History of Chocolate
As is stands today, chocolate is one of the most popular sweet substances in the world. Today, the world consumes nearly 6 billion pounds of chocolate per year, nearly half of that is eaten by Americans. Some of the largest companies in the world, like Hershey and Nestle, made their money by making chocolate available to everyone. What people may not know is that the history of chocolate is rich and vibrant and stretches back thousands of years to the ancient peoples of South and Central America.
Botanists and evolutionary biologists believe that the cocoa plant, from which chocolate is derived, grew wild in the Amazon basin probably for many years before people began using and cultivating it. Archaeologists think that people may have been roaming around in South America as long as 20,000 years ago. However, because they were foragers, it is impossible to say whether or not they had discovered the cocoa plant and what, if anything, they used it for. What archaeologists do know is that the first great civilization of South America, the Olmecs, definitely knew about the plant and the history of chocolate starts with them.
It was the Olmec civilization, which resided in the southern part of modern day Mexico and Central America, who first domesticated the cocoa plant. The fact that they took the time to gather seeds, clear land, and nurture the cocoa plant by hand shows the importance that this substance played in their lives. It is thought that the Olmecs began cultivating chocolate during the first half of the life of their civilization, which lasted from about 1500 BC to 400 BC. For most of the history of chocolate, it has been a substance reserved for kings, high priests and other nobility and archaeologists believe that this was certainly the case with the Olmecs. Not many people would recognize the chocolate the Olmecs were drinking as the substance we think of today.
