Chock Full of Chocolate

That chocolate bar you're craving contains some 5000 years of history and more than a couple psychoactive substances. Learn how a tropical seed changed the world, for the good and the bad, in this episode of FoodStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hello, and welcome to food Stuff. I'm Anny Rees and
I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, And uh what what would you say?
This episode is like Annie Box chocolate because you never
know where you're gonna get except probably some chocolate history. Yeah,
maybe some chocolate science. A few sad things about chocolate.

(00:29):
Heads up, it's sad it is. We're gonna get that
other way right in the front. I guess you have
some idea what to expect. And big thanks to listener
Freda who suggested this forever ago, and she sent it
some really useful resources to check out, which was useful. Yes,
that's all. All suggestions are welcome, suggestions plus resources. Even

(00:50):
more so, m and um recommendation. If you haven't listened
to an episode on vanilla, you might want to go
do that because the history of these things are like
so intertwined. Oh absolutely, and even even sugar a little
bit too that because there's a lot of Yes, you'll
you'll see, you'll see. Alexandra Leef, who runs chocolate tours

(01:13):
of New York City, describes chocolate as quote the best
known food that nobody knows anything about. Huh so, what
is it chocolate? What is it? It? Depends kind of.
First a couple of terminology notes, because it can get
a little messy. So cacao usually describes the beans or
plants before any processing has been done. It's large. The

(01:38):
cocow nib or bean or seed is surrounded by the
cacao fruit. It's really big. The plethora of stuff made
um with the beans is chocolate processed. If it's been processed,
it's chocolate, and coco is the powdered form, except sometimes
the British use cocoa instead of cocow, and that really
confuses lots of articles. It's pretty you know, yeah, the

(02:01):
British always always making things more complicated and interesting chocolate.
The umbrella term now includes a lot of products that
are more sugar additives now than cocao, which is a
Star Wars reference for anybody anyway, I got it, Okay.
The cacao that is in there, more often than not

(02:24):
comes from the least flavorful but most sturdy of cocaw beings,
and that's changing us societally. We shift to that whole
being to bar more flavor, more sustainable kind of thing.
But you know, something to keep in mind. Yeah, a
little bit more about that in just a moment. As
we discussed in the vanilla episode, the root of the
word chocolate goes back to chuck al attle, the Aztec

(02:46):
word for a bitter drink made from cocao, and vanilla
helped sweeten the drink, and that's one of the reasons
it was so popular, both vanilla and coco, and especially
them together. The Latin root of theobroma cacao, the coco tree,
translates to food of the gods. Yes, divine food, one
of one of many. Yes. And there's a rumor about it,

(03:07):
isn't there la oh? Yes that Carl Linneus, who formalized
the system of naming organisms in the seventeen hundreds, named
it so after having read this French medical thesis on
chocolate medical thesis on Chocolate, I love it um, which
suggested that it is so red that it should be
the nourishment of the gods rather than nectar or ambrosia.

(03:28):
But it could you know, it could be either both. Yeah,
why do you have to just pick one's divine in general?
So what about the cow tree? What? What what's going
on there? It is a tropical tree. Um, it needs warm,
rainy kind of conditions. And a lot of shade in
order to do its thing. And there are three main
varieties of cacao trees, the hardy for stero, the finicky

(03:51):
but more complex flavored creole, and the trinitario, which is
a hybrid of the two that kind of sounds like
every fairy tale about three siblings, you know. Oh man,
I think, all right, let's write. Can we write some
children's storybooks? Is that a thing? You know that I'm
making it a thing I have. I have a whole

(04:11):
plan actually for a whole other children's story. Anyway, this
is this is outside the realm of chocolate. So let's
talk about harvesting those tasty, tasty beans. Um. Okay. The
flowers of the cow tree grow directly on the trees trunks.
The resulting fruit, often called pods, are these largish, oblong
things sort of like a slightly deflated ribbed football. And

(04:35):
that's the American football, not like a football, like a
soccer ball. Okay, it's sort of sort of like someone
stretched out a pumpkin. Yeah. Um. And they can come
in green or yellow or orange or red as they grow,
and then they will change colors as they ripen. And
they don't have to start as green and wind up

(04:55):
as red. They can kind of go the other way.
It gets confusing, apparently. Unlike man fruits, they can grow
year round, and a single tree will usually have a
bunch of pods at different stages of growth. Inside those pods, uh,
there's this sort of gooey, sweet white pulp surrounding some
twenty fifty seeds, which are the cocoa beans. When the

(05:16):
pods are ripe um, the spotting of which, like I said,
can be tricky and it's a job for experienced farmers.
They are cut from the tree by the stem. The
farmers then split the pods open with either a hammer
or a club, which is the preferred method but goes
a little bit slower, or a machette, which, as you
may imagine, is quicker but could damage the beans um.

(05:37):
And then you remove the beans plus some or all
of the pulp. At this stage, the beans are light
colored and don't really have a lot of flavor. In
order to make that happen, we need fermentation. What bacteria
poop is involved in chocolate. We're talking about again again, chocolate.

(05:57):
I feel like I feel like someone's already gotten a bing,
like like yeah, all right, So here we go. The
workers lay out these these pulpy beans in heaps or
in boxes and then cover them to keep them warm
and moist. The pulp around the beans liquefies, and the
beans kind of just soak in that broth for five

(06:20):
to seven days, with the workers stirring and draining it occasionally.
During the first twenty four hours or so, the seas
actually germinate and begin growing, and those we baby plants.
Enzymes convert all of the pulps sucros to a glucose
and fructose. With that high energy food available, a whole
bunch of bacteria and yeasts another fungi go to proverbial town. Uh.

(06:44):
Those micro organisms, by the way, I get in there
thanks to contact with workers, hands and all the equipment
that is used and reused cross contamination in the best
possible way. The germs also produce heat which can reach
like fifty degrees celsius a k and height and is
enough to kill the plant embryo and basically any unwanted microorganisms.

(07:06):
Among these bugs are our old friends, a sacro micy service,
a service. I'm gonna learn how to say that one
day one of these years. That's that's Brewer's yeast, which
is much nicer to say, and various species of Lactobacillus
a k a ealactic acid bacteria. These yeasts help break
down the pecton covering the seeds, which let's a kind

(07:28):
of two bitter compounds leak out and allows the alcohol
created by the yeasts in the bacteria to seep in,
along with all kinds of alcohol soluble flavor compounds that
are also excreted by the microbes. Five days into the process,
this gloup can contain up to a trillion microbes per gram.
That is a lot that is tasty, tasty, tasty, science tasty,

(07:53):
gloop scidence microbes. Absolutely, So you want to stop this
whole process before those microbes again growing in or on
the beans instead of just the pulp, because those bacteria
and fungi can can break down some of the fats
and the beans and cause all kinds of weird off flavors.
So you dry the beans out, you get them graded

(08:13):
is either fine or flavor beans or as bulk or
ordinary beans, and then you have ship them off for manufacturing,
the first step of which is roasting them to a
hundred and twenty one celsius a k a. About two
hundred and fifty fahrenheit, which kills off any remaining microbes
and also brings out a lot of those flavor and
aroma compounds. At the roasting stage, the beans still have

(08:34):
a husk on them, so they're shelled and then crushed
into nibs, a little little kernels of bean. Those nibs
or kernels can be sold as is or ground and
paste sometimes called chocolate liqueur, not like chocolate core, like
the stuff you would drink more confusion for further processing.
The paste is about half and half fats and solids.

(08:55):
If you remove some of the fats, which are cocoa butter,
from the paste, the remaining solids or cocoa powder. Cocoa
butter is often used to give some of the creaminess
and flavor to chocolate candies. It's also the only part
of the cocow plant that's actually in white chocolate, and
it is used of course on its own or mixed
with any number of things in the cosmetic industry. And

(09:16):
speaking of white chocolate, brief rundown very brief of chocolate types.
So you've got the unsweetened cocoa powder, unsweetened baking or
bitter chocolate made only of ground up cocoa beans, dark chocolate,
which contains no milk solids. Bitter sweet chocolate has to
have at least thirty five cocoa solids. Most have about fifty.

(09:38):
You've got semi sweet, which apparently is a mostly American
term made up by Nestley. You've got milk chocolate, which
has either condensed milk or dry milk solids. And white chocolate,
as mentioned only cocoa butter, and some don't even have that. Yeah,
how check it out? Dare you? Yeah? All right, there

(09:59):
are more, but those are the basics. And thanks to
the spruce dot com for the handy breakdown. Oh yeah, absolutely,
as spruce is a great resource for many many things. Um.
One quick note here though, uh, as we talked about
all these different types of candy type things, candy making
sides is not what we're talking about here today. It's
the molecular ar. The molecular ar. Yes, the molecular stuff

(10:22):
is really fascinating, but also a lot that was too
much physics. Yeah, which I am very excited. Apparently, Lauren,
you've made shuffles. Yeah, I know about tempering and yeah,
it's super easy, like like I said before we started
the podcast, it's super easy as long as you follow
your instructions extremely exactly and don't get any water anywhere

(10:44):
near it. So I will fail, but I am down
to try. Yes, we won't be talking about that today.
That's the future future episode. Yeah. Oh I'm so excited. Yeah.
But anyway, back to chocolate in general. Yeah, Cope. Dauvoire
accounted for twenty of global coco production in fifteen, which

(11:05):
comes out to sixty of their export revenue. And today
we spend an annual seventy five billion dollars on chocolate,
and in America we didn't average twelve pounds of chocolate
a year. The industry of chocolate manufacturing is valued at
about four billion a year in the US, and worldwide,
the chocolate candy specifically candy industry is worth one hundred

(11:26):
billion US dollars. That's a lot of money. That is uh,
that's also a lot of twelve pounds of chocolate. That's
a lot of chocolate. Do you except I feel like
I probably eat more than that. I don't know. I
honestly would love to see a picture of a pound.
What a pound looks like in terms of chocolate bars,
although I feel like I get most of my chocolate

(11:48):
from baked goods, just my weakness. Yeah, yeah, that's harder
either way. There's a one hundred grand pun in there,
but it's a lot of chocolate. Um, so what about
the history. We'll talk about that after a quick break
for a word from our sponsor, and we're back, Thank

(12:17):
you sponsor. So onto the history. Yes, as we said
in our Vanilla episode, chocolate leaves behind a handy dandy
chemical residue, and that residue happens to be THEO bromine
or bro mean, which yes, can be found in all
kinds of really old stuff. It can including a five thousand,

(12:38):
five hundred year old ceramic and a piece of mortar
discovered in southern Ecuador. Historians think that Shaman's native to
the area ground up cacao for use in hallucinogenic potion. Yes,
if we're talking linguistic evidence by b C pre Ole
met cultures living in what is now Mexico, we're produced chocolate,

(13:01):
and but chocolate. We mean they were taking the cacao
beans and fermenting them back to your boobia, roasting them
and then grinding them up between two stones. With a
fire underneath and mixing the resulting paste with things like vanilla, honey, chili, peppers,
and water, and the final product was a froffy And
everywhere I read used that words that it must have

(13:22):
been pretty froffy chocolate drink that was meant to be
more invigorating and less sweet and comforting like the way
we view our hot chocolate today. Yeah. Absolutely. It was
also an important preservation process for the beans because by
itself the chocolate paste would last maybe a couple of weeks,
but they could also harden and dry it out into
these like tablets for storage and then reconstitute them up

(13:44):
to two years later. Just pretty cool, uh, And this
was the primary way people consume chocolate for centuries, as
a drink bit or drink that would put a pep
in your step. And of course, of course it was
seen as an afro dsac wen go because of its
perceived mood and libido boosting. Both the Aztec and the

(14:07):
my revered chocolate as a gift from the god, specifically
the feathered serpent god the Maya called ku kul Can,
and the Aztec cuts a cuddle. Chocolate was often a
part of royal feast, ceremonies or sacred rituals, and until
seventy seven, cow beans were used as currency. A hundred
of them would get you a fancy turkey. Ties into

(14:30):
so many other episodes. I know Aztec sacrifice victims who
were too bombed out to participate in the pre sacrifice festivities.
What was wrong with them? They were given a gourd
of chocolate to lift their spirits, and the chocolate had
the blood of past victims in it, So quite spirited. Indeed,
that works on two terrible levels. Thank thank you any

(14:54):
we can always count on you. Cow I don't know,
okay anyway. Pottery with coca resid on Earth and Honduras
goes back as far as four BC, and historians think
that the people at the time made an alcoholic beverage
by fermenting the pulp in casing the cocao beans. Later on,
around about the b CE CE switch over, the pulp

(15:16):
was a staple food for the Maya. The Aztec had
difficulty growing cocaw so they traded with the Maya, and
according to a few sources, in the sixteenth century, Aztec
emperor Montezuma drink three gallons of this stuff a day
to achieve maximum libido. Sounds like an eighties movie, It
really does. I am going to design the cover for

(15:38):
it after this. Oh, I'm so excited. It's going to
be excellent. Speaking of Montezuma, as we've mentioned in previous episodes,
he purportedly welcomed Spanish explorer Hernan Cortez his arrival in
fifteen nineteen or fifteen with, among other things, chocolate, like
fifty jugs of it. Yeah, a lot, and it was

(15:59):
poured and served golden cups, which is I think pretty
regularly you drink at the time. He had your chocolate
and chocolate and golden cup and some versions of this story,
montez Montezuma believed Cortes to be a deity reincarnated coming
back over the sea. It's the whole thing. It might
be apocryphal. We're not sure. Yeah, a lot of things

(16:22):
we read and look into. Anyway. In the writings of
both Columbus and Cortez, they described beans that were quote
almond like and that were used as currency. Cortez claimed
that chocolate caffeinated those who drank it, and upon his
arrival to Nicaragua on his fourth voyage, Columbus wrote he
that he was greeted by natives with a chocolate drink

(16:45):
that was spicy and bittery. He probably didn't use those words,
but those that was essentially what he was saying. When
Cortes returned to Europe with chocolate leaving decimation, decimation in
his wake for your hands didn't really go for it um.
As we mentioned in the vanilla episode, it was described

(17:06):
in the Spanish writing of you know, I looked it
up your Lamo Benzoni as um seemed more a drink
for pigs than a drink for humanity. Ouch. Yeah, it
wasn't sweet enough for their taste, but that was easily
remedied by adding some honey or cane sugar and some
cinnamon and later, yes, vanilla chocolate spread throughout Spain, but

(17:29):
still largely drink for the rich and elite often and
vibe from fancy cups and grave goblets, golden, golden vessels.
You weren't upper class if you didn't own some chocolate wear. Yeah,
specifically for that. Oh I love that. I wish it
hadn't gone out of fashion. Would you have some chocolate wear, Lauren? Heck, yeah, yeah,
I drink it like once a year, but I don't know,

(17:51):
I feel like that's about as often as I used
my teapot. Unsweetened chocolate was used medicinally for things like
upset stomach and oh yeah, they thought it was an
fordsiac of course. Yeah, Casanova reportedly loved this stuff, possibly
downing it after his daily breakfast of sixty morning oysters
another episode reference. And actually, I was thinking about this,

(18:12):
and I supposed, thanks to advertising and a successful misrepresentation
of Mesoamerican culture as being this really sensual thing, um,
chocolate is still seen as an aphrodisiac in Western culture
kind of yeah, yeah, and it's sort of spread. I mean,
Japan also has like Valentine's Day traditions of gifting chocolate
to each other, although I'm not sure how much of

(18:32):
that is perpetuated. And you know, the greeting card industry
versus yeah, actual thought, greeting card industry. While Cortez brings
the Spanish chocolate as the predominant theory, it relies on
some assumption. According to Sophie and Michael Coe's book The
True History of Chocolate, the first evidence of chocolate in

(18:54):
Spain was when Friars introduced it to Prince Philip, and
it would make sense for friars to have access to
cow too, since they're still being used in Mesoamerica for
rituals and religious ceremonies, and the Friars might pocket them
and or sell them to whatever the case. Trade records
from the fifteen eighties document regular deliveries of chocolate to Spain.

(19:17):
Since cocoo really prefers a tropical, lowland climate, they relied
on long distance trade for their supply. Some accounts say
the first chocolate shop opened in Spain around this time,
but there isn't definitive proof. The first substantive proof of
that in Spain a chocolate shop, that is, is in
the sixteen thirties, when mostly female vendors might sell small

(19:37):
amounts of chocolate out of stands in places like Madrid. Okay,
but but so we're saying that nobody really liked it
that much at the time. Why go to all this trouble?
I know, I guess it had to do with the
dependence of the Spanish settling in the New World. They
they depended on these local goods, and despite massively decreasing

(20:01):
the indigenous population with disease and violence, the Spanish for
still the minority, and Spanish women exponentially. So this, along
with um a calculated strategy of using marriage and other
domestic situations to further their dominance, meant that there was
a lot of like mashing up and exchanging of cultures

(20:22):
and ideas often coerced in Mesoamerica. At the time, women
typically made the chocolate, and elite Spaniards married to these
women are who knew these women as the servants that
raised their children learned to like the stuff. When the
Spaniards returned to Europe bremmening with tales of their conquest,

(20:43):
the aristocracy wanted to emulate them, and then people wanted
to emulate the aristocracy and so on. It's one of
those interesting cases, and is pointed out by a terrific
article that we came across, the name of which I
don't have right in front of me. Um. Yeah, that
that's pointing out that it's one of the bottom up
um absorptions of a cultural idea versus a top down

(21:07):
kind of thing, which is the way that a lot
of things go, you know, like like Queen says, I'm
wanna wear this white dress, and all of a sudden
we're all wearing white dresses at weddings exactly, um and
kind of related. The love of chocolate in the New
World by both the Indigenous and the Spanish sparked rumors
of sorcery that the women used the chocolate they made

(21:27):
to be which people chocolate, which is because if there
is an opportunity to accuse a woman of being a witch,
why not by gully? Why not? Says history. Several inquisition
documents in cases site chocolate's alleged use in love potions
cure spells. Spanish author wand de Cardenas said about saving

(21:51):
saving chocolate from paganism, as he said by advocating its
use in the context of old old world medicine, because
that was okay, oh yeah, sure, that's full of all
the you know, leeches and humors and everything that we're
comfortable with, exactly. And in speaking of heres, he gave
it a humor profile, which is not nearly as fun
as it sounds. Mine would be something like bad puns.

(22:13):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, No, no humors meaning the the
liquids that make up our universe or the substances rather,
And I can't wait to do an episode on that
because I do not know much about it at all. Oh,
it's terrifying. I love it. Okay, I've read some of
this guy's book and it was it was quite offensive.
It didn't accomplish what he wanted to either, because there

(22:34):
was an anxiety about chocolate spreading the culture of the
New World for a long time after. In sixty nineteen,
a Spanish physician wrote in his book that Spanish women
use chocolate quote to give occasion to avenge their jealousy,
jealousies learning and using spells from Indian women who are
the great masters, having been taught by the devil. And

(22:57):
to be clear, this wasn't a medical book. He as
a physician, but it wasn't a medical book. And that
was the dialogue of a character known as the Indian Um.
But that's a taste of some of the racism that
came attached with chocolate and liking chocolate at the time. Huh. Yeah.
Spain did manage to keep chocolate close to the chest

(23:19):
until the sixteen fifteen wedding of the daughter of Spanish
King Philip the Third to French King Louis, and France
got a taste of chocolate. Royal courts and aristocracy across
Europe and braced chocolate, and soon it was all the
rage of fashionable drink that make cure your ailments and
increase your libido, always showing off how rich and luxurious

(23:41):
your lifestyle was. Before coffee or tea, chocolate was the
original stimulant drink in Europe, and even when coffee and
tea did hit the scene, drinking chocolate was at least
as popular, even though it was more than twice as expensive.
It was so popular, in fact, that the Roman Catholic
Church basically waved it in as okay to drink during

(24:02):
fasts because they were afraid that if they didn't, they
would drive off some of their wealthiest practitioners. And seriously,
it was so popular. People used to throw these chocolate parties,
and chocolate didn't have the same gendering that coffee and
t did, so it was relatively more equal opportunity chocolate parties. Also,
T was gendered feminine in Europe because it was from Asia.

(24:25):
Oh my gosh, future episode, I got so mad. Wow
I didn't. Okay, all right, I'm back at the microphone. Yeah,
I never even thought about it. That's really okay. Here
we go. The increase and popularity of chocola, of course,
meant an increase in demand, and that meant the establishment

(24:46):
of European plantations, because of course the rest of imperialist
Europe wasn't going to let Spain dominate the cocow trade,
of course, not in uh and they set these up
in the Caribbean mes America islands off Africa's coast during
the seven and nineteenth centuries to grow and harvest the
time consuming and labor intensive cacao, and these plantations were

(25:07):
often powered with slate labor. Sugar and vanilla were tied
up in this as well, since those were two of
the chocolate enhancers of choice. African slaves were brought in
once the native Mesoamerican laborers were all but wiped out
by European diseases. Who through all this, Yeah, Spain was

(25:29):
importing thousands of pounds of cacao and chocolate per year
by the sixteen twenties, and in the thirty years between
sixteen twenty and sixteen fifty, Venezuela exported thirty one thousand pounds,
and from sixteen fifty to seventeen hundred that number shot
up to seven million pounds. But but there's a reason

(25:50):
why Spain is not the country that you perhaps think
of when you think of the chocolate industry in Europe.
That's true. The Dutch were the first European power to
break Spain's hold on out both by capturing the island
of Curasow in sixteen thirty four and by smuggling cacao
to Amsterdam. Not long after that, the Dutch became Europe's
main supply for cacao, and it was around this time

(26:13):
that the latter half of the seventeenth century that Europeans
were making solid chocolate candies as well as just drinking
chocolates um but they were like evaporating the drinking chocolate
into these solid candies, and during America's Revolutionary War, chocolate
was used as wages and it was included in the
soldiers rations. Folks were still using chocolate for medicinal purposes

(26:37):
at the time, though in eighteen six, our friend Brilliant
Savarin described chocolate with ambergris as the chocolate of the afflicted. Ambergrid,
by the way, is a sort of musky smelling waxy
stuff that was popular in perfume and medicine at the time,
and it comes from the guts of sperm whales, where
it forms like a bezo are from the undigested beaks

(26:59):
of this quid that they eat. That's fantastic, oh man perfumery. Okay, Anyway,
our French buddy recommended this mixture to quote any man
who has drunk too deeply of the cup of pleasure,
who finds his wit temporarily losing its edge, or who
is tortured by a fixed idea. Oh, drink some chocolate

(27:21):
and sperm whale stuff. Yeah, get better. We've been We
really have been trying to cure the hangover for a
long time, haven't we. Chocolate became more accessible when Conrad
Johanna's vun Houting, a Dutch chemist, came up with the
idea for the coco press. And basically what this press
did was take roasted cocao beans and squeeze out about

(27:43):
half the cocoa butter, leaving behind a dry cake like
thing that was then pulverized into a powder. This powder,
called Dutch cocoa, was often mixed with other things to
cut the bitterness, like alkaline salts and liquids. Very key
because this sment you could mold and solidified chocolate into
individual pieces, and it also lowered the cost of chocolate,

(28:06):
making it even more readily available to more people. And
helping deal over the price was the removal of chocolate
text in Europe at the same time. Oh yeah, that'll
that'll do it. Joseph Fry of British chocolate company J. S.
Fry and Sons made the first chocolate bar in eighteen
forty seven, a combination of cocoa butter, cocoa powder and sugar.

(28:29):
And then along comes the company Cadbury. Wait that that Cadbury,
Yes that Cadbury, with boxes of chocolates available for purchase
in England by eighteen sixty eight, followed in a couple
of years by Nestley Yep that one. Uh, they had
a milk chocolate bar with the help of powder powdered

(28:51):
milks introduction in eighteen seventy five. Silkier, smoother chocolate was
made possible by Rodolph Lyntz huh invention of the counting
machine in eighteen seventy nine. Family owned Yes that One
companies Hershey and Mars got in the game soon after. Wait,
Mars was a dude. Mars was like a family name. Yeah,

(29:12):
what I have to say several times when I was
reading scientific research about chocolate and there's like research from Mars,
and I thought they were researching chocolate on Mars. And
then I realized Mars isn't quite as popular in the US,
I suppose as it is in Europe. I don't know,
random spoutings in the middle of a podcast. Um. With

(29:35):
the twentieth century, demand only increased, which put more and
more strain on the equator adjacent regions that are capable
of growing this stuff. The average cacao farmer makes two
dollars a day. And that's like today, not like, yeah,
this is where this is modern. We're talking modern now.
Several of the plantations West African countries use that provide

(29:57):
a good chunk of cow supply for big companies, use
child and slave labor, impacting and estimated two million children
working with chainsaws and other dangerous tools like machetes. Industrial
chemicals used to keep away insects, and there are truly
horrific stories from people who are forced to work on
account farms as children. One of the children who worked

(30:17):
on one said in a BBC documentary on the subject,
when people eat chocolate, they are eating my flesh. Some
companies are working with the African countries to reduce this number. Ferraro,
for example, is set a date of twenty to get
rid of slavery at the farms and plantations that it
uses for cacao mars as in The Company not the

(30:37):
Planet has set a similar benchmark. Several big hitters in
the chocolate world came together to form the nonprofit group,
the International Coco Initiative, with the goal of finding some solutions,
but it's slow going. Yeah, it's one of those really
unfortunate situations where people at multiple points in the chain
have a opportunity to profit, and so it's difficult to

(31:01):
get changes enacted right And unfortunately, there's currently no real
way for consumers to consistently know whether or not slave
labor went into their chocolate. Labels like fair Trade can't
guarantee that those products were made without slave labor. Fortunate
as a good breakdown of what the big companies are

(31:22):
doing if you want to know more, and there's a
blog post on Huffington Post with a list of child
labor free chocolate companies and things we can do as
consumers just basically get informed, get your friends informed, and
let the companies know this is not okay. It is
a huge and complex problem. It involves poverty and so
so much moving pieces. Yeah, yeah, and so right, doing

(31:44):
research is basically the best you can do. We'll try
to send out some of those links that we were
just talking about on social media after this episode airs. Yes,
absolutely and on that depressing but completely necessary note. Let's
take a quick break for a word from our sponsor

(32:10):
and we're back, Thank you sponsor. So this brings us
to our science e healthy kind of manufacturing sort of
section here in other words that I haven't Josh weedened
like that. Um So, first of all, is chocolate a drug?
Is it? Well? Yes, Some historians think that it was

(32:33):
only ever accepted in Europe because it was presented as
a medicine, though their standards for medicines could be pretty low.
It depends on your definition of a drug. Cocao contains
a bunch of different psychoactive compounds and meaning chemicals that
do stuff to the stuff that your brain is doing. Okay,
So it's got stimulants like caffeine, which speeds up nerve

(32:55):
cell activity and constricts blood vessels in the brain, which
can cure aches, and as a byproduct of the nerve
cell activity can cause a release of adrenaline, which affects
your blood flow and muscle tension, and thus can help
with stuff like cramps. There's also theobromine, which increases your
heart rate and widens your blood vessels. There's also a

(33:19):
couple of pleasure producers in their cannabinoids, yes, the same
kind of thing that's in marijuana, which can decrease pain
sensitivity and trigger euphoric pleasure hormones like neo epinephrine and
dopamine in the brain. Also, there's phenal ethyl amine, which
does very similar things, And vaguely in this category are

(33:40):
fats and sugars, which may stimulate opiate production in the brain.
More on that thing in our sugar episodes, I was
just thinking that that it might be kind of an
association that you build when you eat chocolate that is sugary. Yeah. However,
many chocolate candies do not contain a whole lot of

(34:01):
those things, except maybe the fats and sugars part. Although
some of those some of the compounds maybe working together
to create a greater effect than they otherwise want on
their own. For example, some research has indicated that the
effects of caffeine and cannabinoids together can create a greater effect, which,
although it is illicit in many of these are United States,

(34:23):
maybe why marijuana and chocolate are packaged in the same
package sometimes, But the amount of caffeine in chocolate isn't
anything to be worried about as long as you're snacking
in moderation. A single cup of coffee, for example, can
butt you up pretty close to the recommended limit of
caffeine per day, which is two hundred milligrams that's set
up by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. But

(34:47):
in terms of chocolate, even high cocoa chocolate only ranges
to about sixty milligrams per every two ounces. That's fifty
grams of chocolate. You're probably gonna be fine. Here's another
headline about chocolate. Oh yeah, is my dog going to
die of chocolate boisoning? I hope not. Yeah. It is

(35:07):
true that dogs and cats should not eat chocolate, but okay.
Dogs and cats process THEO bromine more slowly than humans,
which means that they can eat more of it than
their adorable fuzzy bodies can safely process fairly quickly. But again,
most chocolate doesn't contain that much. I mean, like, don't
feed your dog a pound of chocolate. That's it's not

(35:29):
good for anybody. But if your dog gets into some
candy or baked goods or ice cream, probably the worst
thing that's going to happen is minor digestive issues. If
your dog is eating chocolate and then acts nervous or shaky,
or refuses other food, or has continued digestive issues, definitely
calivet And if you're worried either way, or if your
dog is very small, go on and call of it anyway,

(35:51):
just to be sure you're doing all you can, because
the theobromine can create a stroke like conditions and animals.
That's the problem there, and that's not what anybody for
a pepper and onto nutrition, nutrition stuff, nutrition stuff. So
perhaps obviously the nutritional properties of chocolate depend on the
cocoa to cocoa butter ratio and what you've mixed them with,

(36:14):
including sugars and creamy things like milk. Cocoa nibs on
their own are a high calorie food. There about a
hundred and thirty calories per ounce, which is twenty eight
grams and composition wise they're fat, but they also contain
some twelve percent protein and a lot of dietary fiber
and essentially no sugar. So in moderation this cocoa nibs,

(36:36):
the purest form of the cow plant that you can get,
are pretty good for you. It'll fill you up fast
and has you know, a little bit of protein. However,
even high coco dark chocolate is significantly more sugary. Generally,
the less cocoa and more sweeteners and creamy things that
are involved in chocolates, the more of a treat they

(36:57):
should be considered. But it's not like you're eating chocolate
for your health, are you? Well? Wait, wait are you?
People certainly have been. There are a lot of health
claims and studies out there about chocolate and cows component chemicals,
some of which are flavonoids, which are a group of

(37:17):
antioxidant compounds that have been associated with lower risks of
cardiovascular conditions like heart attacks and strokes, plus lower risks
of diseases like cancer and diabetes under particular conditions. For example,
one study of the Kuna people in Panama, who drink
as many as forty cups of their traditional bitter cocoa
per week develop those aforementioned diseases and conditions at lower rates,

(37:40):
and in the case of cancer, much lower rates than
other people from Panama. But there are some problems with
this and other studies into chocolates potential health benefits. First
of all, the studies are often at least partially funded
by or otherwise connected to confectionary giants like the aforementioned
Mars Incorporated. Doesn't necessarily mean that their results are wrong,

(38:01):
but it is a thing to keep in mind. Secondly,
the amount of flavor als actually present in consumer chocolate
products depends on on the beans themselves, on how hot
they get during manufacturing, on how much any dairy in
your chocolate is interfering with the flavoral uptake, which is
a thing that happens, and how much cocoa solid is

(38:23):
actually in your finished chocolate product. For example, they're One
study in two thousand four showed that with just two
weeks of eating one point six ounces of a high
flavoral chocolate per day, that improved the function of participants
blood vessels, inner walls. But what on Earth counts as
a high flavoral chocolate? For that we have to turn

(38:46):
into the future. We both even kind of looked in
the same direction when we did that. That's nice. I
think that's called America face. I think that's the thing.
I'm pretty sure. Okay, I believe you. We both just
did America phase. Alright. So the future, what's going on.

(39:10):
Researchers are working on manufacturing processes that can retain more
of cocoa's flavanols, and meanwhile, back on the raw production
and other researchers are working on developing higher yield co
cow trees, which is good because they're pretty finicky plants
and some thirty of the world's crop has traditionally been
lost every year to disease and pests and hip hip parae.

(39:34):
Climate change is making this worse because warming climates they
allow for more diseases and pest rereading, and also weather
extremes are bad. Um top of that, there's a lack
of genetic diversity, which means if one strain of cacao
being is susceptible, probably a lot of them are. A

(39:54):
few years back, scientists sequence the genome researchers believe is
responsible for inn of our cacal Scientists are applying this
data to all sorts of things like increasing yield and
um increasing disease resistance. So a lot of things being
worked on there. UM folks are also working on setting
out the complete microbiology of the chocolate fermentation process in

(40:17):
order to reduce waste from unwanted microbe growth and to
make tastier and tastier chocolate all the time. That's just good.
I um, I don't know. If you've heard this, you
probably have chocolate. I'm learning attracts a lot of these headlines,
these disastrous Oh yeah, but I've heard that there will
be no real chocolate and I was expecting to like

(40:39):
find something about that. I did. I did find something
kind of about it. But it seems more like if
we don't do anything, then eventually we won't have chocolate.
But we are doing stuff, and it's I mean, I
don't know. That's it's really hard to predict exactly what
kind of effects climate change is going to have on
single areas like us. Yes, that is true, um, but

(41:04):
you know, let's uh, let's talk about candy. Oh yeah,
and one more big scary headline, Is it true I'm
eating insect legs? What? What? What is that a thing?
Did you not have you never heard this before? I
think I think I had, But it was big when
I was in elementary school. Oh no, I think I

(41:26):
just ignored it. Yeah, like I eat insect legs all
the time. That's insect leg laur And that's what they
called me on the playground. What a nickname. According to
an f d A compliance policy guideline first published in
and last was that revised in two thousand titled Chocolate

(41:47):
and Chocolate core Adulteration with insect and rodent Filth, the
FDA can sees any chocolate if six separate subsamples of
one grams are about two regular size chocolate bars have
over sixty insect fragments on average, or if any single
of those substant subsamples has ninety or more insect fragments.

(42:09):
For rodents, if you're interested, it's an average of one
rodent hair one point zero rodent hair from six gram
sub subsamples, or if any single one hundred gram sample
has three rodent hairs. And apparently the story was big
in twelve although, like I said, I first heard about
it in elementary school. Um and when the news outlets

(42:30):
were reporting the reporting it, they were saying that if
you had a chocolate allergy, what you're reacting to was
the insect parts, specifically cockroach insect parts. However, chocolate is
not alone in this. It's really really hard to avoid
insect parts in your food completely, and attempting to do
so would be worse for your health, most likely since

(42:52):
it happens at the source and would require using more pesticides. Yeah, like, like, seriously,
I know that one point five hairs per chocolate bar
sounds like a drastically large amount of rodent hair to
be allowable. Um, But if you're squeamish about insects or
or or other pest waste like that, probably just never

(43:15):
read any of the f d A S or any
other governing bodies regulations about how much pest contamination per
part is allowed in any food, and definitely never get
a job in the food industry. There are lots of
things that humans can and in fact often do, to
prevent the sort of contamination, but pests do happen no
matter how careful we are. Furthermore, if you are allergic

(43:36):
to cockroaches, chocolate is probably not the greatest of your worries.
It is a fairly common allergy to have. Studies found
that of humans who have allergies. Anywhere from four point
seven to twelve point five percent may be sensitive to
cockroache allergens, something I did not know, especially especially because
cockroaches are heck and everywhere. In the United States, the

(43:57):
rate of homes possessing detectable levels of cockroage allergens ranges
between in like wealthy, spaced out suburbs and in poorer,
more crunched in urban areas, which is a thing that
we all basically just have to be okay with because
cockroaches aren't going anywhere. You can take steps in your

(44:19):
own home by keeping everything clean and dry and uncluttered,
and by using stuff like traps if it's safe for
you and your pets and your kids. And speaking of
being okay with it, a few years ago in France,
Chocolate Tier purposefully put bugs on his chocolates, like on
not not in it, on top like a decoration. They

(44:41):
were a topping crickets and worms dusted with gold. I
got to read all about cricket diets and this because
he was particular about what he would feed the crickets
that he put on there. And I can tell you
I was not expecting the research to go this way
cricket diets in the chocolate episode. U. Yeah, there's nothing

(45:03):
more to say on that currently not currently um oh,
but but side note, if you are sensitive to chocolate
and you do have other like sneezy, sniffle e, rashy,
migraine allergies, it could be cockroaches. Could Yeah, maybe I
get a skin test from a doctor if you're concerned. Um. However,
if you're sensitive to gluten or have Celiac disease, there's

(45:25):
a protein in cocoa that's really similar in structures, so
that could explain you're having a kind of digestive tract
reaction to chocolate. Some symptoms could also be due to dairy, caffeine,
soy or nuts sensitivities, or even nickel sensitivities, which coco
and a lot of nuts that might be in chocolate
bars are high end. Or it could be the chocolate itself.

(45:48):
If you have symptoms, especially like anaphylaxis type symptoms, difficulty breathing, hives,
swelling in the mouth area, vomiting, uh, definitely talked to
an allergist and be careful about what you eat in
the mean Aile. I had a friend Um in middle
school and high school and she she was allergic to

(46:08):
chocolate and she you know, I couldn't enjoy parties and
all this stuff when she was in high school. I
think it was her older brother said it was a prank,
like he just told her that and then if she
had some, she die And she wasn't actually allergic what
she was furious years years years gone. Oh you never

(46:33):
get that chocolate eating life back, not as a kid,
No way. I think about that often. Oh I'm going
to think about it often now, I mean mean but
successful frank siblings Man siblings. Okay, so that's chocolate. But yeah, um,

(46:54):
it was quite the undertaking and definitely a lot more
topics to explore there. But meantime, listener, man, we have
two raman emails. Bob senters this eating dry raman is
quite common here in China and other Asian countries. Growing up,

(47:14):
my son was always asking for Mama noodles. I don't know,
I think um or one of the other brands of
what is essentially just a bag of flavored dry ramen noodles. Also,
oftentimes before work when we were in Macau, I used
to stop at a little restaurant by my office that
served a lovely beef with black bean sauce served over
crispy noodles, which, of course it was only broken block

(47:37):
of dry ramen. So don't be embarrassed by munching on
a block of dry ramen, as over here no one
would even blink at the idea. H Rose also wrote
in I have visited the Mamafuku Ando Ramen Museum in Akeda, Osaka.
Aside from displays of instant raman through the years and
a historical replica of Mamafuku's workshop, the main focus of

(47:58):
the museum is composing your own cup noodle. That's right
for about three fifty U s Circu Two eight. Anyway,
you can choose up to three toppings and a soup base.
You can also decorate your cup noodle package. It's then
shrink wrapped and put into a strange bag that I
realized must have been developed for cup noodle space travel
after I listened to your podcast. If you are a

(48:21):
better planner than I was, you can also take a
class on making your own instant chicken ramen noodles. That
sounds worth visiting for sure. Yes, all my own ramen flavors.
I don't know what I would do I know. I
think the indecision might overwhelming. Yeah. I can't even go
into frozen yogurt places. It's a lot. Yeah, we got
in trouble. You got into a little bit more trouble

(48:44):
than I did, but you were going for the visuals,
so I was. There's a whole video. You can find
it online. Yeah, it's it's in our yogurt video. Um.
Thanks to both of them for writing in. If you
would like to write us that you can do so.
Our email is food Stuff at how stuff work dot com.
We're also on social media. You can find us on
Twitter and Facebook at food stuff HSW. We're also on

(49:07):
Instagram at food stuff. We hope to hear from you.
We are so grateful to our amazing producer, Dylan Fagan,
and we hope that lots more good things are coming
your way.