The History of Chocolate — Reading

Passage

A Theobroma cacao is an awkward plant. It grows only within about twenty degrees of the equator, needs shade and constant humidity, and is pollinated not by bees but by midges so small that most growers never see them. Each pod holds thirty to fifty seeds embedded in white pulp, and those seeds taste of almost nothing recognisable as chocolate. The flavour is manufactured, not harvested: the beans must ferment in their own pulp for several days, developing the precursor compounds, before drying and roasting turn those precursors into the several hundred aromatic molecules of finished chocolate. Skip the fermentation and the result is merely bitter. B The earliest chemical traces of cacao use come from Olmec pottery in the Gulf of Mexico dating to around 1900 BCE, well before the Maya, who are more often credited. Maya texts and painted vessels show cacao poured between containers from a height to raise a foam that was evidently the point of the drink. It was consumed unsweetened, often with chilli or maize, at weddings and funerals and in offerings to the dead. C Among the Aztecs cacao became currency as well as drink. Beans bought goods at fixed rates recorded by Spanish observers — a rabbit for a few dozen, a slave for rather more — and counterfeiting existed, with hollowed shells packed with earth. Because cacao would not grow on the Aztec plateau, it arrived as tribute from subject provinces, which made access a marker of rank. The drink was largely restricted to nobles, warriors and long-distance merchants. D Spanish contact in the sixteenth century moved cacao to Europe, though not quickly. The drink was sweetened with cane sugar, warmed, and spiced with cinnamon and vanilla, and for over a century it remained a Spanish court preference before spreading to France, Italy and England. It stayed expensive, and it stayed a drink: nobody yet had a way of turning the fatty, gritty mass of ground beans into anything solid. E Three nineteenth-century inventions changed that in sequence. In 1828 Coenraad van Houten patented a press that removed much of the cocoa butter, leaving a powder that mixed readily with water; his alkali treatment also darkened the colour and softened the bitterness. In 1847 the British firm J. S. Fry combined cocoa powder, sugar and the extracted butter into a paste that could be cast in a mould — the first true eating bar. In 1879 Rodolphe Lindt left a mixing machine running by accident over a weekend and found the prolonged agitation, now called conching, produced a texture that melted rather than crumbled. F Production had by then outgrown the Americas. Cacao was carried to West Africa in the late nineteenth century, and Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire together now supply well over half the world crop, grown mostly on smallholdings of a few hectares. The economics have proved persistently poor for growers: farm-gate prices are volatile, most of the value is added after export, and estimates of the share reaching the farmer are commonly in the single digits. Repeated industry commitments to eliminate child labour from the supply chain have missed successive deadlines. G The plant's own vulnerability is now the sharper worry. Cacao is threatened by witches' broom, black pod and swollen shoot virus, and the commercially grown stock is genetically narrow, being descended from a small number of introduced trees. Breeding programmes are drawing on wild populations in the upper Amazon, where the species' true diversity remains. Whether disease resistance can be combined with flavour worth paying for is the question the industry has not yet answered. H Chocolate's other persistent problem sits further down the supply chain, at the farms themselves. West Africa, and Ivory Coast and Ghana in particular, together supply roughly two-thirds of the world's cocoa, grown overwhelmingly on small family farms rather than plantations. Farmers typically receive a small fraction of the retail price of a chocolate bar, and cocoa farming has been repeatedly linked to child labour, including in roles that fall under international definitions of the worst forms of it. Certification schemes — Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance and others — have multiplied in response, each promising a premium and stricter labour standards in exchange for a licence to use its label. Independent evaluations of these schemes have produced mixed results: some find modest income gains for participating farmers, others find that certification costs and the small size of the premium relative to farm income limit the effect, echoing the same debate that surrounds coffee certification. What is not contested is that cocoa farming remains one of the poorer forms of commercial agriculture globally, a fact that a wall of certification logos on a supermarket shelf does not, by itself, change.

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