Passage

Chocolate begins with the cacao tree, which grows in warm, rainy parts of Central and South America. The tree produces large pods, and inside each pod there are dozens of beans. The beans themselves are bitter, so the chocolate we eat today is very different from the raw ingredient. Before they are used, the beans must be dried and roasted, which gives chocolate its familiar taste. The first people to use cacao were the Maya, who lived in what is now Mexico and Central America more than two thousand years ago. They made a bitter drink from the beans and used them in religious ceremonies. Later, the Aztecs also valued cacao highly. For the Aztecs, the beans were so important that they were sometimes used as money, and only rich people could afford the cacao drink. In the sixteenth century, Spanish explorers brought cacao beans back to Europe. At first, the Spanish kept the drink a secret, but it soon became popular in the royal courts of Spain and then spread to other European countries. Sugar was added to make the drink sweeter, and hot chocolate became a fashionable drink among the wealthy. For a long time, chocolate remained a luxury item because the beans had to be shipped across the Atlantic and the drink was expensive to prepare. The invention of machines changed everything. In 1828, a Dutch chemist found a way to separate cocoa butter from the beans, which made it possible to produce chocolate powder cheaply. Later in the nineteenth century, British companies developed the first solid chocolate bars by mixing cocoa powder with sugar and cocoa butter. As production became cheaper, ordinary people could finally afford to buy chocolate, and factories in Europe began to make it in large quantities. Today, most of the world's cacao is grown in West Africa, even though the plant originally came from the Americas. Chocolate is now eaten in almost every country, and it is an important ingredient in cakes, drinks and desserts. However, most farmers who grow cacao still receive a small share of the final price, and many companies now try to buy beans from farms that treat their workers fairly.