Chocolate
Do you know that people celebrate World Chocolate Day? It takes place every year on 7 July. We cannot imagine our life without chocolate. We eat chocolate sweets, and we drink hot and cold chocolate drinks. The chocolate we eat today is made from a lot of different ingredients, but the most important one is cacao beans.
The story of cacao beans and their long journey to shops and supermarkets all over the world started hundreds of years ago in Mexico. Cacao trees can grow in places where the temperature is high and it is rainy and they originally grew in the Yucatan Peninsula.
The Maya were the first people to use cacao beans. They picked cacao beans from wild trees and cleared land to grow their own trees. They made a drink from cacao beans but without sugar. Their drink was bitter. The Maya also used the beans to buy other goods from other American Indian tribes. The Maya also used cacao beans for religious ceremonies.
The Mayan people travelled north and introduced cacao beans to the Aztec people. Soon cacao beans were part of lives of different peoples. The Aztecs could not grow cacao trees because of the dry climate. When the Aztecs conquered the Maya, they asked for cacao beans as a tribute. The Aztecs mixed cacao beans with vanilla or chili peppers.
Later people started to grow cacao trees in different countries. For example, Ecuador was for a long time the world’s number-one producer of cocoa beans. It is still one of the top ten producers of the beans, but nowadays more than 70 per cent of cocoa beans come from West Africa.
