A Brief History of Chocolate

Sarah Moss (University of Exeter)

Chocolate is perhaps the ultimate global commodity. The people who consume chocolate live as far as possible from the people who produce it. In its most common modern form, chocolate requires ingredients (cacao, sugar and cows’ milk) from three continents and a production process necessitating at least two climates. The familiar form of solid chocolate cannot be made ‘by hand’, nor without complicated technological and industrial processes. Although of course earlier forms of chocolate were made by simpler methods, since its arrival in Europe chocolate has encoded some of our most acute anxieties and excitements about gender, sex and colonialism. And despite the ubiquity of packaging describing chocolate as ‘sinful’, ‘wicked’ or ‘indulgent’, by modern lights the sins of chocolate relate far more to its production than consumption. The chocolate we know is the product of a world of both low-paid manual labour and mechanised food preparation, of both hungry labourers and sleek consumers, and of both the ecologically rich equatorial nations and the economic powers of Europe and North America. It could not exist, in its familiar form, in any other era.

Chocolate begins with a tree, although the end product bears no visible or tactile relation to what grows. The cocoa tree, theobroma cacao, grows only below about 1,000 feet in altitude and only within 20° of the Equator. It requires humidity, shade (which must be provided by taller trees) and a temperature that remains above 16°C, all of which mean that it does not grow within thousands of miles of the countries that consume most chocolate. Cocoa is not easily farmed, and is prone to diseases which destroy entire plantations in a few weeks. It depends on midges, which breed best on the floors of uncultivated rainforests, for pollination. The cocoa bean, a pod which grows out of the tree’s trunk, must be harvested with a carefully wielded machete to avoid damaging the buds from which more beans will grow; in its beginnings making chocolate is highly skilled artisanal work that cannot be done by machines. The latter stages are highly mechanised work that cannot be done without machines.