Author: Cocoa Runners

How did beer, teosinte, and chicha, lead to bread, corn, and chocolate?.

One of the great unexplained mysteries of chocolate is how humans worked out just how to make nutritious and delicious drinking chocolate out of unappetising, astringent, and bitter cacao seeds.

Over the past few decades archaeologists, paleobotanists, and anthropologists have posited an intriguing theory. They suggest that drinking chocolate was discovered as a by-product, or accidental follow-up, to our delight in drinking cocoa pulp, and in particular, our fascination for fermented cocoa pulp; ‘cocoa chicha’, a light beer that is still drunk all over South and Central America.

And this fits well with a broader suggestion that fermented alcohol, made from grapes and grains, gave rise to the first agricultural revolutions all over the world, thereby putting us on the path to civilization.

Fermentation of Fruits and Grains as the Basis of Civilization?

Once upon a time, historians believed that ‘civilization’ started when humans upgraded from living as nomadic hunter-gatherers to becoming sedentary farmers who learned to grow plants, farm grains, domesticate animals, make bread, build towns, etc. …who then went on to discover the delights of beer, wine, chicha and other alcoholic beverages.

Over the last few decades this view has been challenged. For example, a number of archaeologists have suggested that Göbekli Tepe in Turkey (described by UNESCO as “one of the first manifestations of human-made monumental architecture” and dating back to around 9000 BC) was a temple where nomadic peoples would gather to celebrate with beer and various alcoholic porridges. They then further suggest that as a by-product of figuring out how to brew this beer, palaeolithic hunter-gatherers started farming and baking bread. Or as Edward Slingerland neatly summarises it “beer [came] before bread …[and] Neolithic, alcohol-fueled raves gave rise to civilization“!

A similar set of hypotheses are now being advanced for how Mesoamerican civilizations figured out how to cultivate maize (aka corn) from teosinte. Mayan, Aztec, and Inca civilisations all enjoyed various alcoholic drinks, including a beer brewed from teosinte. For a long period, scientists thought that teosinte was a separate plant to maize, but this view has now been corrected. In parallel, scientists have also shown not just how Mayan civilization worked out how to make beer from teosinte but that in their efforts to improve crop yields, they selectively bred bigger-eared teosinte, which evolved into maize; accidentally creating the bedrock of the modern diet: Corn.

Cocoa Pulp, Chicha/Beer, and Chocolate

The same trajectory from ‘delighting in booze’ may explain the discovery of drinking chocolate.

It may well be that the drinking chocolate celebrated by the Aztecs and Olmecs, and then brought back to Europe in the late 16th Century, also emerged as a by-product of (alcoholic) fermented cocoa pulp (‘cocoa chicha’). That is to say, the palaeolithic inhabitants of Mesoamerica first made chicha from cocoa pulp when they worked out that it easily fermented into a light alcoholic beverage. And then, as a by-product of this fermentation, the Olmecs (and maybe their predecessors) discovered that this fermentation also turned the incredibly bitter and astringent cacao seeds into nutritious and flavourful cocoa beans.

ne intriguing argument for this run of events is from an analysis of pottery fragments from Puerto Escondido, in the lower Ulúa Valley in northern Honduras, which date back to 500-1100 BC. When John Henderson and Rosemary Joyce analysed these pottery shards in the early 2000s they discovered that many contained residue of theobromine; the telltale sign of cocoa fermentation. The earliest pots, which date back to 1100 BC, have necks that would have made pouring any liquid to generate the desired ‘cocoa froth’ exceedingly difficult (the Aztecs treasured above all the froth from drinking chocolate; Montezuma consumed the FROTH of fifty cups of chocolate; he didn’t drink them). However, the later pots, dating from 900 BC, have longer necks that could have easily created cocoa foam and they also contain traces of spices and peppers which we know were used by the Mayans and Aztecs to add flavour to their cocoa drinks (the earlier pottery shards just contain theobromine). In other words, drinking chocolate came AFTER fermented cocoa pulp.

📷: PNAS/National Academy of Sciences.

Since this work was published in the early 2000s, archaeologists and paleobotanists have discovered even earlier examples of pottery with traces of theobromine that date back to 3500 BC in Santa Ana La Florida in Ecuador. However, it’s not yet clear whether the people living there, named as the Chinchipe Maya, were brewing cocoa pulp ‘chicha beer’ or crafting ‘drinking chocolate’ (or both). So we can’t definitively assert that the earliest known consumers of fermented cocoa pods, the Chinchipe Maya, started off by first drinking fermented cocoa pulp. But it certainly provides a credible explanation for how Mesoamericans worked out that fermentation, followed by drying, winnowing, grinding, and the addition of spices, vanilla, and some water, could make a nutritious filling drink from incredibly bitter, astringent cacao seeds.

You can try cacao pulp yourself! Straight out of a cocoa pod, the sweet, nutritious, and flavoursome pulp can be used to make all sorts of curious drinkable concoctions!

Other Arguments for Alcohols’ Roles in ‘Civilizing’ Mankind

…and their link to Valentine’s Day

Although many of us delight in beer, wine, and other alcohols, the dangers of alcohol are also well documented. This has led scientists to try and understand the evolutionary benefits of fermenting grains and fruits into alcohol.

The ‘standard’ argument that beer is safer to drink than unpurified water is now looked at with some scepticism as it’s generally easier to boil water than ferment beer, chicha etc. Although when travelling to certain parts of the world, bottles of beer may well be a better option than water (and ice) that are new to you and your digestive system.

Back in the early 2000s, Robert Dudley posited an alternative theory for our love affair with alcohol under the arresting title of “The Drunken Monkey”. Dudley suggests that both humans and monkeys use the smell of ethanol (i.e. alcohol) to find ripe and fermenting fruit, which was otherwise often hard to find (possibly including cocoa). And once they’d found this valuable fruit, our sour taste receptors help us distinguish between ‘good fermentation’ and ‘bad bacterial rotting’ to pick out the alcoholic fermented fruits. Dudley also notes; “ethanol consumed during the course of frugivory may act as an appetite stimulant“, that is to say, we want to eat more after consuming alcohol, and getting ‘the munchies’ around fruit can clearly be a good thing.

Researcher Edward Slingerland, mentioned above, also adds this:

“…intoxication [through alcohol] helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: Enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers. Our desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We would not have civilization without intoxication“.

Slingerland’s basic argument is that alcohol, at low levels, helps humans overcome some of the disadvantages of our prefrontal cortex; that bit of our brain responsible for “grown up, pragmatic, rational thinking“. The prefrontal cortex is the slowest part of humans to develop (taking around 20 years from birth). And while the prefrontal cortex clearly helps us step back, pause, ponder, and reflect in an adult-like way, the prefrontal cortex also makes us more inhibited and cautious. This ‘stepping back’ can discourage cooperation and challenge creativity; indeed, many societies, and even companies, use alcohol to get around these problems. For example, Microsoft, in the early 2000s, coined the so-called “Ballmer Peak”, named after the ex-CEO of Microsoft, who discovered that coders are at their most “creative” when their “blood alcohol level is at between  0.129% and 0.138%“. And according to Slingerland, Google also has special Scotch whisky bars for coders who are stuck and need something more than caffeine to solve a problem.

Alcohol also encourages bonding and severely inhibits lying (the latter requires too much concentration for most people when inebriated). Hence its powerful role in building bonds and trust.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

Slingerland, and almost every other scientist in this area, goes to great lengths to stress that these benefits come from drinking alcohol in moderation, and with other people. They note that the beers and chichas of Göbekli Tepe and Puerto Escondido were very low by today’s standards. And they are careful to warn of the dangers of alcoholism and excessive inebriation, especially from strong spirits, and from drinking alone.

Resources and further reading:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21676715/

https://edward-slingerland.medium.com/beer-before-bread-b179125cb180https://www.livescience.com/11028-ancient-african-cocktail-beer-shot-antibiotic.html

https://www.livescience.com/10221-beer-lubricated-rise-civilization-study-suggests.html

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278416521001069

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/19/books/review/drunk-edward-slingerland.html

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210815-an-immense-mystery-older-than-stonehenge

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0708815104

http://news.unm.edu/news/releases-20200601-6803126

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2141886/

https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/maya/chocolate/early-history-of-chocolate

https://medium.com/@alroth/the-ballmer-peak-501dd54c5aa5

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9265738/

https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/ballmer-peak/

The history of chocolate is; appropriately; rich, complex, and definitely not clear. Everything from how chocolate was consumed and celebrated, to how it first made it to Europe, is shrouded in confusion. For example; although Columbus certainly came across cocoa beans, he doesn’t appear to have realised it could be made into chocolate, and it’s a myth that he was the first to bring it back to Europe.

Much of chocolate’s history with cocoa is also dark and depressing: The conquest of the “New World” and eventual ‘take off’ of chocolate in the “Old World” involves everything from plagues to slavery, and deforestation to desertification.

However, there are some brighter spots; for example, we can now enjoy craft chocolate bars from Lachua, Guatemala, which can trace a lineage back to the first people who brought chocolate to Europe; some Kechi tribal leaders way back in 1544. For more on this history and some of these award winning Lachua bars, please see below and HERE.

New Foods from the New World

The discovery of the “New World” revolutionised food in the “Old World”. Before Columbus, Europe didn’t know about potatoes, tomatoes, chillies, turkeys, corn, maize, vanilla, tobacco, peanuts or; of course; chocolate.

Columbus brought back many of these new foods with him to impress Ferdinand and Isabella, the sponsors of his expeditions. In particular, he was proud of what he called “chili peppers”, as he used these chilis to argue that he had discovered a lucrative new route to the Indies for black pepper. This confusion still persists even though peppers and chilis are very different plants, and the ‘heat’ from piperine (peppers) is very different to the heat from chilis (capsaicin). (For more on this, and some great bars made with both different peppers and different chilis, please see HERE).  

While European (and Asian) desire for chilis took off quickly; it took far longer  for many of these new foods to percolate through into “Old World” diets. For example potatoes didn’t really take off for over two centuries. And even chocolate took a few generations.

Indeed, in the case of cacao and chocolate, it took some time before anyone brought them back to Europe. We know that Columbus and his son came across cocoa beans on his fourth voyage and were amazed at the importance that the Mayans treated these “almond like beans”. But there is no evidence that he witnessed how the Mayans drank chocolate, nor is there any evidence that he brought any cocoa beans, or chocolate, back with him to Europe.

There is also no evidence that Hernán Cortés sent any chocolate back to Europe; although he did describe it in various letters he sent back. This is even more surprising given the fact that his chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo was enamoured with chocolate; gushing over Montezuma consumption of “the froth of fifty cups of chocolate” before visiting his wives. (Indeed, this tale of superhuman stamina may well have been the start of chocolate’s association with aphrodisiacs).

When did chocolate first reach “The Old World”?

The first clearly documented evidence we have of cocoa beans and chocolate being presented to a European court is 1544. Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas brought a delegation of Kekchi (or Q’eqchi) leaders to the court of the future Philip II of Spain, who gave the future monarch a series of gifts including 2000 quetzal feathers, chillies, sarsaparilla and both cocoa beans and chocolate for drinking. Perhaps because the drinking chocolate was served cold (and therefore associated with all sorts of health issues), perhaps because it wasn’t mixed with spices and sweeteners, or perhaps because Philip just didn’t like chocolate, this event was not a ‘eureka moment’ for chocolate in Europe.

It took another generation for Europeans to import cocoa beans in any volume from the New World. And chocolate’s success in the late 1500s appears largely down to its promotion as a great, and tasty, source of nutrition on fast days in Catholic Europe. In medieval and early modern Catholic Europe, over 100 days of the year were ‘fasting days’: All Wednesdays, all Fridays and most saints’ days, plus Lent. On these fasting days, any animal based product; meat, cheese, butter, etc.; was to be avoided. Hot chocolate was therefore promoted as a nutritious and delicious option, especially by the Jesuits, and they even secured papal endorsement for this practise (along with fish on Fridays).

How did cocoa and chocolate fare in the post-conquest “New World”?

Whilst drinking chocolate started a rapid ascent in Europe (and later in the USA and Caribbean), the history of chocolate consumption and cultivation in the conquered “New World” was not nearly as rosy.

One disastrous consequence of the “discovery” of the “New World” was the introduction of various diseases, in particular smallpox, which devastated the populations of the Aztec and Inca Empires, wiping out over 70% of the population in modern day Guatemala and Belize. For more on this tragedy, please see HERE.

Indeed, this is why in the 17th and 18th Centuries cocoa cultivation moved to Ecuador and Venezuela, and away from its traditional heartlands of Mexico, Guatemala and Belize; the combination of smallpox and brutal conquest meant that there weren’t enough people to farm cocoa in areas once famed for their cocoa production.

Ceremonies, Festivals, and Chocolate

These social and political upheavals radically changed not just the way chocolate was farmed, but also how it was consumed and used in celebrations. The Aztec ruling classes, who had consumed cocoa as a core part of their aristocratic lifestyles, were destroyed and many of their chocolate rituals were also abandoned. Given that some of these ceremonies involved human sacrifice, with victims’ hearts cut out with knives dipped in ‘ceremonial cocoa’, some of these ceremonies may not have been sorely missed. But as the indigenous peoples and tribes were brutalised and enslaved, many of their rituals and ceremonies celebrating cacao, the rainforest and their traditional ways of life were destroyed and lost.

In a few cases, some celebrations involving chocolate seem to have survived, and indeed some new rituals have emerged. For example the Ch’orti’ Maya people, based in Eastern Guatemala and Western Honduras, were able to continue to farm cacao despite extensive hardships. And it appears that they managed to preserve some uses of cocoa in religious ceremonies. In pre-Columbian Mayan society, chocolate was a key part of everyday life, woven into the fabric of society. It is still an everyday drink in indigenous Maya culture, and is used in ceremonies to mark milestones in life: The Yucatec Maya use chocolate in coming-of-age rituals to usher girls into adulthood, while the Kekchi Maya in Belize scatter cocoa beans during ceremonies to bless new houses. In the Ch’orti’ culture, where agriculture is still extremely important, chocolate is used in various rain ceremonies, where ritual meals of turkeys and chilate (a gruel made out of cocoa and maize) are consumed.

Amongst the neighbouring Ladino peoples, whose culture combines aspects of their Spanish and indigenous heritage, the Catholic Church co-opted traditional native practices of using chocolate. Hot and cold chocolate drinks made with roasted cocoa beans, cinnamon and sugar are used to celebrate Christmas, the New Year and Easter. (Note: In traditional religious practice, chocolate drinking varied depending on the time of year, according to the Mayan calendar. This switching between hot and cold chocolate drinks caused all sorts of confusion with the European ideas of ‘humours’ and health). Numerous rituals involving cocoa beans and communally sharing chocolate were (and are) also used to celebrate everything from moving house to getting married and even to help mothers recuperate after giving birth.

A Hopeful Story: Lachua Cocoa from the Q’eqchi’ and Mopan Maya

Las Casas had brought the Q’eqchi’ to the court of Philip of Spain in 1544 to counter the idea of forcefully conquering the indigenous peoples, and to show the benefits of “peaceful” cooperation. Sadly, las Casas’ approach was soon abandoned, and the Q’eqchi’ were enslaved to the Spanish colonists, along with many other indigenous peoples. Their lives became fuel for the colonial machine.

Nevertheless, some of the Q’eqchi’ peoples survived. They were displaced from their homelands, and are now one of the most widely distributed of all the Maya peoples. In spite of this, and of the continued blights of poverty, enslavement persecution, environmental destruction and land loss, they managed to preserve elements of their traditional culture. And for their own personal consumption they continued to grow, and celebrate, cocoa.

In the 1980s, Hershey’s tried to grow cocoa in Belize with the Mopan Maya, neighbours to the Q’eqchi. Hershey suddenly pulled out, badly letting the Mopan down. Fortunately some craft chocolate pioneers including Uncommon Cacao’s Emily, Taza’s Alex Whitmore and Choco del Sol’s Patrick Walter, teamed up with Maya Mountain to step in and plug some of this gap, providing long term contracts for the cacao that also pay a living wage and preserve the environment (for more on this please see our article, and award winning bars, on Maya Mountain HERE).

Recently, Uncommon Cacao have extended this initiative over the Belize border into Guatemala to distribute cocoa grown by the Q’echi’ living around Lake Lachua. Back in 1976, Laguna Lachuá was designated a national park and in 2006 it was designated ‘Ramsar site’ (i.e. a wetland of extreme importance). Since 2014, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), FUNDALACHUA, and FundaSistemas, have worked with a series of local communities to plant, grow, harvest and ferment over 245 acres of cocoa trees. These beans have been distributed by Uncommon Cacao to makers around the world including Fjåk, Land, Bare Bones, Boho, Standout, Pump Street, Utopick and Sirene.

So try any of these bars below to ‘complete the circle’ from 1544 to today.