Chocolate

Chocolate

      You are at Dollarama and you beg your mom for a chocolate bar and she says “Yes.” You look for the biggest one they have. You take Kit Kat and stand in line. How much trouble can one chocolate bar cause? Well, a lot of trouble, one chocolate bar probably can ruin a child’s life. Before you learn the dark side of chocolate, let’s learn some history, then how chocolate is made.

      The earliest record of chocolate was over fifteen hundred years ago in Central America. Chocolate comes from cocoa beans that grow on the cacao tree. This tree was worshipped by the Mayan civilization and cacao is a Mayan word which means “God Food.”

The Aztecs of Mexico also prized these beans, but had to obtain them through trade or war. The Aztecs also used the beans as money. They made a special drink with the cocoa bean called “Xocolatl”. When the Spanish arrived they could not pronounce the word and so called it “Chocolat”, the English then called it Chocolate.

Many think that chocolate is easy to make, little do they know that there are many steps to producing chocolate.
The workers cut the ripe cacao bean pods from the trees and scrap out the pulp inside. It is left for a few days to ferment and then spread in the hot sun to dry. The seeds are roasted. The inner kernel of the seed is broken into bits called “nibs”. The types of chocolate depends on how the nibs are treated. Nibs are ground under heavy stone mills and the oil is released and turns this mass into “chocolate liquor”. This when hardened, makes bitter chocolate used in baking. To make sweet chocolate you add cocoa butter, which is a fat and other ingredients are also added. Cocoa butter is a byproduct of chocolate. When cocoa butter is finely ground it produces that great drink cocoa.

Chocolate is a wonderful treat that many people enjoy, but there is a proper way to harvest it. Most companies do it the wrong way. In the last decade, the cocoa prices have been so low that the farmers...