by Spain, even though it was named after it's Portuguese discoverer, Fernando Po. (Now called Bioko Island).

Three hundred seventy-five miles southwest of Fernando Po were a pair of islands occupied by Portugal,  São Tomé and Principe (above).  Originally the Europeans profited by making palm oil on all three, but by 1868 transplanted Cacahualti trees were producing more wealth than palm trees were. They were more labor intensive, but that problem was solved by the simple expedient of using black slave labor, easily kidnapped from Niger and lands to the south. 

Isolated on Po and Principe, beatings, murder and rapes which brutally suppressed uprising of the 68,000 slaves on cocoa plantations could be hidden from annoying "humanitarians", such as the British Navy. By 1895 chocolate seed production from the island of San Thome alone had reached a million kilograms. 

By the Twentieth Century slave production of chocolate had made the jump to the mainland, to Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon and Togo, and morphed while doing so.  Workers now signed contracts, guaranteeing salary, food and housing.  But once workers were toiling the planters often ignored those agreements, resulting in slavery covered by a thin veneer of legality.  Officials in Liberia became so outraged they prohibited any labor traders from contacting their citizens to work on the chocolate plantations.

As late as 1955 an observer would report "...some unlucky Africans…are deported to São Tomé and Principe...Here they do forced or directed labor on the cocoa fields in circumstances barely distinguishable from slavery”.

It was the nation of Ghana, with hundreds of small cocoa farms, which became the world's single largest producer of chocolate, exporting half a million metric tons of cocoa beans to Europe and the United States by the Second World War.

Then in 1960, newly independent Côte d'Ivoire ((Ivory Coast) decided to make cocoa their primary export. Today they produced some 2 million tons a year - about 40% of the world market. 

And the place where the Cacaualtl evolved are now the backwater in the world wide chocolate market. 

And still the places were chocolate consumption remains at it's lowest, are the places it is grown, south and central America, and the Atlantic coast of Equatorial Africa. Chocolate remains the food of the Gods upon the earth,  And we all know who they are. They're the rich.

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