We Love Chocolate!
Is chocolate one of your top treats? If so, you are not alone. The average American eats about 12 pounds each year. This adds up to more than 3 billion pounds!
People buy about 48 million pounds of chocolate candy during Valentine’s week. They buy even more chocolate for Halloween, Easter and Christmas.
Let’s learn more about this sweet treat.
Where do we get chocolate?
People make chocolate from the seeds of the cacao (kah-KOW) tree. It grows in the wild in the rainforests of Central and
South America. It is also grown on farms in other tropical areas.
Cacao trees grow about
30 feet tall. In the wild, taller trees growing around them protect them from tropical heat, wind and dryness.
An ancient drink
About 3,000 years ago, the Maya people in Mexico and Central America created a spicy chocolate drink. This was not the sweet chocolate we drink today.
Cacao seeds are bitter-tasting. The Maya ground the seeds into a paste and mixed it with water. They gave their chocolate an even sharper taste by mixing it with spices such as red peppers.
The Maya drank their chocolate in religious and political ceremonies. It was a valuable trade item, and they introduced their chocolate drink to other people, including the Aztecs.
Aztecs and chocolate
Cacao trees did not grow in the cooler areas of what is now Mexico, where the Aztecs lived. They had to trade across long distances to get the seeds.
Cacao seeds were so valuable that Aztecs used them as money in the 1400s to 1500s. They offered cacao seeds to their gods. Their chocolate drink was drunk mainly by royalty, priests, and warriors and merchants receiving special honors.
Europeans discover chocolate
In the early 1500s, Spanish explorers learned of the valuable chocolate drink from the Aztecs. They took cacao seeds back to Spain.
The Spanish mixed the drink with sugar. Chocolate and sugar were both expensive, so only the wealthy could drink hot chocolate. In the next 100 years, visiting Europeans tasted it in Spain and wanted it too.