ChocolateChocolate

Melting in your mouth, baked into a brownie, steaming hot in a mug. Chocolate is the ultimate indulgence, delicious and decadent. But chocolate has not always been the ultimate guilty pleasure; and there is evidence that we should not even feel all that guilty about enjoying a piece of it anyway. Chocolate has been used as a comfort, a treat, a cure, a form of money, and even a sacred symbol for thousands of years. And while it comes in all kinds of food and drink, one thing is clear: chocolate is such an important part of our everyday lives that it is difficult to imagine a time when it was not around, or a time when it might not be once again. Kay Frydenborg takes an in-depth journey through chocolate's earliest uses in Mesoamerica, its meteoric rise in Western society, the slave labor practices that have enabled (and continue to enable) the chocolate industry to thrive historically, and the modern science used to help sustain our chocolate habit, which is science that might even help save our environment. History, science, culture, and religion come together to tell a story as rich, and dark, as chocolate itself.