Bitter Chocolate (2 page)

“What would you do if you couldn't grow cocoa anymore?” we ask.

“A catastrophe,” one man answers, and they all look very grim.

“This is our life,” declares the chief, Mahamad Sawadago. He tells me he is fifty-four, but he looks many years older. Three of the women here are his wives; he has eleven children.

“Where does the cocoa go after it leaves here?” Ange asks the villagers. There is a confused silence, and everyone turns to Mahamad.

“It goes to the great port of San Pedro,” the chief explains with authority, “and then on to people in Europe and America.” They all nod.

“What do those people do with the cocoa beans?”

Silence again, and everyone looks to the chief. But this time, he too seems puzzled.

“I don't know,” he answers honestly.

He's certain they make something with it, for sure, but he doesn't know what.

They make chocolate, I explain. Has anyone ever tasted chocolate? One man says he tried it once when he was away from the village and thought it tasted good. No one else even knows what it is.

Even Ange Aboa, who reports on the Ivorian cocoa industry, is surprised by how little these people know about the commodity they harvest. Ange tears a sheet of paper from his notebook and rolls it up into an oval tube. He explains that people in the West grind up the cocoa and add lots of sugar to make little bars this size. The bars are quite sweet and delicious. Sometimes milk and even peanuts are added. Children in Europe and America often get such things as treats.

Ange goes on to explain that one of these bars costs about 500 West African francs (roughly equivalent to a Canadian dollar). Their eyes widen in disbelief. The sum strikes them as staggering for such a small treat—almost enough to buy a good-sized chicken or an entire bag of rice. It represents more than the value of one boy's work for three days, if they are being paid at all, which I'm sure they are not. I explain that a child in my country

will consume such a chocolate bar within minutes. The boys look awed. Days of their effort consumed in a heartbeat on the other side of the world. And yet they don't begrudge North American children such pleasure. West Africans rarely express envy.

As I look at the young faces, the questions in their eyes are the measure of a vast gulf between the children who eat chocolate on their way to school in North American and those who have no school at all, who must, from childhood, work to survive. And I feel the profound irony before me: the children who struggle to produce the small delights of life in the world I come from have never known such pleasure, and most likely, they never will.

It's a measure of the separation in our worlds, a distance now so staggeringly vast … the distance between the hand that picks the cocoa and the hand that reaches for the chocolate bar.

I tell the boys of Sinikosson who do not know what chocolate is that most people in my country who eat chocolate don't know where it comes from. The people in my country have no idea who picks the cocoa beans or how those people live. The boys of Sinikosson think it would be a good idea if I told them.

T
HE STORY BEGINS IN THE PREDAWN OF HUMAN HISTORY,
more than three thousand years ago. At least, that's the beginning we can glean from the scant records of Meso-American people, about whom we know only fragments: the Olmec. And it probably begins with women, harvesting the colourful gourds from the dappled limbs of wild cocoa trees then liberating beans from the pulpy interior; mashing them to a fatty, viscous goo mixed with water and starch and then dispensed among the more elevated classes of their people.

The staple of the Olmec diet was maize, which sat overnight in tall urns filled with water and wood ash, or sometimes lime and the pulverized shells of snails. In the thin light of the early day, the women scooped out the dissolved mixture and washed away the transparent hulls. They'd beat the grain into a doughy mass, then serve it to the masters often fortified by the dark,
magical substance they'd extracted from the bean called
kakawa
, or, as we know it, cocoa.

It was a perfect gastronomical marriage. The starchy maize absorbed much of the heavy, fatty cocoa butter and made it more digestible, while the rich flavours of the bean gave the mixture zest. The Olmec women served it as thick, bitter-tasting drink, stimulating, nourishing and—they believed—healing as well. The wisest among the Olmec would have been hard pressed to explain the origins or the mysterious chemistry of this dark and bitter additive. Why it seemed to restore the weak and add vigour to even the strongest among them; why adversity seemed more manageable and pleasures more enjoyable under its benevolent influence; how it helped them through their daily challenges—fatigue, despair and even, among their warriors, fear. But time and custom had evolved a deep, unshakeable faith in the beneficial properties of cocoa. The purity and potency of an Olmec chocolate cocktail is impossible to come by nowadays—the mass-produced and processed product we know as chocolate is a pale substitute. But one thing is consistent: then and now, chocolate is a luxury consumed by the privileged at the cost of those much less so. For thousands of years, the chocolate cravings of an elite have been satisfied by the hard labour of an underclass.

Theobroma
grows in a band around the world, hugging the equator, and thriving only where there are perfect temperatures and plentiful moisture. But three thousand years ago, when the Olmec first harvested its riches, cocoa could be found only in the dense tropical rain forests of Central America and southern Mexico. According to American anthropologists Sophie and Michael Coe, the same fecund climate that allows cocoa to thrive also provided the perfect conditions for destroying written records about its cultivation, as well as many of the Olmec's more fragile
artifacts. What did survive were some of the most renowned and recognizable Meso-American relics: giant stone heads with smooth faces as inscrutable as the history that time erased.

According to the Coes, the Olmec were probably the first people in the Americas to form a class-based society in which a select few were able to live comfortably off the toil of those less fortunate. Olmec clans established permanent villages and relied on agriculture for their economic well-being. Making use of a servant class, they developed sophisticated methods for preparing food, not least among them the first known recipes for cocoa.

Archaeologists have never settled the dispute over the relationship between the Olmec and the Maya—whether they were descendants, trading partners or simply neighbours. Olmec civilization mysteriously disappeared around the same time as the Maya rose to dominate the region, in the first or second century AD. But it's clear that the Maya built upon the centuries of wisdom and know-how of their predecessors, including the fine art of making cocoa concoctions.

Over many centuries, the Maya came to occupy parts of the countries now known as Belize, Honduras and Guatemala, as well as the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico. These fertile, humid lands supported the highest-quality cocoa beans ever to be found, in particular the bean known as the Criollo, a variety as coveted by today's chocolate-makers as Cabernet Sauvignon grapes are by wine snobs. For over two thousand years, Mayan civilization rivalled or surpassed anything found in Classical Greece and Rome, while Mayan pottery, ceramics, painting and textiles dazzled all who saw them. The Maya built pyramids, stone houses, parks and gardens in their stately cities. And the culinary delights they made from cocoa would confound even the most advanced modern-day chocolatier.

We know something of how the Maya prepared their chocolate drinks from surviving manuscripts and also from the detailed scenes of court life depicted on pottery and frescoes. For
cacahuatl
,
literally “cocoa water,” the beans were soaked, aerated, ground and then mixed with a wide range of spices and flavours, including chili pepper, flowers, vanilla and herbs, along with edible dyes. Occasionally, Mayan aristocrats took their chocolate sweet, with honey added to it; but it was always mixed with ground corn, making the beverage a kind of thin gruel. Key to the enjoyment of chocolate was a topping of frothy bubbles. Cocoa liquid was poured from one vessel to another—splashed, really—to beat air into the mixture. The cook would stand holding a pitcher of
cacahuatl
and transfer the contents into a second jug placed on the floor—the extra height presumably increased the bubble content—as lords, high-ranking warriors and honoured dinner guests looked on raptly. The cocoa would then be served in cups of calabash or clay, depending on the status of the guest. The foam (some Europeans called it scum) was consumed first, as a special treat.

As befits a food of divine provenance, cocoa was also associated with religious rituals and the worship of various deities. In the Dresden Codex, one of the few surviving texts of this age, gods are depicted seated on thrones holding cocoa pods and dishes heaped with cocoa beans. Another image, of the New Year ceremonies, shows the opossum god holding the rain god on his back and providing cocoa for his food. A drawing in the Madrid Codex shows gods piercing their ears and sprinkling their blood over the cocoa harvest, indicating a strong association between blood and cocoa in Meso-American tradition. Humans were often sacrificed to guarantee a good cocoa harvest. First, the prisoner was forced to drink a cup of chocolate—sometimes spiked with blood—as the Maya believed it would convert the victim's heart into a cocoa pod. Temple priests devised many elaborate means of slaughter: beheading, throat slitting, crushing, hurling from towers or extracting the still-beating heart. After the poor wretch had expired, the presumably transubstantiated organ was offered to the gods.

The Popol Vuh, a manuscript believed to originate with the Izapan (who were closely associated with the Olmec and likely passed on the secrets of chocolate to the Maya), shows cocoa as a divine product, awarded to human beings from the mythical Mountain of Sustenance. In a particularly vivid story, one of the so-called hero twins—the children of the man and woman who created the universe—is decapitated. His head is then posted on a cocoa tree, where it manages to impregnate the ruler's daughter, who gives birth to other hero twins. These offspring subsequently save humankind from the evil denizens of the underworld.

By the ninth century, Mayan territory was vast and its culture well developed. But as often happens when great cultures turn imperial, Mayan generals became belligerent. As the empire expanded, the Maya were obliged to wage frequent wars to defend their holdings from a host of enemies. The conquered tribes of the Mayan empire rarely added up to a coherent society, though Mayan cities were as densely overpopulated as some of the large urban centres of the world today. The aristocracy grew decadent and wasteful as the Maya denuded their forests and depleted their farmlands.

Anthropologists call it the “Classic Maya Collapse,” the time when Mayan civilization seems to have caved under its own weight. Environmental degradation, chronic warfare, natural disasters and, finally, a revolt by people in the working class against the elites all contributed to the downfall, though it's not clear why the disintegration was so sudden and so complete. While a modest population of Maya survives to this day, by the end of the tenth century, the grand Mayan empire was gone.