We Heart Chocolate

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One bit of trivia about this is: even in the present day, women each week of the year are the biggest buyers of chocolate, except for one week, and that's the week leading up to Valentine's Day.

That's right.

Ever since Richard Cadbury put chocolates in a heart-shaped box for February 14th, way back in 1861, this stupid hallmark holiday has been associated with one of my favorite substances.

Chocolate, one of mine, too.

Although I'm with with you, Nikki, about the holiday.

Still, any excuse to eat chocolate is all good by me.

It might not be Valentine's Day quite yet, but the shelves are already stocked.

And so we at Gastropod are here, as always, to equip you with all the weird chocolate science and history your heart desires.

So, heart-shaped boxes are one thing, but is chocolate really good for your actual heart?

And why would you spend $18 on a fancy single-origin bar when you can get a chocolate hit for just a couple of bucks at the supermarket?

And to get to the heart of the story, how did chocolate conquer the world?

And is it true that we might be facing a chocolate-free future?

Please, God, no.

I need at least one reason to live.

You're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of history and science.

I'm Nicola Twilley.

And I'm Cynthia Graeber.

The first thing to know is that chocolate grows on trees.

Which means there's such a thing as a chocolate forest.

Simron Setti has been to one of these wondrous places.

She's the author of Bread, Wine, Chocolate, and she has a podcast all about chocolate called The Slow Melt.

It's lush.

There's

akin to a rainforest.

I mean, there's a lot of different kinds of vegetation.

The one thing that's a bit challenging to a human is that there are a lot of insects called midges, also known as noceums, buzzing around and they are relentless.

They bite through your clothes.

They, you know, leave these huge, itchy welts, but they're what pollinate cacao.

This is the first time in my life that I have felt good about midges.

I hate midges.

But if they pollinate chocolate trees, and Simron says they do, maybe they're actually cool with me after all.

And what the cacao fruit actually looks like is something like a honeydew melon or an American football.

It's oblong or round in shape, and it varies in colors from a light kind of whitish green to a deep purple, and kind of everything in between from red to orange to green to yellow.

And there's this, what seems like quite haphazard haphazard placement on the tree itself.

So to me, it looks like kind of a botanical game of pin the tail on the donkey.

Simron expected these cacao forests to smell like chocolate, but they didn't, not at all.

Cacao, by the way, that's the actual plant, the tree, the beans.

Chocolate, that's what we turn cacao into.

But so the forest didn't smell like chocolate with the pod?

You know, we crack open the pod, and there are these kind of mushy seeds, you know, that are enrobed in mucilage or pulp.

And I thought I would find the flavor there.

But what that flesh actually tasted like was a wide range of flavors ranging from lemon to honeydew to peanut brittle.

I mean it was kind of astonishing.

Simran got to taste the pulp fresh from the pod, which is not an option for most of us who don't live in the tropics.

But if you have a Brazilian neighborhood near you, you might be able to get hold of some frozen cacao pulp.

I've had it fresh.

It's delicious.

So if you can find it, I totally recommend it.

But again, what it still doesn't do is taste like chocolate, which Samron found a little frustrating.

Nothing offered up the experience of chocolate.

And so then I bit into the seed, which I shouldn't have done because that's actually just really this intense bitterness and none of the sweetness, none of the cacao or the cocoa flavors that we expect.

And what I learned through that process is, of course, that those things don't manifest without many, many steps.

And that includes, you know, about a week, five to seven days of fermentation, plus drying, plus roasting.

Those are the qualities and the steps that actually bring out the flavor that we know as chocolate.

That's right.

Chocolate is a fermented food, like pickles and sauerkraut.

I had never thought of it that way, but if you leave out the fermentation step, you don't get chocolate.

Once again, thank the microbes.

Drink.

And yes.

Thank you.

So if you wanted to go find a chocolate forest, where would you go?

The wild plant originally came from around the northwest Amazon and what's now Ecuador, and then it was domesticated at least 4,000 years ago.

From what we can tell, and the archaeological evidence is pretty slim, it seems like the people who first figured out how to make chocolate from cacao, this whole business of fermenting, drying, roasting, and winnowing the bitter seeds from the shell, those people were the Almecs, and they lived in what is now Central America and southern Mexico.

There are not a lot of archaeological images and descriptions of chocolate, so most of what we know comes from the conquistadors, yep, the Spaniards who showed up in the New World in order to conquer it.

Just to give you a perspective, post-conquest to now is about one-fifth of chocolate's existence.

But it's the part we know the most about, the part where Europeans come on the scene for better and for worse.

Carla Martin is a lecturer at Harvard University and director of the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute.

She says, at first, the Europeans had no idea what to make of these strange brown beans.

So this is actually another really fun myth that comes up frequently in relation to cacao and chocolate.

It's this idea that Columbus was the European who discovered chocolate.

And in fact, what happened is Columbus encountered a group of people off of the island of Guanaja in canoes who had what he described as a type of almonds that they treated as though they were extremely valuable.

Columbus's son Ferdinand wrote about this encounter, and he said that when one of these almond things fell to the ground, all the natives raced to pick it up.

quote, as if they were eyes that had fallen out of their heads.

Nobody knows if Columbus actually ever tasted chocolate or even figured out that the the local Aztecs and Maya were using cacao beans as money because that's actually what Columbus witnessed.

The locals had basically dropped a bunch of their version of coins.

It was also a particularly practical type of coin.

If you can imagine the kind of doubloons made of silver or other metals that Europeans would have been using at this time, if they showed up at the market and wanted to buy, say, a tomato, it was quite difficult to cut out a chunk of that coin and buy a tomato with it.

Based on conquistador diaries, we have some record of what these cacao beans were worth.

So in the 1540s in Mexico, a small rabbit would have been worth 30 cacao beans.

A turkey egg would have cost you three beans.

And a tamale was only one.

A brief interlude with a prostitute would run you about eight to ten cacao beans.

Apparently the price was negotiable.

Whereas a good turkey hen was worth much more.

A hundred good cacao beans or a hundred and twenty shrunken old beans.

Cacao beans were money and also people were roasting the beans into a paste and drinking it.

That's how chocolate was typically consumed.

It's like eating gold leaf or something.

The Aztecs in Maya were literally drinking cash.

Europeans quickly figured out that cacao beans were more useful in the New World than their doubloons.

But Carlos says it took them a while to discover the joys of drinking chocolate.

There's one particular character that I like a lot.

I describe him as one of my favorite historical jerks.

His name is Girolamo Benzoni.

He was an Italian who went to what is today Nicaragua in the 1500s and spent time traveling through the area.

And he was consistently offered cacao beverages and he would turn them down because he thought that they were a drink, as he described it, fit only for pigs.

And he would say, you know, every time that I'm offered these drinks, I turn them down and the natives walk away from me laughing because they think, you know, they thought he was absurd not for wanting to consume that.

And he describes that it was only after he didn't have enough access to wine, which is what he typically would have been drinking, and the water was of bad quality, that he came to this habit of consuming cacao as a beverage.

And then he found it to actually be a really nice and refreshing bitter treat.

And this is quite typical of many European experiences in this time, where it was only after some real convincing that they came to like chocolate.

They were missing out.

But by the time chocolate reached the Spanish court, they were converted.

No one is sure exactly when chocolate first arrived in Europe.

The first recorded shipment is in the 1580s.

And chocolate became all the rage among the Spanish nobility.

And from Spain, thanks to nobles marrying each other and also religious networks, the chocolate trend spread across Europe.

It was introduced to France by a cardinal in the 1600s who advised that it would be useful in helping people overcome fits of anger.

The English, um, Nikki, took a while to catch on.

English pirates burnt a ship of cacao beans off the coast of Spain, thinking they were sheep droppings.

Hubrits did soon catch on.

Nobody can resist chocolate.

Okay, almost nobody.

Slowly but surely, chocolate was conquering the world.

But it wasn't chocolate as we know it.

And when it arrived in Europe, it actually wasn't chocolate as the Mesoamericans knew it.

Because for Mesoamericans, there wasn't just one way to consume chocolate.

Fernando Rodriguez lives in a town near Mexico City.

His company is called Chocolate Macondo, and he's working with researchers to learn about ancient recipes.

And he's creating new versions of some of those original recipes today.

He told us that the Mesoamericans made cacao drinks with flowers, herbs, spices, seeds.

They called the drinks precious waters.

One of Fernando's favorites is made with magnolia flower petals mixed with yarbasanta, acuya flour, peppers, and chili.

Fernando says the combination is delicious.

From what we can tell, there were a whole range of different styles of chocolate concoctions, drinks, gruels, powders, porridges.

Carlos tried a contemporary version of another ancient drink, too.

It's one that Fernando also makes.

So one recipe that was quite popular, and in fact, that we still see today among contemporary Maya people, was a recipe that was essentially a meal replacement that brought together cacao, also then mixed with a maize-like paste and water.

And that would be consumed as something that was really to beat hunger and to provide you with energy to make your way through the day.

You will notice that we're not talking about chocolate bars.

That's because for most of its history, chocolate has been mostly consumed in liquid form.

The Aztecs and the Maya drank it hot or cold, and they love to whip it into a light, fluffy froth.

Apparently, the frothiness of that froth was really important.

So, there are some beautiful examples in the archaeological record.

One is known as the Maya Princeton vase, for example, which shows a serving woman pouring from quite a height a cacao beverage from one vessel to another, aerating it in the process.

Europeans, once they got the hang of this new beverage, adapted it to what was available in the old world.

Chili peppers were replaced with black pepper, fragrant sapote might have been substituted with cinnamon.

And Europeans were not keen on drinking chocolate cold.

They also preferred it pretty sweet.

And then Europeans decided it'd be a good idea to add milk to hot cocoa.

It seems like the first guy to offer that serving suggestion is Hans Sloan.

Better known at least in England as the guy whose collection founded the British Museum.

In the late 1600s, as chocolate drinking caught on in Britain, Sloan's advice was that adding milk to chocolate made it easier to digest.

So now chocolate is milky and sweet, so we'd recognize that.

But it's still not the chocolate we tend to eat today.

When did it become a solid bar?

Turning chocolate into a stable solid was actually kind of a challenge.

It's incredible.

Chocolate has a 5,000-year history, but the world has only known the wonders of the chocolate bar for the past 150 of that.

That's because if you just ground up cocoa beans and maybe some sugar, it would be pretty soft at room temperature.

And even if it did harden, it would be brittle and crumbly, and this is all because of cocoa butter.

Cocoa butter is made up of lots of little fatty crystals, and those crystals can take a variety of shapes.

If you do nothing to your cocoa beans other than grind them up, the crystals are basically a mess.

They're all disorganized, which means if you try to form them into a solid bar, then like Cynthia said, the bar is all melty and grainy and crumbly.

To turn cocoa beans into a chocolate bar, first you have to take some of the fat out of the crushed beans, and then you add it back in as you heat the chocolate and then slowly cool it down.

This helps get the crystals all nice and orderly, and then when it gets made into a solid, instead of melting at room temperature, it doesn't melt until body temperature, and you get a beautiful sheen on the solid chocolate and a satisfying snap when you break it.

But squeezing the cocoa butter out of the crushed beans, that's not so easy.

So one of the big breakthroughs technologically was in the 1820s when a Dutchman came up with a process for really pressing chocolate.

Helen White is a historian at Michigan State University.

And this bright yellow cocoa butter would just ooze out of the chocolate.

And so you'd be left with this extremely hard pellet, which you could then grind up and if you wanted, recombine with some of that cocoa powder and with milk potentially with sugars and things like that.

So that was when the early solid chocolate started becoming available.

The Dutchman just used that invention to grate the cake of crushed beans and make cocoa powder.

It took a Brit named Joseph Fry to add that cocoa fat back and make the world's first modern bar in 1847.

As proud as I am of my fellow countrymen, I should point out that Joseph Fry's bar was not all that compared to the bars of today.

There was still still plenty of tweaking and innovation that needed to happen to refine the whole cocoa butter crystal heating and cooling process.

Apparently, this very first bar is kind of chewy, which is not a texture I'm looking for in my chocolate.

And then, even after chocolate bars were invented, it took another almost 30 years before anyone figured out how to get milk into them.

In the mid-1800s, people in Switzerland, especially, were experimenting with ways that they could powder milk and actually allow for its preservation over longer periods of time.

So it was with that development of a means to powder milk that people first got the idea to then add powdered milk to chocolate.

And it was Henri Nestlé who did that in Switzerland.

Nestlé, of course, is a relatively well-known name in the world of chocolate today.

Side note: the first major company to add milk to chocolate in America was, not surprisingly, Hershey's.

Anytime you want delicious chocolate,

But instead of adding powdered milk, Hershey's added fresh milk.

As a Brit, I think Hershey's taste like puke.

Not exactly the great American chocolate bar, huh?

Many of us non-Americans actually share my view.

Some of them have even shared their opinions on YouTube.

So I tried my first ever Hershey bar.

This is the

extra creamy milk chocolate.

It was the worst experience of my entire life.

I wanted to die.

It actually smelled a bit like a vomit.

Tastes like how it smells.

Like sour milk.

They taste like craft pieces again.

Hershey's kisses of death.

Right?

It's perfectly fine.

That's just okay.

There we go.

And that's proof that British people do not hate Hershey's.

Oh, wait, no.

What?

Oh, no.

Oh, God.

No, what are you doing?

You just ruined it.

Oh, no.

What?

Oh, that's really horrible.

See, Cynthia, it's not just me.

And it's actually down to the milk.

Because Hershey's uses fresh, not powdered milk, they have to treat it to make it shelf-stable.

And that treatment, that adds the signature Hershey's vomit flavor note.

So now you know.

So I don't love Hershey's, but I also don't think it tastes like vomit.

But Milton Hershey's fresh milk was not the final step in chocolate innovation.

Modern chocolate needed one more breakthrough.

And it was invented by another name you might recognize from the candy aisle,

Rudolph Lind.

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I'm not sure they're selling chocolate in that ad, but basically the conching machine that Rudolph Lind invented, it heats and mixes the chocolate for so long that the fat coats all the sugar and cocoa particles and that makes the chocolate super smooth.

It also makes some of the acidity and bitterness go away and helps the flavors develop.

And here is where chocolate's journey from Mesoamerican spicy drink to candy bar is complete.

Once conching was invented in the 1870s, chocolate really became chocolate as we know it.

This transformation from a drink to a bar, Helen and Carla both told us that what it also meant is that many more people had the chance to get to know chocolate.

Early on, like in the 18th century, people really associated chocolate with the aristocracy, with the wealthy.

Drinking chocolate was this sort of idle practice for people who didn't have to work.

And really by the early 1900s, these were foods that the average person could more regularly access.

Chocolate had gone mass market.

Kids could buy a penny chocolate candy.

Workmen could have a bar for lunch.

And stressed podcasters could tear through tons of this stuff every episode.

Yeah, I mean, chocolate is one of those foods that when you say like, oh, I had a bad day.

I'm just want to go home and eat chocolate.

It's this sort of, you know, automatic escape valve.

Oh, yes.

And it turns out it might not be so bad for us.

That's right, chocolate might be good for our health.

But like everything with chocolate, this is actually a very old idea.

In Mesoamerica, they ate it for all sorts of health-related reasons.

So there's theobromine in chocolate that gives you a perkiness.

So sometimes soldiers would consume it to stay awake.

That's Deanna Puciarelli.

She's a professor at Ball State University in Indiana, and she's an expert on the medicinal history of chocolate.

Early Mesoamericans didn't know what theobromine was, of course, but cacao was widely used as a stimulant.

And not just for marching.

It was considered helpful for the horizontal jog, too.

So we have quotes from the codices that suggest that, for example, Montezuma would consume anywhere from 20 to 50 glasses before he went with his wives.

I'm not sure I'd really be in the mood after 20 glasses of anything.

But really, the Mesoamericans saw chocolate's health benefits as more of a holistic thing.

It was really a huge part of their spiritual life.

They used it in all sorts of rituals, from childbirth to marriage.

Then the Europeans show up, and they are not interested in ritual.

They just want to know what chocolate can do for them physically.

The early Spanish conquistadors, upon arriving in Central America, were fascinated by the possibilities of cacao as an aphrodisiac.

They were quite health-obsessed, in fact, and were looking for foods that would make them less constipated.

They were often consuming so much protein that they were uncomfortable, or that would make them more virile.

So they were excited about the possibility that cacao could do those things for them.

Then when Europeans brought chocolate home with them, they decided it could be used to treat all sorts of diseases.

The first book entirely devoted to the topic of chocolate was published by a Spaniard in 1631, and he said basically, chocolate is good for everything, but especially, quote, the plague of the guts, fluxes, consumptions, and coughs of the lungs, with sundry other desperate diseases.

And actually, plague of the guts and fluxes, that's diarrhea.

There might be some reality to the benefits of drinking chocolate to treat those unpleasant symptoms.

At this time, you know, a lot of diseases was due to bad water.

And so you're boiling water to make this beverage, so that aids in health at this time.

So it's less the chocolate that's healing here and more the boiling of the water to make the chocolate drink.

But, hey, whatever, it worked.

And consumption and coughs of the lungs.

Turns out there might weirdly be some usefulness to chocolate there too.

So most of our diseases during this era are associated with wasting.

So we have, you know, smallpox and yellow fever.

And so people lose weight and they're also very lethargic.

Well, you start giving chocolate to a patient, it's not going to cure a virus, but it certainly will aid anyway in having people gain weight as well as become a little bit more alert.

In other words, someone who had TB and was wasting away, or someone with one of these other consumptive diseases, it's like, give them some chocolate and at least they gain the weight back.

They look healthier.

Of course, that's because chocolate is really energy dense.

And in fact, Mesoamericans loved it for that reason, as Carla described.

Cacao paste mixed with maize or corn, that was an energy drink.

But what's interesting here is two things sort of happened at the same time.

Like we said, by the end of the 1900s, chocolate has been transformed from drink to solid, which means that in Europe and North America, it's starting to be seen as a food rather than a medicinal drink.

And that's also exactly when this guy called Wilbur Atwater starts measuring the energy in food in calories.

And if you want to learn everything possible about the calorie, we have it covered.

Go back and listen to our episode, The End of the Calorie.

You'll become an expert.

So applying the concept of calories to chocolate, according to Helen, that made chocolate even more appealing.

If you're looking at it in terms of calories, chocolate is cheaper than bread, it's cheaper than butter, it's certainly way cheaper than fruits or vegetables.

So people promoted it for the poor because it was seen as economical in the sense that we no longer think of it.

It's so weird now when we think of cheap calories as bad.

But in the early 20th century, Hershey's would put out ads that literally just compared the calories in a pound of chocolate to beef, potatoes, white bread.

The message was, why waste your money on this other other energy-poor food when you could just have chocolate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?

And this is awesome.

Chocolate is food.

And then, Helen told us, if you combine it with milk, even better.

Milk was really at its high point in the early 20th century.

People thought it was a perfect food.

So, this was this great way to combine what was seen as the helpfulness of chocolate, the, you know, the supreme nutritive value of milk, and also some sugar, which was seen as energy-boosting and positive.

And advertising also really pushed hot cocoa for children.

And also chocolate bars as this special, wholesome treat, a way that mothers could express their love.

Yes, if you really loved your children, you'd give them chocolate.

Children still use this argument today.

And this is not just good news for kids.

Chocolate makers are all over the switch from chocolate as medicine to chocolate as wonder food.

I mean, you eat food every day.

You only take medicine if you're feeling under the weather.

This is all at the start of the 20th century, but a few decades later, after the Second World War, things are no longer looking so sweet.

Suddenly, those calories, they're not so awesome anymore.

In the West, we are now worried that we're eating too many calories.

Chocolate is no longer a good food, suddenly, it's a bad food, it's sinful.

This is a sad time in chocolate's history.

But all is not lost because it looks like now in the 21st century, chocolate might actually be medicine again.

Maybe.

And for that discovery, we can thank an indigenous community in Central America back in chocolate's original homeland.

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You know that point in the afternoon when you just hit a wall?

You don't have time for self-care rituals or getting some fresh air, so maybe you grab a beverage to bring you back.

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The people that are attributed with the so-called discovery of chocolate and heart health were the Kuna Indians in Panama.

It's a group of people that lived on an island and consumed chocolate as a beverage, unsweetened, without milk, just, you know, the cocoa and water mixed together.

And they consumed such high amounts somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 to 15 cups a day as part of their culture.

And there was this correlation that they had relatively no heart disease.

This came to light a while ago in the 1940s.

There was an army surgeon who was serving in the Panama Canal Zone, and he noticed that the kuna who stayed in their home region, these islands called San Blas, they had really low blood pressure.

The ones who moved to the city, they weren't doing nearly as well.

This army surgeon's work was kind of ignored for 50 years.

But then a Harvard doctor came across his papers in the 1990s and started studying the kuna and chocolate's possible cardiovascular benefits again.

Now, mind you, they're living on an island.

They're not in a high-stress environment.

They're probably in a low-pollution environment.

It's recorded that they didn't smoke cigarettes.

So there's other elements.

But in any event, that's when the signs started to take off.

Now, a few decades later, there's reams of research into chocolate and its potential medicinal qualities.

We spoke to another Harvard doctor about it.

Eric Ding is an epidemiologist and nutritionist at the Harvard School of Public Health.

There's so many supplements that tout the benefits of cocoa that we really wanted to do an evidence-based assessment of whether a lot of these claims have merit, especially since people say it pretty often colloquially, oh, chocolate is good for you, chocolate is good for you, but how good is it for you?

So Eric and his colleagues decided to take a hard look at the evidence so far.

Specifically, they wanted to know whether chocolate can prevent heart disease.

So altogether we reviewed 24 papers selected out of thousands of studies related to cocoa.

Eric told us there are dozens of factors that are linked to a healthy heart.

There are things like blood pressure and cholesterol, those you've probably heard of, and then there are things like flow-mediated vascular dilation, which you probably haven't.

All of these are risk factors, things that have been shown to be either very predictive or actually causal when it comes to heart disease.

And did eating chocolate work?

Did it improve these risk factors?

So the chocolate findings are actually quite stunning.

So it lowered blood pressure, actually lowered the bad cholesterol increased the good cholesterol lowered the bad triglycerides and improved fasting glucose which means it improved insin sensitivity and interestingly also improved inflammation as well as the flow-mediated dilation FMD dude chocolate really is a wonder drug This is the best news of 2017 so far.

It's not like a one-hit wonder in certain ways.

It only lowers blood pressure and nothing else.

It lowers almost every major risk factor for heart disease, which is quite remarkable.

And it's something called flavonoids that seem to be key to chocolate's benefits.

These flavonoids are chemicals that can be found in all sorts of foods, but the ones in cocoa do seem to be unusual.

Right, so cocoa flavonoids are really specialized.

So there are many flavonoids, and you know, there's T flavonoids and beriflavonoids, but the evidence for T flavonoid and beriflavonoids are much more, you know, controversial.

So what Eric and his colleagues showed is that these flavonoids in chocolate, they work in a bunch of different ways to lower the risk factors for heart attacks.

But here's the question.

Do they actually prevent heart attacks?

And I'll say right now, the heart attacks in terms of doing these kind of actual heart attack prevention trials take millions and millions of dollars and many, many years.

And there's actually one that just recently started called Cosmos.

And that trial will actually finish within the next two to three years.

We should hopefully get preliminary results on whether or not it actually prevents heart attacks, which is a hard end point.

So, really, we don't know if chocolate actually prevents heart attacks yet, though Eric is kind of shockingly positive about it.

In academic science, we don't usually get that excited about a compound, but cocoflavonoid seems to hold all the different

check mark potentials.

Amazing.

Chocolate is, in fact, the miracle drug we've all been looking for.

But of course, there's more to the story.

Let's go back to the Kuna Indians for a minute.

Like before, they hold the clues.

But you have to consider that like the natives and these tribal populations that drank these cocoa drinks drink a huge, huge volume a day on a daily basis.

They were drinking about eight cups of unsweetened cocoa every day.

This is not the same thing as having a few bites of chocolate after dinner.

Right, and same deal in the medical trials.

People were given really high doses of these flavonoids.

Normally, to get the doses seen in some of these trials,

you would have to consume a lot of bars or likely use a supplement.

Specifically, eight bars of dark chocolate every day.

So does that mean there's no benefit unless you eat those massive amounts?

I mean, that sounds delicious, but I am not sure about eight bars of dark chocolate a day or even eight cups of unsweetened cocoa.

What if I just want to snack on some chocolate?

I think the benefits will accrue even if you do not hit the certain target.

There's an assumption of linear effects in which we assume, even if you don't hit the

really high target, that the benefits are proportional and accumulates.

Okay, so how do we know if the chocolate bar we're eating is full of flavonoids?

Like everything, it depends on what you buy.

Hershey's Kiss typically contains about, I think, 11% cacao content, so really very little.

And my students and I often try to think of what are other foods where if it only had 11%, would you still call it chocolate, let's say?

Not to dump on Hershey's again, although it does taste like puke, but Carla's point is, most of the mass market chocolate out there has very, very little chocolate in it, and hence very few flavonoids.

It's mostly milk and sugar.

In America, it only legally needs 10% cocoa to be called chocolate.

And so to get some of the benefits Eric's talking about, you really need to be eating dark chocolate, like 70-80% dark chocolate.

Milk chocolate is never going to get you to the right dose that you need.

So here's where we're at.

It's taken hundreds of years, but chocolate has, again, become both food and medicine at the same time.

But once again, there's a dark cloud on the horizon.

Even while scientists such as Eric are getting all excited about chocolate, other scientists are sounding alarm bells.

Augustus, climb out of that chocolate river.

It's your favorite.

Johnny Depp, put back that chocolate.

We are in a cocoa crisis, nicknamed the chocolates.

The Australian Stock Exchange is in a frenzy this morning after a report was released overnight forecasting a global critical shortage of chocolate.

The chocolate shortage could be felt worldwide.

Currently in the midst of a chocolate deficit.

The surprise of chocolate ingredients has skyrocketed.

It's true, there are some pretty major threats to our chocolate supply.

One of those is disease.

Simran Seti, she wrote the book Bread, Wine, Chocolate.

She spends a lot of time worrying about the future of our favorite treat.

One-third of the crop currently is lost to diseases that have like completely sinister names, like witch's broom, and frosty pod rot, and black pod rot.

And you see them, and like it just kills you because you see how sinister they are just on the vine.

And this story will be familiar from other crops, but one of the reasons disease is such a threat to chocolate is because of monocultures.

We're growing this one particularly hardy and high-yielding variety in bulk on massive plantations in West Africa to the point that 70% of the world's chocolate comes from there.

And that makes our supply vulnerable.

A monoculture of one particular varietal that's plagued by disease, that's an obvious vulnerability, but that's not the only threat to cacao.

The trees won't grow outside a narrow band 20 degrees north and south of the equator, and climate climate change threatens to make these regions too hot for cacao trees to thrive.

Scientists are trying to breed varieties that are even hardier and more resistant to diseases.

And so what we see is, you know, the development of hybrids, because they grow quite abundantly and they do have disease tolerance, are kind of taking over.

We need to increase yield.

But what happens is when we increase yield to the exclusion of everything else is we lose this diversity, we lose the backup system and we lose the diverse flavors.

And to me, that's a real shame because we're only just at the beginning of discovering them.

And this is where some chocolate makers are saying, hold up, there's another strategy.

What about if we grow traditional cacao varietals in a diverse forest rather than a monoculture plantation?

Because that kind of chocolate forest, that's another way to resist disease.

And there's a big bonus to this strategy.

It means we get to taste all the different flavors that chocolate can offer.

And they range from like caramel and violets that you find in cocoa from Ecuador, you know, or caramel from cocoa from Venezuela, a really nice fruit kind of acidity, almost a sourness that we find in cocoa that's grown in Madagascar.

Like there's all this diversity that gets erased.

through the commoditization that says we kind of just need that one chocolate note and everything else can kind of go away.

These flavor differences come from all sorts of things, different tree varietals, like Simran said, and also soils and growing conditions.

You can even taste this for yourself.

You can find higher-end craft chocolate bars that are single-origin.

That is, they come from one country.

Buy some from different countries and taste them one after the other.

This is precisely how I discovered that Hawaiian chocolate tastes like honey, for real.

And cacao grown in Honduras tastes sort of like grapefruit.

We are not making this up.

But if we stop growing those varieties, if we stop retaining that diversity, then we're not going to have that backup system as we may need it moving forward.

And it might be because of climate change.

It might be because of our tastes changing.

it might be because of disease.

But what is of greater concern, a more immediate concern when it comes to the loss of chocolate, is simply the fact that farmers are walking away from a crop that doesn't treat them well, that pays them so little money that to grow this crop makes no sense when you could grow something far more lucrative, like palm oil or rubber, or

any of the other crops that thrive in these same environments.

Basically, Simron is saying, yeah, disease, climate change, monoculture, it's all very scary.

But the real chalk apocalypse is being caused by us paying too little for our chocolate.

According to Simron, if we're paying two bucks for a giant Hershey bar, the cacao farmer who grew the chocolate is getting about 10 cents.

So the choice that we actually have to make as consumers is, are we willing to consider different kinds of models?

These models do exist.

They're the ones usually used by the more expensive small company craft chocolate bars.

The bars might have labels like fair trade or even direct trade.

The companies pay the the farmers more, and so the farmers can afford to grow traditional varieties of cacao trees in better conditions, and the resulting chocolate tastes better.

But Carla says we've still got a long way to go.

So if we think about what part of the chocolate industry could be considered specialty or fine, it's probably 1%, maybe even less than 1%.

So 99% of chocolate that people consume is going to be commercial, mass-manufactured, bulk chocolate.

And when we compare this to other specialty foods, it's actually striking how different it is.

Coffee, for example, about 50% of the market is considered specialty.

Seven or eight percent of that is considered high-end specialty.

Cheese has a significantly growing and robust specialty side of the market.

Beer is another example.

And so chocolate is on its way, but it's going to require a lot more interest to do that.

I am willing to eat much more

specialty chocolate too, too.

You're both heroes.

Yep, that's me stepping up to do my part.

Here's the thing, though.

This kind of craft chocolate, it's an expensive habit to acquire.

You know, I understand people bristling at the idea of a $10 bar of chocolate or a $20 bar of chocolate.

But the truth is, we are not paying enough for these goods.

And until we as consumers are willing to put more money behind these things, until we are willing to explore some of these companies that are trying to reward farmers with money, you know, for sustaining these crops, I don't think that we can alleve ourselves of the fear that chocolate will go away.

And I do not want it to go away.

To be fair to our wallets, I do love the $10 bars, but there are other great options too.

Two of my favorites are Taza and Theo.

They're leaders in the fair trade chocolate world, and they're like $4 to $5 a bar.

The other thing I've noticed is that for my favorite good single origin chocolate, which is called Willie's Cacao, it's expensive, but I find I savor it more so I eat less.

So I'm saving money kind of

this is why you're a podcaster and not an accountant but really cheap chocolate is not worth it especially when you think that you might be supporting slavery just this month a judge ruled that six men now in their 20s and 30s can sue Nestle in court for having been enslaved on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast the most important thing to keep in mind about cacao and chocolate history is it's one that has always been intimately linked with labor exploitation and that goes all the way back to early Mesoamerican production, all the way up into the present day.

Ultimately, what's going on here is that cacao is a commodity crop that requires, at least in the current structure of the way it's supplied, requires cheap labor.

And so until we actually structurally dismantle a lot of the ways that cacao is produced and fundamentally change how the money makes its way to people at the so-called bottom of the supply chain, we will continue to face these labor issues.

So, here's your motivation for eating the good stuff.

Save chocolate and save chocolate farmers.

And if you need more encouragement, remember that fancy dark chocolate bars are higher in flavonoids, so they're better for you anyway.

Carla says the idea of tasting and comparing dark chocolate can be kind of intimidating if you've only snacked on grocery store milk chocolate until now.

So, she has some suggestions.

There's no sort of right or wrong way to taste.

If If you are interested in tasting it like a lot of the chocolate connoisseurs taste today, one of the things that you can do is try to taste it in a more kind of mindful manner, as people describe it.

And that would include taking time to smell the chocolate, to snap it, to then let it melt on your tongue, and then once it has melted, to think about the finish of the chocolate or the lingering flavor and whether or not that's something that's pleasant for you.

And as you come come to do that more and more, you will become more comfortable with identifying what types of chocolate you like best and also how you might then recommend chocolate to your friends and loved ones.

Thanks so much to all our guests this week: Carla Martin, Sim Roncetti, Eric Ding, Helen Byte, and Diana Puccarelli.

We have links to their websites, books, podcasts, everything on our website, gastropod.com.

More information on our website, where you can also take our survey, sign up for our mailing list, support the show, and basically find everything you ever wanted.

We are back in two weeks with a topic that lots of people feel very, very passionately about, vegetarianism and veganism.

Till then.

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