MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The chocolate industry is currently worth about $150 billion. It's easy to see why. Yum. But chocolate also has a complex and fascinating history. Throughline's Rund Abdelfatah brings us back to the pre-Columbus Americas to trace how chocolate went from a local commodity to one of the world's favorite sweets.
RUND ABDELFATAH, BYLINE: Carla Martin says, to understand chocolate, you have to go back thousands of years to its source - cacao.
CARLA MARTIN: Cacao originally kind of came out of the primordial ooze in the Amazon region.
ABDELFATAH: Carla is a lecturer in African and African American studies at Harvard University and the founder of the Institute for Cacao and Chocolate Research. She told us that cacao pods contain about 30 to 40 seeds, what we know as cacao beans. Those beans migrated across the Americas.
MARTIN: And it then, over time, spread into what is today southern Ecuador. We have evidence of its consumption at least 5,000 years ago there. It also moved up the Americas into what is today Central America and southern Mexico.
ABDELFATAH: And that's where cacao started to transform from simple seeds into something more.
MARTIN: And in that particular region, it took on a distinct cultural significance. It came to be used in four different ways.
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MARTIN: It was used as a food flavoring. It was used as a beverage, and there were thousands of recipes that used cacao in beverage form. It was also used as a spiritual offering, so it took on an important social significance in these different groups of Indigenous people.
ABDELFATAH: For example, cacao would be present at official meetings and marriage ceremonies and was even used as an offering when rulers passed away. And...
MARTIN: It was used as a currency. And that is where the big interest initially came with European conquest of Central America, because cacao was quite literally the money that grew on trees.
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ABDELFATAH: By the early 1500s, the first Spanish conquistadors had arrived on the shores of the New World. It was here that they would come across cacao for the first time.
MARTIN: The place in the world that produced the most cacao at this time was the Pacific coast of El Salvador, known as the Izalcos region, where the Pipil people were producing enormous quantities of cacao. And the Pipil people were also producers of something that we today say every time we say the word, and that is chocolate. So the first recipe for chocolate came from somewhere in this region.
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MARTIN: So they were roasting and deshelling cacao beans...
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MARTIN: ...Grinding them into a paste, and then adding them with some kind of sweetener - it could be honey, it could be agave - and then also putting in, at times, some vanilla. And that is very, very similar to what people who are listening might know of as dark chocolate today.
ABDELFATAH: And when the Spanish brought cacao beans back to Europe, they would be used as a kind of medicine for things like fatigue, digestion, bowel function and so on. Meanwhile, back in Mesoamerica, the Spaniards wanted to stockpile cacao since it was used as currency there.
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MARTIN: Once the Spanish really began the conquest, they were granted what was called the encomienda system by the Spanish crown. That allowed them to effectively enslave Indigenous people working on - they called them, you know, cacao orchards - they were a version of plantations - and to require that those Indigenous people would produce cacao beans for them in the form of tribute. They, you know, in a kind of cynical way, they promised that they would protect these Indigenous people, that they would bring them the Catholic faith. Of course, what resulted was utter destruction of their societies, mass death, great deal of violence.
ABDELFATAH: Many Indigenous people died from infectious diseases that the Spanish brought with them. It was also during this time that Spain, along with other European powers, began to invest heavily in another crop - sugar cane.
MARTIN: Now, sugar plantations are notoriously brutal. Data that we see about enslaved Africans arriving, let's say, to the Caribbean shows that when they would arrive during the colonial period, they might live anywhere from five to eight years working on that plantation because the work was so intense. Now, if we then transfer to what it means to work on cacao, it is actually less overall labor-intensive.
ABDELFATAH: And so growing cacao was seen as a way to get more profit out of enslaved people on plantations.
MARTIN: It became attractive as something that elderly people could do, that children could do, that could be done in a less intense system that would be on the side of sugar production in lots of places.
ABDELFATAH: The work of growing cacao may not have been as difficult as sugar, but it was still very hard work.
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MARTIN: If you're doing it for 16, 18 hours a day, six or seven days a week, it is still an absolutely brutal system of labor, especially when one is enslaved, malnourished, etc.
ABDELFATAH: And it was only the rich and noble class in Spain that could afford to have cacao, which they often had in the form of a drink. Over time, cacao slowly spread from the Spanish royal court to other European kingdoms.
MARTIN: There's a long tradition of, you know, kind of marrying a princess to a prince in one country. She would often bring with her a tradition of chocolate consumption and spread it to a new country.
ABDELFATAH: But the taste and market for chocolate would soon expand beyond Europe's royal houses. Newly wealthy merchants who got rich off the slave trade could now buy their own chocolate. And then, in the 1800s, new technologies broke open the market again.
MARTIN: Specifically, that comes from the development of the hydraulic press. That's the tool that allows you to make cocoa powder and cocoa butter. It comes from larger-scale grinding machines - that will grind those roasted cocoa beans and allow you to turn them into a cocoa paste and then chocolate - and a variety of other machinery. This allows cocoa chocolate to become cheaper as a whole. And all throughout the 1800s, into the late 1800s, demand for the product goes up in Europe.
ABDELFATAH: With the invention of the hydraulic press, this chocolate drink could be made faster now and, in turn, could also be sold for less.
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MARTIN: If we think about Britain, for example, in the 1800s during the industrial revolution, people were encouraged to have tea with some sugar in it as a way of cutting hunger. And the same came to be true of promoting cocoa as something that kids would drink during the industrial revolution because it was a way of giving them a relatively cheap and energy boost via calories. Also creates a kind of sense of wellbeing in people who consume it. But it was cheaper than other foods at the time. We treat it as silly. You know, we - it's like the Willy Wonka-fication of chocolate. And it is actually very serious business.
KELLY: Carla Martin, speaking there. She's a lecturer in African and African American studies at Harvard University. She's also the founder of the Institute for Cacao and Chocolate Research. You can hear more from Rund Abdelfatah on the origins of chocolate on the Throughline podcast.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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