Latest / Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries / The History of Chocolate: From Sacred Aztec Drink to Candy Bar | Sleep History with Rain Sounds

Transcript

The History of Chocolate: From Sacred Aztec Drink to Candy Bar | Sleep History with Rain Sounds · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome back to Sleepless History, the podcast where we wander slowly through the past so that your mind can finally rest.
• 0:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going to talk about something small enough to hold in your hand and old enough to have been worshipped as a god.
• 0:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: We are going to talk about chocolate.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight's story stretches across roughly 4,000 years from the humid rainforests of ancient Mesoamerica to the glass towers of modern candy corporations.
• 0:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a story of gods and kings, of conquest and greed, of factories and fortunes and of a small bit of seed that people have gone to extraordinary lengths to turn into something sweet.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will move through five long chapters tonight.
• 0:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: First, we will travel to the ancient world of the Olemek and the Maya and the Aztec, where chocolate was not a dessert at all, but a bitter, spiced, sacred drink, reserved for warriors, priests, and kings.
• 1:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Second, we will follow chocolate across the ocean to Europe, where it became the obsession of royal courts and the centerpiece of London's earliest social clubs.
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Third, we will watch the industrial revolution transform chocolate from a rare luxury into something an ordinary person could afford.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Through the work of a handful of stubborn, inventive families in England and Switzerland and the United States.
• 1:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fourth, we will walk through the 20th century through world wars and colonial plantations and candy counters.
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: as chocolate became a truly global commodity.
• 1:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And finally, we will arrive in our own time, where chocolate sits at the centre of very old questions about labour, land, and who benefits from a sweetness that the rest of us take for granted.
• 1:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lastly, before we begin tonight's story, a quick note.
• 2:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sleepless History is independent, no network behind it,
• 2:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: If these stories have become part of your nightly routine, you can support the show on Patreon, linked in the show notes.
• 2:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Early access, add free listening, different background audio and bonus stories are available for members.
• 2:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if that's not for you right now, that's okay.
• 2:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Simply commenting or following the show helps just as much.
• 2:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now let's begin.
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter one, the food of the gods,
• 2:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Long before there was a Spain to conquer anything, long before there was a Europe hungry for sugar, there was a tree.
• 2:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It grew low and shaded beneath the tall canopy of the tropical rainforests of what is now southern Mexico and Central America.
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: A modest tree that scientists would eventually name Theobroma Cacao.
• 3:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: A Greek phrase that translates rather beautifully to food of the gods.
• 3:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The tree produces strange, almost alien fruit.
• 3:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Large-ridged pods shape something like a small football or an oversized lemon.
• 3:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grow directly out of the trunk and the older branches.
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than dangling from slender twigs, the way most fruit does.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inside each pod are rows of seeds, usually somewhere between 20 and 40 of them, surrounded by a sweet white pulp.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those seeds are cacao beans, and those beans are the beginning of every single piece of chocolate that has ever existed.
• 3:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The earliest people to make use of this tree were not thinking about candy at all.
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, the very earliest evidence we have suggests that Cacao was first valued, not for the bitter seeds themselves, but for that sweet white pulp surrounding them.
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: which could be fermented into a mildly alcoholic beverage, something closer to a fruit wine than anything we would recognise as chocolate today.
• 4:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Archaeologists have found residue of cacao on pottery vessels, dating back roughly 3,900 years.
• 4:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: found its sights belonging to a culture sometimes called the Mochaia, an early Mesoamerican people whose name itself means fittingly, the corn people, though they clearly had an appetite for more than corn.
• 4:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: From there, Kakao you spread and deepened among the old maximization.
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Often described as the mother culture of Mesoamerica,
• 4:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Flourishing along the Gulf Coast of what is now Mexico, starting around 3,200 years ago.
• 4:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The All-Mec left behind massive carved stone heads and sophisticated art, but they left very little written record.
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So much of what we know about their relationship with Kakao comes from indirect evidence, pottery residues, and the fact that the very word Kakao itself appears to trace its linguistic roots back to a language likely spoken by the Olmek or their close descendants.
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a word that has survived essentially unchanged in its core sound.
• 5:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: For over 3,000 years, past from language to language, culture to culture,
• 5:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: all the way down to the modern English word we use today.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the myos civilization, however, that truly turned cacao into something we might recognize as a cultural institution.
• 5:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Maya, who's city-states rose to prominence across the Yucatan Peninsula and the surrounding lowlands, beginning around 2,000 years ago, and flourishing for well over 1,000 years after that, Wove Cacao into nearly every layer of their society, they did not eat chocolate the way we do.
• 5:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were no bars, no bricks, no sweet solid candies.
• 6:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, the Maya roasted cacao beans ground them into a paste using stone tools and mix that paste with water, chili peppers, cornmeal and a variety of spices and flowers including in some recipes a flower we now call ear flower prized for its perfume like aroma the resulting drink
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes called Kakao in the Mayan language was thick, dark, bitter, and often quite spicy.
• 6:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was frequently poured back and forth between two vessels held at a distance from one another.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: A technique used specifically to build up a thick, prized foam on top.
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: A bit like a Mesoamerican cappuccino made nearly 2,000 years before anyone in Europe had ever heard the word coffee.
• 6:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: This drink was not casual refreshment.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kakao appears repeatedly in Maya religious texts and artwork as something sacred, something tied directly to the gods and to the ruling class.
• 7:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the Popal Vue, the sacred narrative of the Kauai Maya people that records their creation myths and early history, Kakao is mentioned as one of the foods the gods used in the creation of humanity alongside maze.
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maya Art shows kings and nobles drinking a cow at feasts, and archaeologists have found Kakao residue inside painted ceramic vessels placed in royal tombs, suggesting that Kakao was meant to accompany rulers even into the afterlife.
• 7:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is also evidence that Kakao played a role in wedding ceremonies among the Maya.
• 7:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: exchanged as a kind of ritual gift between families, a tradition that echoes faintly in the modern custom of giving chocolate as a romantic gift.
• 7:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Maya also appeared to have used cacao beans as a form of currency, or at least as a unit of value in trade, and this practice would later be documented in far greater detail by the civilization that rose after them.
• 8:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: That civilization was the Aztec Empire, known more properly to historians as the Mexica, who built their capital city of Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco, in the valley where Mexico City now stands.
• 8:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Aztec Empire rose to dominance in a century and a half or so before European contact.
• 8:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And by the time Spanish explorers arrived in the early 1500s, Kakao had become deeply embedded in Aztec economic, religious and social life.
• 8:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: even though the Aztec homeland itself was too high and too dry to grow cacao trees successfully.
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is an important detail and it tells us something about how valuable cacao truly was.
• 8:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Aztec had to import essentially all of their cacao from the hot, humid, lowland regions to the south and east.
• 9:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Territories that were not coincidentally
• 9:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Among the regions, the Aztec Empire worked hardest to conquer and control through tribute.
• 9:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Historical records compiled after the conquest, including a document known as the Codex Mendoza, list the tribute that conquered provinces were required to send to the Aztec capital.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: and cacao beans appear again and again on those lists.
• 9:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes in staggering quantities, with certain provinces required to deliver hundreds of loads of cacao beans annually to the imperial treasury.
• 9:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because cacao beans were relatively small, easily countable, and durable enough to be transported over long distances without spoiling too quickly.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: they functioned in as tech society as an actual currency.
• 9:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Used alongside other trade goods to buy and sell ordinary items in the market place.
• 9:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Historical accounts describe prices in the great market of clatterloko.
• 10:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the largest markets in the world at that time, given in terms of numbers of cacao beans.
• 10:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: A rabbit might cost around 30 beans.
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: A turkey egg might cost around 3 beans, a basic meal at a food store might cost around 4 beans.
• 10:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because the beans themselves carried real monetary value, counterfitting became a genuine problem, and historical accounts describe people hollowing out cacao beans and refilling them with mud, sand, or avocado seed fragments.
• 10:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: In order to pass off fake currency as real, a strange, distant echo of coin clipping
• 10:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: and currency fraud in society's half a world away.
• 10:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Despite this economic function, Kakao's highest and most prestigious use remained the drink itself.
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And among the Aztec, that drink was known as Exo-Cotal, sometimes rendered as Exo-Colactal.
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: A word many linguists believe is the direct ancestor of our modern word chocolate.
• 11:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though the exact path that word took, as it moved from now wattle, the Aztec language, into Spanish and then into English remains debated among historians and linguists.
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The word likely combined a root meaning bitter or sour, with the word ATL, meaning water, giving us roughly bitter water, which is a fairly accurate description of what the drink actually tasted like to anyone expecting something sweet.
• 11:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Kotel, as prepared in the Aztec Court, was typically a cold, unsweetened, frothy beverage, often flavoured with chili pepper, vanilla and a flower known as Tlokso Chittel and Colored.
• 11:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: In some preparations, with a red dye called Akiyote.
• 11:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was consumed almost exclusively by the nobility, by priests during religious ceremonies and by warriors, who believed the drink provided strength and stamina.
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes serving it to soldiers before they went into battle, or commoners were largely barred from drinking it under normal circumstances.
• 12:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the drink itself carried strong associations with masculinity, warfare, and elite status.
• 12:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Aztec Emperor, Moctezuma II, who ruled at the time of Spanish contact, was said by early Spanish chroniclers to drink enormous quantities of Soxacotal daily.
• 12:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Served in golden cups that were reportedly used only once, and then discarded, or given away.
• 12:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: An extraordinary display of wealth built around a beverage most Europeans, at the time, had never even heard of.
• 12:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Spanish accounts admittedly written by Congress, with every incentive to exaggerate the exotic splendor of the empire they were in the process of destroying.
• 12:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Describe elaborate cacao preparation rituals within the Royal Court, with dedicated servants whose sole responsibility was preparing and serving the Emperor's chocolate.
• 13:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Long distance trade in Kakao across Mesoamerica relied on a class of professional merchants, known among the Aztec as Pocktaker, who traveled in organized caravans along established trade routes, stretching from the humid Kakao growing lowlands near the Pacific and Gulf coasts, up into the Highland Valley, where to notched it lands sat.
• 13:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: These merchants carried cacao alongside other valuable goods, including feathers, Jade, and animal skins, and they occupied a distinct and somewhat privileged position within Aztec society.
• 13:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Operating almost as a hereditary guild, with their own patron deities, their own legal privileges, and on occasion, their own diplomatic and even intelligence gathering functions on behalf of the Empire.
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Since merchants travelling through foreign territory were well positioned together useful information about potential rivals or targets for future conquest, Kakao's high value relative to its weight made it a particularly attractive good for these long-distance traders to carry, since a relatively small light cargo of beans could represent a substantial amount of wealth by the time it reached the markets of the capital.
• 14:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Religiously, Kakao was tied to several deities within the broader Mesoamerican pantheon.
• 14:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Among the Maya, a god known as Ek Chua was associated with both merchants and Kakao.
• 14:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fitting given Kakao's dual role as sacred substance and tradable currency.
• 14:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Among the Aztec, Kakao was connected to the god Ketzel Kotel, the feathered serpent, one of the most important deities in the Aztec religious system.
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to Aztec mythology recorded after the conquest, Ketsal Coattle was said to have descended from the heavens on a beam of the morning star, carrying a cacao tree stolen or gifted from paradise, and to have taught humanity how to cultivate it and prepare it as a drink.
• 15:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this telling, Kakao was quite literally a divine gift, smuggled down from the realm of the gods for human benefit, which helps explain why the substance carried such profound religious weight.
• 15:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the time Spanish ships first began arriving on the shores of what is now Mexico and Central America in the early 1500s, Kakao had already been cultivated, traded, worshipped,
• 15:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: passing through the hands of the Mochaia, the Olemic, the Maya, and finally the Aztec.
• 15:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each civilization adding new layers of ritual, mythology and economic function to this small bitterseed.
• 16:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: None of them, as far as historians can tell, ever added sugar.
• 16:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: That transformation
• 16:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The one that would eventually turn Kakao into the sweet confection we know today was still to come.
• 16:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it would arrive from a cross-enotion carried by explorers who at first didn't even understand what they were looking at.
• 16:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's worth spending a little more time on how Kakao actually made its way from tree to cupped in the ancient world, because the process itself was slow, careful, and entirely done by hand.
• 16:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kakao trees are notoriously delicate.
• 16:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: They cannot tolerate direct sunlight, strong wind, or significant temperature swings, which is why they grow naturally in the understory
• 16:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mesoamerican farmers understood this instinctively, long before anyone had a word for microclimate, often cultivating cacao trees beneath larger shade trees, deliberately planted or preserved for that exact purpose.
• 17:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: A practice that modern agronomists now call Agroforestry, and that many cacao farmers around the world still rely on today.
• 17:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: A cacao tree typically takes around four or five years to produce its first pots, and even a healthy mature tree produces a surprisingly modest yield.
• 17:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Often only enough cacao beans across an entire year to produce a few pounds of finished chocolate, which helps explain why cacao remains such a labor intensive and highly valued crop for the entirety of its ancient history.
• 17:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once harvested, the pods had to be split open by hand.
• 17:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Usually with a wooden club or stone tool.
• 17:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Careful not to damage the beans inside.
• 17:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The beans still coated in their sweet white pulp, with then piled together and left a ferment for several days.
• 18:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: A process that generates heat and begins to break down the pulp while also triggering chemical changes inside the bean itself.
• 18:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Changes that are absolutely essential to developing the complex flavors we now associate with chocolate.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Unfammented cacao beans,
• 18:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you were ever unfortunate enough to taste one, are intensely bitter and almost entirely lacking in what we would recognise as chocolate flavor at all.
• 18:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fermentation, followed by careful drying in the sun, was what began transforming a bitter, unremarkable seed into something worth writing myths about.
• 18:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mesoamerican cacao farmers
• 18:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: appear to have understood and refined this fermentation process through countless generations of trial and observation.
• 18:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Long before anyone anywhere had a scientific understanding of the chemistry involved.
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Maya and Aztec both also placed enormous cultural value on the tools used to prepare Cacao and archaeologists have recovered numerous finely carved grinding stones, known as metades, along with specialised pouring vessels, some elaborately painted with scenes of Cacao preparation and consumption.
• 19:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: buried alongside high status individuals.
• 19:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: These objects weren't simply kitchen tools.
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were, in many cases, treated as valuable possessions, worthy of accompanying their owners into the afterlife.
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Further evidence of just how deeply woven into ritual and status, this bitter little beam truly was.
• 19:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a wonderful, almost comic historical detail worth
• 19:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: When Christopher Columbus' expedition encountered cacao beans during his fourth voyage in the year 1502, intercepting a large native trading canoe off the coast of what is now Honduras.
• 20:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Spanish crew apparently had no idea what the strange almond-shaped seeds were for.
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Columbus's son Ferdinand, who documented the voyage, noted that the native traders seemed to value these beans enormously.
• 20:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Going to great lengths to gather up any that spilled onto the deck of their canoe, as if in Ferdinand's words an eye had fallen from someone's head, and yet the Spanish.
• 20:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Holding in their hands the very seed that would eventually reshape economies, empires and dinner tables across the entire globe simply didn't understand its worth and moved on in search of gold instead.
• 20:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would take another 17 years and a far more violent and consequential encounter before Europeans truly began to understand what a cow could become.
• 20:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: let that settle for a moment.
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: A civilisation built currency, religion, ritual, and royal ceremony around this small bit of being for thousands of years.
• 21:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the people who eventually took it from them almost missed it entirely, distracted by their search for something shinier.
• 21:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 2, a bit of drink crosses the ocean,
• 21:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our story now shifts toward the year 1519.
• 21:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the Spanish conquistador earn and courtes landed on the coast of what is now Mexico, with a small force of soldiers, horses and cannons.
• 21:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: and began a campaign that would, within just two years, bring down the entire Aztec Empire.
• 21:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is not primarily a story about that conquest, which was brutal, devastating, and reshape the demographic and political landscape of an entire continent through violence.
• 21:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, even more so, through the diseases the Spanish carried with them, diseases against which the native population had no immunity.
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: but it is impossible to tell the story of chocolate without acknowledging that it's journey to Europe began inside this larger, darker story of conquest and colonization.
• 22:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cortes and his men encountered exocotal during their time in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and Spanish chronicles traveling with the expedition.
• 22:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: including a soldier named Bernal Diaz del Castillo.
• 22:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Later, wrote Detailed Accounts, describing the elaborate cacao drinking customs of Moctezuma's court.
• 22:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: At first, the Spanish were not particularly impressed.
• 22:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: A custom to European tastes.
• 22:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of the early Spanish accounts describe the drink as bitter, strange, and somewhat unpleasant, more suited as one account rather memorably put it, for pigs than for men.
• 23:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But attitudes shifted quickly.
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once the Spanish began to understand Cacao's broader, cultural, and economic significance within the societies they were conquering.
• 23:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Particularly its function as currency.
• 23:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: which was a concept the money-minded Spanish Empire understood instantly and valued highly.
• 23:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: One small but enduring piece of Mesoamerican technology survived this entire process of European adaptation almost entirely intact.
• 23:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: A carved wooden whisk known as the Molinilo used for centuries to froth chocolate by twirling its handle rapidly between the palms of the hands.
• 23:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Spanish colonizers adopted this tool directly from Mesoamerican chocolate preparation traditions and the Moleneo remains in use today, largely unchanged in its basic design.
• 23:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Particularly in Mexican Kitchens preparing traditional hot chocolate, a rare and rather charming case of an indigenous Mesoamerican tool.
• 24:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: surviving the entire colonial transformation of chocolate, essentially intact.
• 24:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even as nearly everything else about how the drink was prepared, flavoured and understood changed dramatically around it.
• 24:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Spanish colonizers began establishing Kakao plantations across Mesoamerica and eventually further south into what is now Venezuela and Ecuador, using forced indigenous labour and as Kakao cultivation expanded and indigenous populations were devastated by disease and violence increasingly relying on enslaved Africans brought across the Atlantic against their will.
• 24:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is a critical and uncomfortable thread
• 24:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: running through the entire history of chocolate, one we will return to more than once tonight.
• 24:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: From nearly the moment Europeans took control of cacao production, that production was built substantially on forced and coerced labour, a pattern that, in different forms, persists as a serious ethical concern in the chocolate industry even today.
• 25:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Something we will discuss more directly in our final chapter.
• 25:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kakao Beans first made their way back to Spain, sometime in the 1520s or 1530s, though the exact date and circumstances remained somewhat murky in the historical record.
• 25:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: With some accounts crediting Cortez himself with bringing the first shipment, and others suggesting Spanish friars or later colonial administrators played the more decisive role in introducing chocolate to the Spanish court.
• 25:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: What we know with more confidence is that by the middle of the 1500s, Spanish colonists and missionaries in the Americas had begun experimenting with the exocotal recipe, adapting it to European tastes in ways that would prove enormously consequential.
• 25:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The most significant of these adaptations was the addition of sugar, or sometimes honey, to sweeten what had originally been a bitter, savoury, spicy drink.
• 26:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Spanish colonists also began substituting or supplementing the traditional Mesoamerican spices with ingredients more familiar to European palates, including cinnamon, black pepper, and anise, while retaining vanilla,
• 26:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: which the Spanish had also encountered for the first time in Mesoamerica, and which remains to this day, one of the most common flavour pairings with chocolate anywhere in the world.
• 26:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chile Pepper, the traditional Aztec and Maya flavouring
• 26:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: was gradually reduced or removed entirely in most European recipes, a change that fundamentally altered the character of the drink, transforming it from something bitter and spicy into something rich and sweet.
• 26:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: This new sweetened chocolate drink spread first through the Spanish Royal Court and Spanish aristocracy, and Spain, notably, managed to keep chocolate something
• 27:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: protecting both the source of Kakao and the recipe for preparing it as a valuable trade advantage.
• 27:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Historians debate exactly how airtight this secrecy really was, since chocolate almost certainly leaked out to other parts of Europe.
• 27:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: gradually through various channels, rather than through any single dramatic reveal.
• 27:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the popular historical narrative repeated in many accounts holds that chocolate remained largely confined to Spain and Spanish-controlled territories, including parts of Italy.
• 27:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: For roughly a century after its introduction, only spreading more broadly across the rest of Europe in the early 1600s.
• 27:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the pivotal moments often cited in this spread involves a royal marriage.
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1615, the Spanish princess Anne of Austria married King Louis, the 13th of France, and popular historical accounts credit her with bringing a taste for chocolate to the French court, though.
• 28:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: As with many such origin stories, the full picture is likely more gradual and complicated than a single princess, single handedly introducing an entire nation to a new beverage.
• 28:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is certain is that by the middle of the 1600s, chocolate had become a fixture of French aristocratic life.
• 28:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It consumed as a fashionable morning drink among the nobility and eventually served at the court of Versailles, where it became closely associated with luxury, leisure and the elaborate rituals of court life.
• 28:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: From Spain and France, chocolate spread onward to Italy, where it had likely already been introduced somewhat earlier through Spanish-controlled territories in southern Italy,
• 28:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: reaching England by around the middle of the 1600s.
• 29:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: England's relationship with chocolate developed a distinct character all its own, largely centered not around royal courts, but around a new kind of public institution, the Chocolate House.
• 29:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first chocolate house in London is generally credited to have opened in the year 1657.
• 29:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Advertised in a newspaper, as offering an excellent West India drink called chocolate, to be sold at a house in Bishop's Gate Street.
• 29:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chocolate houses quickly became fashionable gathering places for London's wealthier classes, functioning somewhat like the coffee houses that were emerging around the same time.
• 29:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: as venues for socializing, political discussion, gambling and business, all while sipping thick, sweetened, spiced hot chocolate served from silver pots.
• 29:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps the most famous of these chocolate houses was white.
• 30:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Established in the year 1693 by an Italian immigrant named Francesco Bianco, whose name was Anglicized to Francis White.
• 30:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: White's chocolate house quickly became a fashionable gathering spot for London's elite, and over the following decades.
• 30:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Gradually transformed from a chocolate serving establishment into something closer to a private gentleman's club.
• 30:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: eventually becoming and remaining to this day.
• 30:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the oldest and most exclusive private clubs in London, though its chocolate-serving origins have long since faded into history.
• 30:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Remember now mostly as a curious footnote.
• 30:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chocolate houses in this era were expensive, exclusive spaces, and chocolate itself remained a luxury item throughout the 1600s and well into the 1700s.
• 30:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Priced well beyond the reach of ordinary people, both because of the cost of importing cacao beans across the Atlantic,
• 31:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: and because of high taxes, many European governments placed on chocolate, similar to the taxes placed on tea, coffee and sugar, all of which were treated as luxury colonial imports.
• 31:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: As chocolates spread across Catholic Europe during the 1600s, it also became tangled up in a rather unexpected theological debate.
• 31:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because chocolate was consumed as a liquid, questions arose within the Catholic Church.
• 31:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: about whether drinking chocolate broke the traditional religious fasts observed during lent and other holy periods.
• 31:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fasts that generally prohibited the consumption of food but were somewhat more ambiguous when it came to beverages.
• 31:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: prominent theologians and even a series of popes weighed in on the matter over the course of several decades.
• 31:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the debate was taken seriously enough that it produced a genuine body of religious and legal writing devoted specifically to the question of whether a cup of chocolate counted as food or drink.
• 32:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The matter was never fully or permanently settled in a single decree, but the general consensus that gradually emerged favored treating chocolate as a beverage rather than a food.
• 32:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meaning it was generally considered acceptable to drink during periods of fasting.
• 32:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: A ruling that likely helped chocolate's popularity continue to spread within devoutly Catholic regions of Europe, including Spain, Italy and France, without running into serious religious objection.
• 32:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chocolate also became entangled during this same period in the broader European medical tradition, which was still operating largely under the ancient Humeral Theory of Medicine inherited from the classical world.
• 32:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: A system that categorized foods and substances, according to their
• 33:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: European physicians spent considerable energy debating exactly where chocolate fit within this framework.
• 33:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: With some arguing it was dangerously heating and should be consumed only in moderation or avoided by certain temperaments.
• 33:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: and others promoting it as a genuinely restorative tonic, useful for treating everything from digestive complaints to melancholy to general weakness.
• 33:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chocolate was sold in apothecary shops, alongside more conventional medicines, throughout much of the 16 and 1700s, and it wasn't until chocolate became more widely available and its consumption became more of an everyday pleasure, rather than a rare
• 33:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: expensive substance that these elaborate medical justifications gradually faded into the background, replaced by chocolates now familiar identity as simply something delicious.
• 33:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Beyond England, chocolate houses and cafes serving chocolate alongside coffee and tea, also flourished during the
• 34:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: with Italian chocolate makers, in particular, developing a strong regional reputation for quality that persists to this day.
• 34:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the Italian city of Churrin remains closely associated with fine chocolate making, even in the present.
• 34:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Home to a style of chocolate and hazelnut confection,
• 34:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: that would much later inspire one of the best selling chocolate products of the modern era.
• 34:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: A story we will return to in a later chapter tonight.
• 34:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a persistent and charming, if somewhat historically uncertain, story from this era, involving a physician and naturalist named Hans Sloan, who would later go on to found what became the British Museum through his enormous personal collection of specimens and artifacts.
• 35:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to popular legend Sloan travelled to Jamaica in the 1680s and finding the traditional water-based chocolate drink of the region unpleasantly bitter began mixing it with milk instead, creating a recipe he brought back to England.
• 35:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: This milk and chocolate mixture was, according to the popular story, initially sold as a medicinal preparation by apothecaries, prescribed for various ailments.
• 35:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before eventually becoming simply a pleasant drink in its own right.
• 35:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some accounts even suggest that the Cadbury Company, which we will meet properly in our next chapter, later required and sold chocolate based on Sloan's recipe.
• 35:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Historians treat this story with some caution.
• 35:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Since the documentary evidence connecting Sloan directly and exclusively to the invention of milk chocolate as a drink,
• 35:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: is thinner than the popular version of the tail suggests, and milk-based chocolate preparations likely developed somewhat independently in multiple places around this time, but the story remains a beloved and frequently repeated piece of chocolate law, regardless of exactly how much of it holds up to strict historical scrutiny.
• 36:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Throughout the 1700s, chocolate slowly became somewhat more accessible across Europe, though it remained by any modern standard, a rare and expensive luxury.
• 36:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Consumed almost exclusively as a hot beverage rather than as a solid food.
• 36:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The idea of chocolate as something you could bite into, rather than something you drank from a cup, simply did not exist yet.
• 36:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: That transformation required new technology, new industrial processes, and a handful of stubborn, inventive people willing to spend years experimenting with cacao presses, grinding wheels, and chemical treatments in search of something better.
• 37:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it is to those people, and to the industrial revolution that gave them their tools, that we now turn our attention.
• 37:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter three, from drink to barn, the industrial transformation.
• 37:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: For roughly 300 years, from the earliest Spanish encounters with Exo Coattle in the early 1500s through the end of the 1700s, chocolate remained fundamentally a beverage.
• 37:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was thick, often gritty, prepared by hand, using labor-intensive grinding processes largely unchanged from Mesoamerican methods, and it's separated easily.
• 37:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: With the natural cocoa butter present in cacao beans rising to the surface, in an unappetizing greasy layer, if the drink sat for even a short while.
• 37:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The transformation of chocolate, from a difficult, somewhat inconsistent luxury beverage into the smooth, stable, solid confection we recognise today.
• 38:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: required a series of chemical and mechanical innovations that unfolded gradually over the course of the 1800s, largely in the Netherlands, England and Switzerland.
• 38:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first truly pivotal breakthrough came from a Dutch chemist named Cohen Rd Johannes van Houten, who in the year 1828 patented a hydraulic press capable of squeezing much of the natural fat.
• 38:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: known as cocoa butter, out of roasted ground cacao beans.
• 38:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before this invention, cacao beans contain roughly 50% fat by weight, which made the resulting chocolate liquid rich, but also greasy, prone to separating.
• 38:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And difficult to work with in any form other than a beverage.
• 38:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Van Houten's press could remove a substantial portion of that fat, leaving behind a dry cake that could then be ground into a fine powder.
• 39:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: A powder with a much lower fat content that mixed far more easily with water and produced a smoother, more consistent drink.
• 39:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Van Houten took this innovation a step further by developing a process for treating the resulting cocoa powder with alkaline salts, a technique that came to be known as dutching in honor of his nationality.
• 39:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: This alkalising process neutralised some of the natural acidity and bitterness of cacao, darkened its colour, and improved its ability to mix with liquids, producing what we now called Dutch process cocoa powder.
• 39:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Still widely used today, both in cooking and in the production of many chocolate products.
• 39:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Van Houten's innovations essentially split cacao processing into two separate streams for the
• 39:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: cocoa powder on one hand, and the removed cocoa butter on the other.
• 40:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was this separation that made the next great leap forward possible.
• 40:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: That next leap belonged to an English company.
• 40:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Joseph Frye had established a chocolate business in Bristol, England, back in the year 1759, initially producing the traditional drinking chocolate that had been standard across Europe for over a century.
• 40:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: But by the middle of the 1800s, under the direction of Joseph Frye's descendants, operating the firm now known as J.S.
• 40:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Frye and Suns, the company began experimenting with
• 40:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: the very fact that Van Halten's press had been designed to remove, back together, into a new kind of paste.
• 40:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than removing the fat entirely, Fry and Suns realized that by adding extra cocoa butter back into the mixture, along with sugar, they could create a moldable paste that could be poured into shapes, cooled, and hardened into a solid block.
• 41:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the year 1847, Fry and Suns introduced what is widely credited as the world's first mass-produced solid-eating chocolate bar.
• 41:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Marketed under the name Shokla delissue Amonge French for delicious chocolate to eat.
• 41:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was, in a very real sense, the moment chocolate stopped being exclusively
• 41:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: and became for the first time in its 4,000 year history, something you could simply hold in your hand and bite into.
• 41:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's worth sitting with how significant this shift truly was.
• 41:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: After roughly four millennia as a beverage tied to ritual, currency and royal ceremony,
• 41:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chocolate had, within the span of about 20 years of industrial experimentation in England and the Netherlands, become a solid, portable, everyday food.
• 41:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Other British chocolate makers quickly followed fry and suns into this new solid chocolate market, and among the most significant of these competitors was accompanied by a quaker family named Cadbury.
• 42:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: John Cadbury had opened a small shop in Birmingham, England, in the year 1824, initially selling tea, coffee and drinking chocolate.
• 42:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Under the leadership of his sons, particularly Richard and George Cadbury, the company expanded significantly during the second half of the 1800s.
• 42:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Eventually building an enormous factory and model industrial village called Bourneville, just outside Birmingham, designed according to progressive Quaker principles to provide decent housing, gardens, and amenities for the company's workers, a strikingly different vision of industrial labour from the often brutal factory conditions common elsewhere during this period.
• 42:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Cadbury brothers were driven in significant part by their quaker faith, which emphasized social responsibility and the well-being of workers, and the Bournville village they built stood in deliberate.
• 43:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Pointed contrast to the crowded, polluted, and often grim industrial slums that characterized much of urban Birmingham and other British manufacturing cities during this period.
• 43:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Workers at Bourneville had access to gardens, sports facilities, adult education classes and pension arrangements that were remarkably progressive for the era.
• 43:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the Cadbury family's approach to industrial welfare would go on to influence broader conversations about labour conditions and corporate responsibility in Britain for decades afterward.
• 43:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even as, somewhat uncomfortably, the law could cow that fed their famously humane factory was, for a period in the early 1900s.
• 43:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: sourced partly from Portuguese colonial plantations in West Africa, later found to be relying on forced labour practices, a controversy that prompted public scrutiny and eventually led Cadbury to shift its cacao sourcing elsewhere, an early and telling example of the tension between chocolates finished.
• 44:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: comforting image and the much harder realities of its raw supply chain, attention that as we will see never really disappeared.
• 44:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cadbury introduced its own solid chocolate products in the 1870s and would go on to become one of the most significant chocolate companies in the world, eventually developing the dairy milk bar in the year 1905.
• 44:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: A product that remains one of the best selling chocolate bars in the United Kingdom to this day.
• 44:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: While England was busy inventing the solid chocolate bar, the next transformative innovation was brewing in Switzerland, a country that, despite growing no cacao of its own, would go on to become almost synonymous with high quality chocolate.
• 45:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The key figure here is a man named Daniel Peter, a Swiss chocolate maker who spent years struggling with a persistent technical problem, how to successfully combine chocolate with milk in a solid form.
• 45:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Milk contains a substantial amount of water, and water and the fat-rich chocolate mixture simply did not combine well using existing techniques, resulting in a
• 45:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Daniel Peters Breakthrough came through a partnership with a neighbour and family friend, a man named Henry Nestle, who had in the year 1867, developed and patented a process for making condensed milk.
• 45:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: A shelf-stable dairy product created by removing much of the water content from milk and adding sugar.
• 45:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Working with Nestle's condensed milk as an ingredient, rather than fresh liquid milk, Daniel Peter finally solved the technical problem that had frustrated chocolate makers for years.
• 46:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Successfully combining chocolate and milk.
• 46:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: into a stable, solid product.
• 46:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the year 1875, after roughly eight years of experimentation, Peter introduced the world's first genuinely successful milk chocolate bar, a product that would go on to fundamentally reshape the entire chocolate industry, since milk chocolate being sweeter and milder than the darker chocolate that had preceded it.
• 46:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: proved enormously popular with a much wider range of consumers than the more bitter dark chocolates that are dominated the market up to that point.
• 46:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Switzerland produced yet another crucial innovation just a few years later.
• 46:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: courtesy of a chocolate maker named Rudolf Lindt, working in the city of Burn.
• 46:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the year 1879, Lindt developed a process known as Conching, named for the shell-shaped or conch-shaped vessel originally used in the process.
• 47:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Conching involves continuously grinding, mixing and erating chocolate for many hours, sometimes even several days, at a carefully controlled, warm temperature.
• 47:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: This extended mixing process accomplishes several things at once.
• 47:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It evenly distributes cocoa butter throughout the mixture.
• 47:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It releases volatile acidic compounds that contribute unwanted bitterness and sourness.
• 47:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it breaks down the sugar and cocoa particles into an extremely fine, smooth texture.
• 47:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before punching, chocolate, even the solid bars produced by Fry and Cadbury tended to have a
• 47:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: After conching, chocolate achieved the smooth, silky, melting texture that we now consider standard and expect from quality chocolate.
• 48:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: A texture so associated with good chocolate today that it's easy to forget, it required decades of chemical and mechanical experimentation to achieve.
• 48:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean in the United States, a man named Milton Hirschi was building what would eventually become the single most famous chocolate brand in American history.
• 48:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hirschi had actually built his early business career on Caramel, not chocolate, running a successful Caramel Manufacturing Company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania during the 1880s and 1890s.
• 48:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: After encountering chocolate making equipment at an industrial exposition in the early 1890s.
• 48:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hershey became fascinated with chocolate and eventually sold his highly profitable caramel business in the year 1897, using much of the proceeds to fund a new, dedicated chocolate manufacturing venture.
• 49:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hershey's key business insight was not primarily technical but strategic.
• 49:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: He recognized that milk chocolate still a relatively new and somewhat exotic product, associated
• 49:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: could be produced cheaply and reliably enough using American dairy supplies and mass production techniques to be sold to ordinary working-class American consumers at an extremely low price.
• 49:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than remaining a luxury item reserved for the wealthy.
• 49:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the year 1900, Hershey introduced the Hershey bar and shortly afterwards began construction of an entire town, quite literally named Hershey Pennsylvania.
• 49:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Built around his massive new chocolate factory, complete with worker housing, schools and amenities, echoing in a distinctly American industrial fashion.
• 49:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: the earlier model village that the Cadbury family had built at Bourneville in England.
• 50:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hershey's approach to mass production and aggressive pricing helped transform chocolate within the span of just a few decades.
• 50:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: From a luxury good, enjoyed primarily by the wealthy, into a genuinely mass market product accessible to nearly everyone.
• 50:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: A transformation that would only accelerate as the 20th century unfolded, carrying chocolate through two world wars and into the modern global candy industry we recognise today.
• 50:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Switzerland, having already produced Daniel Peters milk chocolate breakthrough and Rudolf Lint's Conching Innovation.
• 50:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: continued to be a hotbed of chocolate experimentation and rivalry throughout the final decades of the 1800s.
• 50:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: A Swiss confectioner named Philippe Sushard had somewhat earlier established his own chocolate company in the year 1826.
• 51:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: and Sushard would go on to become one of the major chocolate producers on the European continent, eventually merging many decades later, with a French company to form what became known as Sushard Toble.
• 51:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: That second name belonged to another Swiss chocolate maker, Theodore Toble.
• 51:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: whose company, working alongside his cousin and confectioner, Emil Baumann, introduced in the year 1908, a distinctively shaped triangular chocolate bar, studied with almond nougat, marketed under the name Toblerone, a name that cleverly combined Tobler's own surname, with the Italian word Toroni, referring to the nougat confection that gave the bar its distinctive chewy texture.
• 51:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The unusual triangular peaks of the bar were reportedly inspired by the jagged silhouette of the Matterhorn, the famous pyramid-shaped mountain that rises along the border between Switzerland and Italy, and the Toblerone bar remains, well over a century later, one of the most recognisably shaped pieces of chocolate, anywhere in the world.
• 52:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chocolate making had also taken root in the United States well before Milton Hershey entered the picture.
• 52:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, the very first chocolate factory established anywhere in the American colonies dates back to the year 1765 founded near Boston Massachusetts by a physician named James Baker.
• 52:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: in partnership with an Irish chocolate maker named John Hannon.
• 52:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their company eventually became known as Baker's chocolate, and it holds the distinction of being one of the oldest continuously operating chocolate brands in American history.
• 52:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Still recognizable today.
• 52:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Primarily through its baking chocolate products, a direct link back to the earliest days of chocolate manufacturing on American soil.
• 52:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: more than a full century before Hershey's factory ever opened its doors in Pennsylvania.
• 53:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the American West Coast, an Italian immigrant named Domeneco Gerardelli established his own chocolate company in San Francisco in the year 1852, having initially traveled to California during the gold rush years, hoping to sell provisions and confections to prospectors, rather than search for gold himself.
• 53:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Guerradelli's company would go on to develop its own particular refinements to the chocolate manufacturing process.
• 53:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And remains.
• 53:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: To this day, one of the most recognized chocolate brands associated specifically with the Western United States.
• 53:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rapid pace of chocolate innovation throughout the second half of the 1800s.
• 53:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: was showcased quite publicly at a series of major international exhibitions and world's fairs held across Europe and the United States.
• 53:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: During this period, grand public events designed to display the latest achievements of industry, science and manufacturing to enormous crowds of curious visitors.
• 54:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chocolate companies frequently built elaborate
• 54:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: competing to demonstrate the scale and sophistication of their manufacturing processes.
• 54:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And these exhibitions played a real role in introducing the general public to chocolate as a modern industrial product, rather than the old fashioned.
• 54:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hand prepared luxury beverage it had been for most of its long history up to that point.
• 54:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the close of the 1800s, in the span of roughly 70 years, chocolate had been utterly transformed.
• 54:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had gone from a thick, greasy, difficult to prepare drink, largely unchanged from its Mesoamerican origins, into a smooth, solid, mass-produced bar.
• 54:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks to a chain of inventions, stretching from Amsterdam to Bristol to Bern to rural Pennsylvania.
• 55:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each innovator built on the work of the ones before them, solving one's stubborn technical problem after another, until chocolate finally became something close to what sits on shelves today.
• 55:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the story of chocolate spread across the world, and the darker questions about who actually grows it, and who actually benefits from it, was only just beginning.
• 55:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's to the turbulent 20th century that we'll travel next.
• 55:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: world wars world markets.
• 55:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the 20th century opened, chocolate had firmly established itself as a mass market product across much of Europe and North America, no longer the exclusive privilege of royal courts and wealthier aristocrats, but an everyday treat available to ordinary working people.
• 55:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And almost immediately, this newly democratized product found itself swept up into two of the most destructive conflicts in human history, world wars, that would, in their own strange and often overlooked way, helps cement chocolate's place in modern culture even further.
• 56:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: During the First World War, which raged from 1914 to 1918, chocolate manufacturers on both sides of the conflict began producing chocolate specifically intended for military rations.
• 56:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chocolate offered soldiers a compact, calorie dense, relatively shelf-stable source of quick energy, and both the Hershey Company in the United States and various European manufacturers,
• 56:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: supplied chocolate to their respective militaries throughout the war.
• 56:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: This established a pattern that would become even more significant during the Second World War, just over two decades later.
• 56:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the United States entered the Second World War, following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, the United States Army approached Milton Hershey's company with a very specific and rather unusual request.
• 57:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: They wanted a chocolate bar designed specifically for soldiers in combat conditions.
• 57:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: One that could withstand high temperatures without melting would provide substantial caloric energy and notably.
• 57:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to the specifications the army reportedly requested should taste only slightly better than a boiled potato.
• 57:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The logic being that if the ration bar tasted too good,
• 57:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Soldiers might eat their entire emergency supply immediately, rather than saving it for genuine emergencies.
• 57:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hershey's company developed what became known as the Ration D-bar, later refined into the tropical chocolate bar, a dense, deliberately not very delicious chocolate bar formulated to resist melting in hot climates and to provide roughly 600 calories per bar.
• 58:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: enough, according to military specifications, to sustain a soldier for a full day in an emergency situation if nothing else was available.
• 58:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hershey's factory produced an absolutely staggering quantity of these Russian bars throughout the war.
• 58:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: reportedly manufacturing over 100 million of them by the war's end, a scale of production that fundamentally transformed Hershey from a domestic candy company into one of the largest food manufacturers in the entire country.
• 58:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The development of the Ration D bar itself was not a simple or immediate success.
• 58:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Military researchers and her she's own chemists went through repeated rounds of testing and reformulation throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s.
• 58:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wrestling with the basic chemistry problem of trying to keep a fundamentally fat-based product from softening or melting in tropical and desert conditions.
• 59:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: while also ensuring it remained dense enough in calories to serve its intended emergency purpose and stable enough to survive rough handling, extreme humidity, and long periods of storage without spoiling.
• 59:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Early versions reportedly proved so hard and dense
• 59:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: that soldiers joked they were more useful for chipping with a knife than eating outright, a deliberate trade-off.
• 59:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Since a bar that was difficult and unpleasant to eat quickly, served the underlying military logic of the whole project rather well, encouraging soldiers to ration it slowly across days of hardship.
• 59:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: rather than consume it all in one sitting, out of simple enjoyment.
• 59:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Later refinements to the recipe soften this reputation somewhat, but the Russian D-bar and its successes were never intended and were never marketed as anything resembling a treat.
• 1:00:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The wars also drove innovation in chocolate coating technology, most famously in the creation of the candy that would become known as MNMs.
• 1:00:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Forest Mars, son of the founder of the Mars Candy Company, reportedly encountered soldiers in Spain during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, eating small pellets of chocolate coated in a hardened sugar shell, a coating that prevented the chocolate from melting in warm climates.
• 1:00:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: a critical feature for soldiers operating without refrigeration.
• 1:00:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inspired by this concept, Forest Mars partnered with Bruce Murray, son of the president of the Hershey Company, and together they developed and patented a similar hard-shelled chocolate candy in the United States.
• 1:00:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: launching it in the year 1941 under the name MNMs, drawing the initials directly from the last names, Mars and Murray.
• 1:00:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Much like Hershey's Russian bars, MNMs found an early and eager customer in the United States military, which purchased large quantities of the candy for distribution to soldiers throughout the Second World War, precisely because the hard sugar shell
• 1:01:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: prevented the chocolate inside from melting in soldiers' pockets during combat in hot climates.
• 1:01:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Giving rise to the companies enduring advertising slogan
• 1:01:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: that the candy melts in your mouth, not in your hand.
• 1:01:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Beyond the battlefield, both World Wars also brought chocolate rationing to civilian populations on the home front, particularly in Britain, where sugar, cocoa, and many other food staples were tightly rationed throughout both conflicts.
• 1:01:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: due to disrupted supply lines and wartime shortages.
• 1:01:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chocolate, once a symbol of everyday abundance, briefly became a genuinely scarce and cherished treat again during these years.
• 1:01:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: A small but telling reminder of just how quickly a mass market product can revert to something closer to its historical status as a rare luxury when supply chains break down.
• 1:02:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: While wars were reshaping chocolate's role in the industrialized nations of Europe and North America, the actual source of the world's cacao supply was undergoing its own dramatic transformation, one rooted deeply in the legacy of European colonialism.
• 1:02:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: For roughly 400 years after the Spanish first began cultivating cacao in the Americas,
• 1:02:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The vast majority of the world's cacao had continued to be grown in the western hemisphere, primarily in Central America, the Caribbean and parts of South America, but beginning in the 1800s and accelerating dramatically through the colonial era.
• 1:02:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kakao cultivation spread to an entirely new region of the world, West Africa, a shift that would, within the span of roughly a century, completely relocate the geographic center of global Kakao production.
• 1:03:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kakao trees were first introduced to the West African island of Soutone by Portuguese colonizers in the late 1800s, and from there, Kakao cultivation spread to the West
• 1:03:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: particularly to territories that were at the time under British and French colonial control, including what were then called the gold coast, now the independent nation of Ghana and the Ivory Coast.
• 1:03:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The climate and soil conditions across a wide swath of West Africa proved remarkably well suited to cacao cultivation and colonial administrations actively encouraged and in many cases essentially coerced local farmers into shifting agricultural production toward cacao as an export crop, one that generated substantial revenue for colonial powers and eventually
• 1:04:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though the prophets were rarely distributed evenly or fairly.
• 1:04:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the middle of the 20th century, the gold coast, soon to become the independent nation of Ghana in 1957, had become the single largest Kakao producing region in the entire world.
• 1:04:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the neighbouring Ivory Coast was not far behind.
• 1:04:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Today, remarkably, these two West African nations alone, Ivory Coast and Ghana, together produce well over half of the entire world supply of Cacao, a truly extraordinary geographic shift.
• 1:04:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: When you consider that Cacao, as we discussed at length in our first chapter tonight, originated on the completely opposite side of the world, in the rainforests of Mesoamerica, several thousand years before any European ship ever crossed the Atlantic.
• 1:04:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: This relocation of Cacao production to West Africa also relocated many of the labor and economic justice concerns that had haunted Cacao cultivation since the earliest days of Spanish colonization in the Americas.
• 1:05:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Colonial era, Cacao farming in West Africa, often relied on exploitative labor practices.
• 1:05:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And even after most West African nations achieved political independence in the mid-20th century, structural economic pressures, including persistently low global Cacao prices.
• 1:05:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: set largely by markets and corporations based in wealthy consuming nations, far from the actual cacao farms.
• 1:05:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Left many small-scale West African cacao farmers trapped in poverty, despite growing a crop that generates many billions of dollars annually for the global chocolate industry as a whole.
• 1:05:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: These are questions we will return to more directly in our final chapter tonight, because they remain very much unresolved in the chocolate industry even now, in our own time.
• 1:06:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Back in the consuming nations of North America and Europe, the post-war decades of the middle 20th century,
• 1:06:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: saw chocolate become an even more thoroughly integrated part of everyday culture and cuisine.
• 1:06:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the year 1938, an American inkeeper named Ruth Wakefield, who ran the toll house in in Massachusetts, is credited with inventing what would become one of the most beloved chocolate desserts in American history, the chocolate chip cookie.
• 1:06:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: reportedly created after she chopped up a bar of semi-sweet chocolate and added the pieces to a batch of cookie dough, expecting the chocolate to melt and spread throughout the dough as it baked.
• 1:06:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Only to discover that the chocolate pieces largely held their shape, creating distinct pockets of melted chocolate throughout the cookie instead.
• 1:06:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wakefield's recipe became so popular that Nestle eventually struck a deal with her, agreeing to print her recipe on their chocolate packaging in exchange for the right to use the toldhouse name.
• 1:07:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And to this day Nestle toldhouse remains one of the best known chocolate chip brands in the United States.
• 1:07:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its packaging still featuring in slightly modified form.
• 1:07:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The very recipe Ruth Wakefield developed by accident nearly nine decades ago.
• 1:07:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The scarcity brought on by wartime rationing also, quite indirectly, gave rise to one of the most beloved chocolate products of the 20th century.
• 1:07:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Italy, during the Second World War, Coco supplies became extremely difficult for confectioners to obtain.
• 1:07:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: and a pastry maker named Pietro Ferrarro, working in the town of Alba in the Piedmont region.
• 1:07:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bigan experimenting with ways to stretch a limited supply of cocoa further by blending it with the regions abundant local hazelnuts, along with sugar and vegetable oil.
• 1:08:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The result was a firm, sliceable paste,
• 1:08:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: that Ferraro began selling in the year 1946 under the name Pastor Gianduja, named after a traditional Piedmontese chocolate and hazelnut confection with roots stretching back to the early 1800s.
• 1:08:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over the following years, Ferraro and his son Michelle continued refining the recipe,
• 1:08:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The company relaunched the product under a new name, Nutella, which went on to become one of the best-selling, chocolate and hazelnut spreads on the entire planet.
• 1:08:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Still produced by the Ferraro company, still headquartered in that same region of Northern Italy, where wartime scarcity first forced a clever confectioner to stretch his cocoa supply with local hazelnuts.
• 1:09:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The post-war decades,
• 1:09:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Also saw the rise of Kakao as a heavily traded global commodity.
• 1:09:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bought and sold in bulk through organized commodity exchanges in cities including London and New York.
• 1:09:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: With Kakao futures contracts, allowing buyers and sellers to agree on prices for Kakao to be delivered months or even years in advance.
• 1:09:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: This system brought a certain financial sophistication and stability to the global chocolate supply chain.
• 1:09:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: allowing large manufacturers to plan production and manage costs more predictably.
• 1:09:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it also meant that the price farmers actually received for their cacao.
• 1:09:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: became increasingly disconnected from the price consumers, eventually paid for a finished chocolate bar with a great many intermediaries, processors, shippers and traders.
• 1:09:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each taking a share of the value, somewhere along the long journey between a cacao farm in West Africa and a candy shelf in London or New York or Los Angeles.
• 1:10:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: a structural imbalance that remains a significant factor in the economic hardship still faced by many cacao farming communities today.
• 1:10:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chocolate advertising also came into its own during these post-war decades, as television became a dominant medium in American and European households, and chocolate companies invested heavily in building recognizable brand identities through jingles, mascots, and slogans that, for many people listening tonight, likely still echo somewhere in memory.
• 1:10:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whether it was the melting in your mouth promise of M&Ms, or the increasingly elaborate seasonal advertising campaigns built around Christmas and Easter chocolate sales, chocolate marketing became, by the middle of the 20th century, a highly sophisticated industry in its own right.
• 1:11:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: One closely studying consumer psychology to determine exactly how to make a simple bar of
• 1:11:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Throughout the middle decades of the 20th century, chocolate manufacturing continued to consolidate into an increasingly small number of enormous multinational corporations, a trend that would only accelerate as the century war on.
• 1:11:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Companies like Nestle, Mars, Hershey, and Cadbury grew through decades of mergers, acquisitions.
• 1:11:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: and aggressive global expansion into the massive multinational corporations that dominate the chocolate industry today, controlling not just chocolate bars but an enormous range of confectionary products sold in virtually every country on earth.
• 1:11:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as these companies grew larger and more global, the questions surrounding where their cacao actually came from,
• 1:12:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: and under what conditions it was grown and harvested became increasingly difficult for both the industry and consumers to ignore entirely, setting the stage for the ethical debates and reform movements that define much of the modern chocolate industry today, which brings us finally to our last chapter of the evening, chapter five, chocolate in our own time.
• 1:12:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: We arrive now at the modern chocolate industry, an enormous global business estimated to be worth well over $100 billion annually, spanning a cow farms in dozens of tropical countries.
• 1:12:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sprawling industrial factories across Europe and North America, and small, artisanal chocolate makers working in converted garages and warehouses in cities all over the world.
• 1:12:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is, in many ways, an industry defined by a striking
• 1:13:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: extraordinary wealth and technological sophistication concentrated among the companies that manufacture and sell finished chocolate products, set against persistent poverty among many of the farmers who actually grow the raw cacao.
• 1:13:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: that makes the entire industry possible in the first place.
• 1:13:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: As we discussed all the end of our previous chapter, the overwhelming majority of the worlds could count today, somewhere around 70% by most estimates, is grown in West Africa.
• 1:13:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Primarily across Ivory Coast and Ghana, typically on small family run farms, rather than large industrial plantations.
• 1:13:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: This structure, millions of small independent farmers, each cultivating a relatively modest plot of land, selling their harvest into a complex global supply chain that eventually funnels cacao.
• 1:13:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: toward a comparatively small number of enormous multinational chocolate and confectionery companies has created persistent and well-documented problems around fair compensation, labor conditions, and most troublingly child labour.
• 1:14:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Beginning in the late 1990s, and becoming a matter of significant international attention in the early 2000s.
• 1:14:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Journalists, researchers, and human rights organizations documented widespread use of child labor on cacao farms across West Africa, including in the most serious documented cases, instances of traffic and forced child labor.
• 1:14:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: These findings prompted significant public concern and led in the year 2001 to an agreement known as the Harkin Engel Protocol, named after the two United States lawmakers, Senator Tom Harkin and representative Elliott Engel who championed the effort.
• 1:14:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Under this voluntary agreement, major chocolate and cocoa companies committed to working toward eliminating the worst forms of child labour from their cacao supply chains by a series of target dates.
• 1:15:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: More than two decades later, however,
• 1:15:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Independent researchers and journalists have repeatedly found that child labour, including hazardous forms of child labour, remains a persistent and widespread problem across West African cacao farming regions, despite the industry's public commitments and the various certification and monitoring programs that have been established since the original Harkin Engel Protocol.
• 1:15:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The underlying economic pressures driving this problem are complex, but they trace back in significant part, to persistently low prices paid to cacao farmers.
• 1:15:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The prices that often leave farming families in genuine poverty, despite growing a crop that generates enormous profits further up the supply chain, closer to the finished chocolate bars sold in wealthy consuming nations.
• 1:16:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many farming families are unable to afford paid adult labour and struggling to make ends meet on the low prices they receive for their cacao harvests.
• 1:16:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: rely on their own children's labour simply to keep their farms operating.
• 1:16:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: A difficult and deeply rooted economic reality that voluntary corporate commitments alone have proven largely insufficient to solve.
• 1:16:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: In response to these ongoing concerns, a number of certification systems have emerged over the past few decades.
• 1:16:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Intended to give consumers a way to identify and purchase chocolate produced under fairer labor and trading conditions.
• 1:16:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fair trade certification, one of the earliest and most widely recognized of these systems, guarantees farmers a minimum price for their cacao.
• 1:16:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: regardless of fluctuations in the global commodity market.
• 1:17:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Along with an additional premium intended to fund community development projects, though critics have noted that fair trade premiums, while genuinely helpful, often remain too modest.
• 1:17:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: to fully address the underlying poverty, affecting many cacao farming communities.
• 1:17:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Other certification systems, including rainforest-aligned certification, and various direct trade arrangements pursued by individual chocolate companies, have emerged alongside fair trade, each attempting to
• 1:17:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: with varying degrees of success and varying methodologies to address the persistent gap between the enormous profitability of the global chocolate industry and the often precarious economic circumstances of the farmers who grow its essential raw ingredient.
• 1:17:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alongside these ongoing labor and trade concerns, the past two or three decades have also seen the rise of a genuinely different kind of chocolate movement, often referred to as the craft chocolate or beam to bar movement.
• 1:18:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: This movement
• 1:18:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: which began gaining meaningful momentum in the late 1990s and early 2000s, particularly in the United States, involve small, independent chocolate makers who purchase raw cacao beans directly, often establishing direct relationships with specific farms or cooperatives and then handle the entire chocolate making process themselves.
• 1:18:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: from roasting and grinding through conching and molding rather than purchasing pre-made industrial chocolate or cocoa products from large commodity suppliers.
• 1:18:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The way most large chocolate companies historically have.
• 1:18:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Being to bar makers often emphasise the concept of single origin chocolate, meaning chocolate made entirely from cacao beans, sourced from one specific farm, region or country.
• 1:18:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Allowing the distinctive flavour characteristics of cacao, grown in different soils and climates to shine through.
• 1:19:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: In much the same way wine makers and coffee roasters have long emphasised the concept of terra.
• 1:19:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The idea that the specific place where an agricultural product is grown imparts distinctive and identifiable flavour characteristics.
• 1:19:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is led to a growing appreciation among chocolate enthusiasts of the surprisingly wide range of flavour notes that can be found in high quality cacao.
• 1:19:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: from fruity and floral notes in some varieties.
• 1:19:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: To deeply earthy, nutty, or even faintly smoky notes in others, a level of flavour complexity that most mass produced commercial chocolate, blended from cacao, sourced across many different farms and countries, and processed for consistency above all else, simply doesn't attempt to showcase.
• 1:19:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Looking further ahead, the chocolate industry now faces a genuinely uncertain long-term future.
• 1:20:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Driven largely by the effects of climate change, on the relatively narrow band of tropical regions, where cacao trees can successfully grow.
• 1:20:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cacao trees are notoriously finicky, requiring consistent warmth, high humidity and protection from direct sun.
• 1:20:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Conditions found naturally within a fairly narrow belt of land, roughly 20 degrees north and south of the equator.
• 1:20:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Scientific research conducted over the past couple of decades has raised significant concerns that rising global temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns could make substantial portions of the current cacao growing regions in west.
• 1:20:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Africa less suitable for cacao cultivation within the coming decades.
• 1:20:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Potentially threatening the long-term stability of the global cacao supply and by extension the price and availability of chocolate itself.
• 1:21:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: In response to these concerns, researchers, chocolate companies and cacao growing nations have begun exploring various strategies, including developing more heat and drought resistant cacao varieties through selective breeding, expanding cacao cultivation into new regions that may become more climate suitable in the coming decades.
• 1:21:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: and, more experimentally, developing entirely new methods of producing chocolate-flavored products without relying on traditional cacao cultivation at all, including laboratory grown cacao cells and various cocoa-free chocolate alternatives designed to replicate chocolate's flavor and texture using other ingredients entirely.
• 1:21:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whether any of these approaches will prove successful enough at a large enough scale, to meaningfully address the long-term challenges facing Kakao cultivation remains.
• 1:22:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: As of tonight's recording, a genuinely open question.
• 1:22:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: one that will likely play out gradually over the coming decades.
• 1:22:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alongside the ethical and environmental questions we've just discussed, the past several decades have also brought a great deal of genuine scientific curiosity about chocolate's effects on the human body.
• 1:22:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Moving well beyond the old humoral medical theories of the 16 and 17 hundreds into modern nutritional and biochemical research.
• 1:22:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Researchers have identified a range of naturally occurring compounds within Cacao.
• 1:22:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: including a class of antioxidant-rich compounds known as flavonoids, along with small amounts of stimulant compounds, including caffeine and a related compound called Theobromine, the very compound that gave cacao its scientific genus name, food of the gods, all those centuries ago.
• 1:22:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some research has suggested that flavonoid-rich dark chocolate, consumed in moderation, may offer certain modest cardiovascular benefits.
• 1:23:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though scientists generally caution that much of this research has been conducted using concentrated cacao extracts rather than ordinary commercial chocolate bars, which typically contain relatively small amounts of cacao solids diluted among substantial quantities of sugar and milk fat.
• 1:23:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meaning, the realistic health benefits of simply eating a chocolate bar are considerably more modest than headlines about chocolate and health sometimes suggest.
• 1:23:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nonetheless, this ongoing scientific interest has helped fuel renewed public curiosity about dark chocolates specifically with higher cacao content bars containing 70% cacao or more.
• 1:23:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: becoming increasingly popular among consumers over the past two decades.
• 1:23:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: A notable shift, after more than a century, during which sweeter milk chocolate, had dominated consumer preference almost everywhere.
• 1:24:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The bean-to-bar and craft chocolate movement we discussed a moment ago has also given rise to a growing calendar of chocolate-focused festivals, competitions and trade shows held in cities around the world.
• 1:24:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Where small chocolate makers gather to showcase their products, compare techniques and compete for recognition.
• 1:24:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not unlike the wine and craft beer competitions that inspired much of the same cultural energy around artisanal food and drink more broadly over the past few decades.
• 1:24:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chocolate tasting itself has developed an increasingly formalised vocabulary among enthusiasts and professionals.
• 1:24:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: borrowing heavily from wine tasting traditions.
• 1:24:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: With tasters trained to identify and describe specific flavor notes, textures and eromas, and to evaluate the visual sheen, the audible snap, and the precise melting behavior of a piece of fine chocolate.
• 1:25:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Details that would have seemed almost unimaginably particular to the Maya priests and Aztec warriors, who first drank Kakao as a thick, bitter, chilly, spiced beverage.
• 1:25:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some 4,000 years before any of this modern refinement existed.
• 1:25:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Modern chocolate science has also reached back into Kakao's ancient genetic history, with researchers using DNA analysis over the past couple of decades, to map out the genetic diversity of Kakao trees, growing across Central and South America.
• 1:25:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: work that has helped identify previously overlooked heirloom cacao varieties.
• 1:25:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some possessing distinctive flavour profiles that have been largely lost to large-scale commercial cacao farming, which has, over the past century, tended to favour a relatively small number of high yielding
• 1:26:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: disease-resistant cacao varieties at the expense of genetic diversity.
• 1:26:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of these rediscovered heirloom varieties have become prized among craft chocolate makers, specifically for their unusual and complex flavour characteristics, offering a small, quiet reminder.
• 1:26:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: that the story of Cacao's astonishing genetic diversity cultivated slowly and carefully by countless generations of Mesoamerican farmers over thousands of years is still even now, being rediscovered and appreciated and new.
• 1:26:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so we find ourselves after 4,000 years of history, standing at a curious and uncertain crossroads.
• 1:26:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chocolate, which began as a bitter, sacred, ceremonial drink reserved for Mesoamerican priests and kings.
• 1:26:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: which crossed an ocean carried by conquerors who barely understood its worth, which was slowly sweetened and refined through generations of European experimentation, which was industrialized and mass produced by a handful of stubborn inventors in England and Switzerland and Pennsylvania, which fed soldiers through two world wars,
• 1:27:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: which now depends overwhelmingly on millions of small farmers across West Africa, working within an often deeply unfair global economic system, and which now faces a genuinely uncertain climate future, remains through all of it, one of the most beloved and universally recognised foods in the entire world.
• 1:27:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a small humble object, usually eaten quickly and without much thought, and yet almost nothing about its long history has been simple at all.
• 1:27:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: That brings us to the end of tonight's journey through the long, complicated, 4,000-year history of chocolate.
• 1:27:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: From sacred bitter drinks poured back and forth to build a perfect phone.
• 1:28:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: To golden cups used once and discarded in an emperor's court, to hydraulic presses in Amsterdam, to conching machines in burn.
• 1:28:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: to ration bars deliberately made to taste unpleasant, to the quiet, ongoing struggle of farmers half a world away from the shelves, where their harvest eventually ends up wrapped in bright cheerful packaging.
• 1:28:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a long story and a heavy one in places, but I hope, like all of our stories here on sleepless history, it has also been a gentle one.
• 1:28:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for spending this time with me tonight, and for letting sleepless history be a small part of your evening.
• 1:28:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you enjoyed this journey, I would be so grateful if you left a rating or a comment, and shared this episode with someone else who might need a little help drifting off tonight.
• 1:28:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Until next time, sleep well, and I'll see you in the next story.