Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Chocolate

Episode Date: May 9, 2022

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedy writer Lydia Bugg (1900HOTDOG, the ‘Trailer Park Boys’ comic anthology) and bestselling author Jason Pargin (‘John Dies At The End’ series, ‘Zoey Ashe’ series) for a look at why chocolate is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Folks, hey, this is Alex, the, you know, the host of the show. You're about to hear episode 93 of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. 9-3. And I'm doing this little message because I'm running a membership drive from now until episode 100. I did this once before last year with episode 50. It's a special time when I ask you to please consider taking the plunge, making the step of backing the podcast.

This show depends on members. It depends on patrons. I try to make a one-time-a-year special request for that, and otherwise just let you enjoy the podcast all the time. Always new free shows. But this is an extremely independent podcast. I make it myself. At the end of each episode, I do sort of a joke in the outro

where I say this entire podcast operation that's kind of a gag I have my friend Chris Sousa help with mastering the show and I pay him for that work otherwise it's just me doing the research the guest booking the taping the editing everything that makes this a thing that can exist and patrons are the real reason it can exist they fund that labor. They fund that effort. They fund me trying to make you a premium podcast, a better podcast than the average show. So that's why this drive is happening. Please head to sifpod.fun and join the Patreon. Make it a successful and fun and awesome drive. Thank you for listening, and please enjoy episode 93. and please enjoy episode 93. Chocolate, known for being tasty, whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people

think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. Two wonderful guests join me this week, Lydia Bug and Jason Pargin. Lydia is a fantastic comedy writer. You can read her columns every week on 1-900-HOTDOG, which is the best comedy website. It is the way comedy websites should be. Also, you may have seen Lydia's other comedy writing on sites like Reductress.com or in physical media, such as the new Trailer Park Boys comic book anthology. Highly recommend. Get it at your local comic shop or wherever else. And then Jason Pargin is my former colleague, my old pal, and one of my favorite authors. He has a new book available for pre-order. It is titled If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. One more time, that's the title. If This Book

Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. That is by Jason Pargin. It's available for pre-order. Pre-orders are the lifeblood of being a novelist. Please, please, please consider giving yourself the gift of receiving this book down the line. It'll be like a surprise in the mail or from your local bookstore or however you get it. Also fun about that book, it is the fourth book in the John Dies at the End series. It also stands on its own and explains itself. So if you love that series, you get more of it. If you're new to that series, you are a-okay just jumping right in here. He makes it so you can onboard at any point in the whole run. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca

to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Acknowledge Lydia and Jason each recorded this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Thank you. each episode. And today's episode is about chocolate, which came about in a totally unique way for the whole run of this show, because that is a patron chosen suggestion. Thank you very much to Jason Pargin for suggesting that topic. Jason is very kindly a patron of the podcast. I'm also thrilled Lydia Bug can return for this one because she was a guest on the vanilla episode of this podcast. It turns out chocolate has some similarities, especially in its history. So two absolutely perfect guests for this topic, a unique process of bringing it about, and I can't wait for you to hear it. So please sit back or go to sifpod.fun and become a patron so you can suggest topics and pick topics just like Jason does. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating

with Lydia Bug and Jason Pargin. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Jason, Lydia, so happy to have you both on this one. And of course, I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. We've kind of pre-prepped that together a little bit. But how do you each feel about chocolate? Well, I assume that the title of this podcast on iTunes or whatever is something to the tune of can chocolate give you sexual superpowers?

Question mark already. And the reason for that is when we did the Valentine's Day episode, which if you've not listened to that, it's very good. But part of what we were trying to answer in that episode was why is chocolate seen as a romantic gift? Because I eat a lot of chocolate. It does not make me feel sexy. But when Googling it, the first thing you get is, oh, yeah, multiple ancient civilizations considered chocolate to give you sexual superpowers. So I was like, okay, that's probably a whole separate episode i'm i'm also like stubbornly proud that the title of this will just be the word chocolate

because the rest of the internet they they load it with every sex and seo word you can yeah they're really into it yeah that's the nice thing about having a patreon run show you can just say call it chocolate that's fine yeah thank you patrons yeah you don't have to fool you yeah so what i i i am a baker like i bake a lot especially during the pandemic and um chocolate is extremely hard to bake with because you have to temper it usually which is like melting it and getting it to an exact temperature and if you get it too high it's you've just ruined it instantly it's going to be like thick and chalky and gross and if you do it right then it's like shiny and it has a really good like snap to it and it's a

true art of baking it's like the the hardest part of baking really i think it's when you get into candy that's your expert level baking stuff where you have to have the candy thermometer and deal with a lot more like kind of chemistry. Cool. That's, what's interesting to me. I like, I like the baking aspect of it. And, uh, I've seen, I follow some people on Tik TOK who make like completely incredible things out of chocolate. Um, I put a picture of like a dragon that this baker made that just looks like a sculpture, but it's all, it's completely edible chocolate, which I don't know how I could ever eat that because it's like way too pretty.

I'd feel terrible. It's bigger than he is. The baker's next to this dragon he made and it looks like it's about to eat him. This is incredible. For the listeners, this photo that I don't know if we can include it in the Patreon description or whatever, but it's a giant, like the dragon. Yeah. As you mentioned, it has to be 200 pounds worth of chocolate, something like that. Probably.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a dragon bigger than a human being, but the baker standing next to it, who has carved and then painted this giant detailed dragon out of chocolate. He's wearing a clean white shirt that is totally spotless i would love to see what my clothes looked like after melting and then carving an entire dragon out of chocolate i feel like i would look like pig pen from peanuts and the dust would be cocoa dust like people would be choking on it as I walk through.

Yeah, I believe that he wore that the entire time. If you watch this guy's TikTok, he's the most precise. Like, it just seems like he's never been dirty in any way in his entire life. He's French and everything is just like so artistic and beautiful. Like he's a sculpture, too. His name, his name here, if I'm reading it right, Amore Guichon. That's a sculpture. his name his name here if i'm reading it right amore guichon that's a sculpture name that's that's almost a person name more of a work of art name yeah it's like a name that is impossible to pronounce without a french accent it's like amore guichon oh there you go

and i and my relationship to chocolate it's less me baking it, but especially my dad's side of the family baking it, the Schmitz. At every family gathering, there'd always be a chocolate dessert. I also learned from prep in this that the concept of German chocolate cake is kind of an accident. Apparently, there was an American homemaker submitted a recipe to a newspaper, a magazine, and it was called German Chocolate Cake. But she was referring to chocolate from a British brand, which is named after the founder, whose name was Samuel German. So it's not from Germany. It's a guy whose last name was German. And then from there, everybody in America said, Oh, yeah, Germans love chocolate. And then I grew up thinking it was like built into my family, because Schmidt is German, it's Smith and German. But then I grew up thinking it was built into my family because Schmidt is German.

It's Smith and German. But not a thing. It's just an accident. Let me give you an even stupider example of that. If you go to the grocery store, you get a block of Baker's chocolate. It is called that because it's named after the inventor whose last name was Baker. It has nothing to do with baking. It is not chocolate for bakers.

It's Baker's brand chocolate named after the guy. Even I did not know that. I believe you. You can Google it. Yeah, we're making stuff up all the time here in the U.S. It's really good. It's a good way to do it. Yeah, and then just being like, yeah, sure, it's for Germans.

We've decided. Yeah. And then just being like, yeah, sure. It's for Germans. We've decided. Yeah. I really, I thought it was part of my like ethnicity. Yeah. I really thought that. And it's just an accident. Like your cultural heritage. All made up.

Like Haagen-Dazs ice cream. That's as far as I understand it, that's also just a made up sound they came up with to make it sound foreign. There's a lot of that going on. Oh, it rules. Yeah. And before we get into the facts about chocolate, I mentioned the patrons earlier. And what I want to make sure to thank patron Jason Pargin. He suggested this on the Patreon.

He supports the show. And what a perfect thing coming out of Valentine's show. I'm really excited about that. Like you said, there is this sexual connotation and thing around it. I basically muscled this through the process using my influence and steamrolled all of the other

suggestions. There's a lot to get into here. Because chocolate is one of those special foods that has a place in the culture that's different from almost anything else, from peanut butter or caramel or anything else. It's there's something where in all of the ads for chocolate around Valentine's Day, it's like, yes, let's eat some chocolate and have sex. Because those are, of course, two things that make perfect sense together. It's like, really? really uh so yeah my question

was how did we get here and it turns out there is an answer let's get into let's get into facts about this amazing thing and on every episode our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics this week that's in a segment called You can't get the numbers You can't get the numbers without some math Standard deviation Join me as I go dancing through some stats Gorgeous. Thank you. I tore apart the room doing that.

That name was submitted by AtParagraphFilms. Thank you. There's a new name for this every week. Please make it as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit to SifPod on Twitter or SifPod at gmail.com. And all the numbers this week, they're about one thing. This is the basic production of chocolate starting from farming the beans, because it turns out it's like one of the most particular agricultural processes on Earth. It's an incredibly specific tree that has to be grown an incredibly specific way. Yeah, and this is one of those people do not appreciate in our globalized system.

How many of the products we enjoy every day are the product of an incredibly specific niche? Yeah. Where you're going to get into it as a specific part of the world, a specific altitude, specific temperature. The fact that you can produce it in mass quantities is a logistical, stunning achievement. But lots of stuff, that's true of a lot of things. Coffee beans that you kind of take for granted

that if the world had to start over and you had to make this stuff, you'd be like, Jesus, this is a huge pain in the butt. Yeah, and like alcohol, similar. Everybody always says society is founded around how difficult it is to make alcohol. I wonder if chocolate's like a similar thing. It's so difficult to make that we were like, we've got to form societies so we can keep having chocolate. Yeah, because it takes so many resources, so many people, so many inputs.

Yeah, it's almost like a sign that you've made it, that you've got this much labor to spare and resources to spare and cultivating this thing that you don't need to live. It's purely a luxury item. Yeah, and because chocolate comes from one tree. This is called the cacao tree, scientific name Theobroma cacao. And first number is 1,000 feet or 300 meters. That's the maximum altitude where it can grow. So it has to be pretty close to sea level. And then also the next number is 20 degrees latitude. That's the maximum

latitude distance from the equator where the cacao tree will grow. And then third number is 16 degrees Celsius, which is 60.8 Fahrenheit. That's the minimum temperature for a cacao tree that things need to be kind of all the time, but then also the trees need to grow under the shade of taller trees. This is a real Goldilocks plant that's basically just at the equator in certain countries. And today the biggest growers are certain countries in West Africa, in particular, the Ivory Coast. Oh, wow. So we got to be real careful or global warming.

We're not going to have any more chocolate. Oh, dear. Now there's good branding for this. Finally, finally, a reason. Finally. Thank you. This is the part that people don't appreciate about global warming in general, because if you say, well, we're, you know, the earth is on a course to two degrees Celsius warming based on what we're doing right now. It's like, well, you know, what is that Fahrenheit was like three or four degrees. I can handle that. It's like, no, you got to understand everything you eat, drink, consume, you know, ocean currents, they all depend on these extremely specific temperatures and specific seasons and things like that, that if it's thrown off just that little bit,

or if it alters the rainfall patterns just a little bit, that's all it takes. And 60.8 degrees Fahrenheit is so specific. Like if it gets colder than that, just, oh, no more chocolate. Right. Yeah. And one of the main sources for this is a book called Chocolate, a Global History. That's by Sarah Moss and Alexander Badenach. They say that almost all chocolate is consumed away from the equator. And so there's this huge global supply chain of growing this stuff at very specific equatorial places. And then, you know, the rest of us up here or down below eating it, you know, we really need to have an

integrated functioning world to enjoy this at all. That's kind of, kind of beautiful about it though. True. Yeah. Like, you know, the fact that we have worked together so hard to have so much of this because it's everywhere. So, I don't know. It's kind of sweet. Hey. Oh, that was a pun. There we go. This is why occasionally you'll see people on social media, especially younger people, talk about how their dream is to just go off in the wilderness and just, I'll just grow my own food.

Oh, yeah. And just get detached from all this busy society and all of the nonsense of capitalism. It's like, I don't think you realize that that granola bar you ate, it came from like nine different countries between the wrapper and the chocolate chips in there and the granola and the grain was grown and the soybean oil was imported from Ecuador. And it's like, you don't realize how globalized everything you touch is. And you like, you posted that using your phone and the phone probably has a component from every single country on earth.

Yeah. Yeah. Good luck growing your cacao tree. Cause if it gets below 60.8 degrees Fahrenheit, wherever you are, you're not getting one. Yeah. And also if you do grow a cacao tree and we'll have pictures linked for this because it's a little bit visual, but if you grow a cacao tree, you might be super surprised by what you get. It does not look like chocolate initially. Next number is 30 to 40. not look like chocolate initially. Next number is 30 to 40. That is the number of cocoa beans in one cacao pod. And these pods, they grow straight out of the trunk of the tree.

Workers have to carefully slice that pod off the tree, usually with a machete. And then they have to carefully extract the beans from the pods. The pictures are amazing. The pod basically looks like a natural football, like a brown oblong thing. And then the beans inside are really big and white and goopy. It's not what you were thinking if you're used to like a Hershey bar. It looks like a pod of alien larva. Yeah. It looks like a pod of squishy white alien larva maggot worms. It's the most disgusting thing. Yeah. It's truly stunning that anyone looked at it and was like, I'm going to eat that.

I think that looks tasty. Every time somebody says that, we always underestimate how hungry people get. It's like, well, who was the first person to ever drink cow's milk? It's like, yeah, you get hungry enough. They saw a baby cow doing it. It's like, well, who was the first person to ever drink cow's milk? It's like, yeah, you get hungry enough. They, they saw a baby cow doing it. It's like, well, I can do that. Yeah. The cow seems to, it's like, there's, I'm not going to die. I'll crawl under the cow and suck on it for a while. That's like a two-step process though. Just the whole process to go from the pods to actual chocolate. just i don't know that blows my mind because it's it's a long journey from that little pod to actual chocolate yeah so read about

that and this may have even been covered in a previous episode the process where they theorize how we accidentally invented cheese because it definitely starts with someone who lets some milk go real, real bad and decided, yeah, I'm just going to eat it anyway. I'm going to, I'm going to drink it anyway, even though it's now a solid block. Um, it's, it's a lot of that kind of thing. It's somebody who's just like, I don't care, man. I'll, I'll try it. This is all we've got left. All we've got is these, these jars or these leather bags of, of milk that turned hard. We got some hard milk. That's the only thing. And they just, it's like, I don't know, what can we do to make it palatable? I could put some salt in it or

something. I don't know. Diet of color. So it's not that color anymore. It's not the color of pus. Like, yeah, sure. Make it orange or something. I like how like so many foods we enjoy. Probably the previous thing someone said before someone tried it is like, what do you want me to do? Or, you know, some other really angry, frustrated, like I give up statement. And then, oh, it was an amazing taste. Worked out great. You want me to eat this chunky

milk i'll eat the chunky milk fine whatever well that was that great fact that i almost certainly learned from a cracked article which is that for centuries lobsters were fed to like prisoners as a punishment yeah because they have like almost no nutritional value they have no calories in them you know because unless you're dipping them in warm butter, they did not get the big bucket of butter to eat with it. So it's like, yeah, you have to eat the sea cockroaches. And if they didn't feed them to like prisoners or to orphans, they would grind them up and use them as fertilizer. Because it's like, what else are we going to do with these giant ocean bugs, these terrifying ocean insects? What else are you going to do with these awful things? Well, and speaking of alien bugs, the beans that we get in these pods, right, truly looks like the larvae of aliens. And then the way that turns into chocolate is humans pull the beans out. They ferment those.

Then they transport them to a dry place, so a whole separate location, for drying, cleaning, roasting, shelling, grinding, liquefication, and then division into their solid components and butter components. I know that was a very long list, but the point is that this is really, really complicated to get the basics of chocolate at all. And so it's amazing that people initially in Mesoamerica were able to do it. Really cool. Yeah. And as we're about to discuss, this part from that that is missing traditionally is where

you add tons and tons of sugar, which is why what they were enjoying as chocolate is not what you have thinking in your mind. It was not sweet, but we'll get into that. Yeah, and when you ferment something, it stinks a whole bunch, too. So that's another part of the process that's fascinating to me, because I've seen people make chocolate from these cacao. I Googled it and watched someone make chocolate from a cacao pod because I was interested. And the funniest part was when she fermented the beans and she pulls this this um top that she has off off of the thing she's been fermenting and look at her face when the smell hit her it was really funny she was like that is not what i expected that to

smell like but fermentation is always stinky yeah that in in the pandemic when everybody was making sourdough bread i kind of stuck to just buying it at stores. I did not want to deal with the smelly, weird part where there's goopy stuff and it smells. No, thanks. I'm lazy. It's the farts of billions of microbes. Yeah, I got my own farts to contend with. Come on.

Can't handle that. But, and yeah, and from here we can get into, there's a couple takeaways and big takeaways that are the rest of the episode. And the first one, takeaway number one. Chocolate has a fuzzy cultural and biological link to love. It's very fuzzy what it has to do with love, whether it's fundamentally biological or constructed culture. And as we said, kind of springboarding off of that Valentine's Day episode, this is a question I am very excited to have an answer to, even though it's not a completely solid answer. It's got to be one of those things, because we're going to get

into the actual biological mechanism seems really weak, but we're going to get into some details. I think it's one of those things where like so many superstitions that this thing gives you whatever it's an aphrodisiac or whatever, like it always comes down to some sort of cultural placebo effect. And it feels like there's just always room in the culture for this, this thing. I don't know. It builds confidence or something, but as we'll get into the substance they were consuming back then, very, very don't know, it builds confidence or something, but as we'll get into the, the, the substance they were consuming back then, very, very different from what, what we're thinking of now. But, but the connotation is very much, you know, cause again,

once, once you turn it over to capitalism now, it's just like, Oh, here's something we can put in the ads. Chocolate is women love chocolate is, is the thing I guess. Yeah, that's true. It's like it's a tasty enough thing where everybody's excited about it. So then you can just invent kind of anything around it. But as far as these links here, the key sources here are two books. One of them is the one I mentioned before, Chocolate of Global History by Sarah Moss and Alexander Badenoch. The other is called Chocolate, A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light. That is by Mort Rosenblum. I was going to cite McGill University Office of Science and Society and Mental Floss and also a piece by lecturer P. Lars Asweda at University of Texas, Austin.

chocolate works. And starting with the cultural angle on it, before the 1500s AD, chocolate was exclusive to the Americas, in particular Mesoamerica, because that was where the tree grows. So that's where you have it. And it was consumed as a beverage there, which we'll talk about a lot in the next takeaway. You get a caveat with this where it's very hard to find solid information on Mayan life and Aztec life because Spanish invaders destroyed as many records as they could. But Moss and Badnock say that liquid chocolate was a core part of Aztec diet and society. They would get the beans from conquered peoples through trade or tribute, and they often drank it after meals. It was considered a high status food. Yeah. And this is where I had immediately asked the liquid they were drinking,

like, would that be the equivalent of like Hershey's chocolate syrup now? Because like, let's say the queen of England after a meal, she was spotted drinking directly from a bottle of Hershey's chocolate syrup. That would actually be seen as a low status thing for her to be doing. That would probably get the British tabloids talking. Where it sounds like back then that was actually considered fancy. That's such a good visual. That's the British baking show, am I right? That's what I want. Yeah.

The queen sucking a tab. show am i right that's what i want yeah the queen second attempt uh yeah this it as far as the loose records go it seems like it was it was closer to hot cocoa like it's not a thick liquid and probably a lot less sweet than what we're used to because like chocolate syrup today is mostly added sugar according to home recipes i could find and just looking at a bottle of it. So we're guessing that the Aztec recipes were a little bitter tasting because most of the modern chocolate we enjoy, I think, Jason, as you said, it's a bunch of added sugar to make it that sweet dessert. This was more of a bitter, what you might think of as dark chocolate kind of taste. But it feels very much like the equivalent of coffee, like something that's warm or hot,

and then it's just got a little bit of a bitter taste that whatever feeling that satisfies in us. Because even, you know, again, we can say, well, for us, it's all about the caffeine, but that's not true. Decaf coffee is a thing. Some people just enjoy the hot cup of bitter liquid completely separate from that and it feels like this is probably close to the same sensation that it just had it's like a

palate cleansing thing after a meal or whatever yeah yeah i don't i don't know how you down a whole cup of chocolate but i guess it's the sugar that would mess me up so if it's like the bitter really dark chocolate i don't know would that be good to drink a whole cup of chocolate i'd be very curious to make some that mimics if we even know like the specific way they made it and just see what it's like like if i knew specifically how they were doing it, maybe it may be really smooth or something. I don't know. Or it could just be that everything they were eating was terrible and this was just the least terrible of the things they had to drink. Yeah. That sounds very plausible to me. Right. It's this or our accident cheese. So what's it going to be?

I mean, people forget that a lot of water was undrinkable through a lot of history. So a lot of the drinks that have been made were a result of trying to make water tolerable somehow. That makes sense. It would be better than like whatever like little rodents you caught in the forest that day and a cup of chocolate. That does sound good. Yeah. Or like they don't have chocolate on hand and you're like can you believe they served me opossum and did not serve chocolate with it like that's an obvious faux pas that's just a mistake we're not going over to me to be dead serious in terms of like

washing an aftertaste out of your mouth like that's extremely plausible again it's anybody studied history knows there's these centuries and centuries where world trade and civilization was all about pursuing spices, right? It was all about the spice trade. Well, that's because the stuff they were eating, it was like, yeah, you're eating a rotten elk that you found on the trail and being able to salt it made it something you could actually eat and it wouldn't make you throw up. It wasn't, you know, about making fine delicacies in your hovel. It was about making the dried meat you were chewing on something you could tolerate. So it may have been

something like that where it just, whatever the terrible aftertaste of the food you had eaten, like that where it just whatever the terrible aftertaste of the food you had eaten here was something that kind of overcame it and and cleansed it i don't know yeah that makes a lot of sense to me i think i think that's a good theory again it's it's a combination of that after dinner thing and the spice thing for it seems like especially mayans according to what records we can get throughout mayan times chocolate was drank as a core part of stuff like wedding rituals. And Moss and Badnock in their books say that it's possible it was a cultural practice, sort of like alcohol at a modern American wedding. Cause you know, it's not like alcohol is exclusive to weddings and it's not like it's totally sacred in a church wine way, but you want to toast with it and you want to show that you're

celebrating and feel like you're celebrating by having it. It's a beverage with special significance that also feels great. I want to come back to that in a moment, because that's something that's going to keep coming up, where it almost holds the place in their culture that alcohol does in ours, but it doesn't do what alcohol does. It's really interesting to me. This beverage, again, as far as we know, the Aztecs especially, they saw it as a drink that was like, it's a high status food. It's a fancy food. It's an after dinner drink that you enjoy as you be high status.

But within all that, there were also romantic contexts put around it, either by Europeans accurately reporting this or not. But records say that Spanish soldier Bernal Diaz del Castillo, he claimed that the Aztec Emperor Montezuma II used chocolate to fuel himself sexually. There was also Hernan Cortes, who is a monster of history and formed a relationship with an Aztec princess. She introduced him to liquid chocolate laced with chili peppers, allegedly to increase his libido. And there were also Spanish sources claiming that Aztec soldiers could drink chocolate and then march all day without needing food, without needing rest. So accurately or not, Europeans said this is a sex thing for the Aztecs and we'll see it that way too. Yeah. This is what I stumbled across when we were trying to do the

Valentine's day episode that made me think there's a rabbit hole here because this is something, this is what separates chocolate from all of the other, like there's no equivalent for pick another candy that's been around forever. Peppermint, you know, caramel's been around forever. Butterscotch. There's no equivalent for those like there is with chocolate that persists for centuries where there's something different about chocolate. Like there's some substances that just have a different meaning in society. just have a different meaning in society. And here's the first time we hear them talking about chocolate the way they normally we talk about like alcohol or caffeine, a drug. But the difference is those actually do have those properties like tea spread around the world because people drink it.

And it's like, oh yeah, I drank it and I could stay awake longer. They didn't know what caffeine was, but they knew that tea leaves kept them awake. Tea kept them awake. Later coffee did the same thing. And so those rumors were true. Yeah. You drink coffee, you can stay up all night. You can march all night. You can do, you can do whatever. And here they're using like this liquid chocolate, this chocolate laced with dried chili peppers, which, by the way, not to get too crude, drinking a cup of that would have me on the toilet for the rest of the day. But they're just talking about chocolate. And you're going to see them reference it again and again, where they're using chocolate in a context where it sounds like they're talking about wine or even a stimulant kind of drug, but there's nothing in chocolate that we know about that would cause it to happen. And some listeners are already saying, well, chocolate's got caffeine in it. It has a very

small amount, not enough to do what they're talking about, not enough to give you sexual superpowers. Yeah. The more we're talking about it, I wonder if part of the mysticality around it has to do with the status thing. Like the fact that there were some, probably a lot of people that couldn't afford to have chocolate, but only the rich people had it. And then they were like, why did the rich people like this chocolate so much? What are they doing with it? Probably having a whole bunch of sex. Yeah. I bet that's what they're doing with it. Like I can see it developing that mythos amongst the lower class because they just never had it. And it was like this, you know, powerful status thing do? Right. It doesn't do anything. It, what it does is it's hard to get. And because it's hard to get, it has value. And so here it may just be, it's like,

oh yeah, we had to, we had to work, you know, a hundred workers chopping these beans off the trees and then processing them and cooking them and fermenting them. And it's like, yeah, it takes a hundred guys working a week to get one small barrel of this stuff. Of course it must be amazing. We put all this effort into it. It must do something. I remember hitting like drinking age and then having that type of discovery with champagne, which is the grossest alcohol to me, but everybody had been talking it up for so long. I was like, there has, there has to be something good about it. I'm going to keep like trying to figure it out, but it's just not my taste. It's not my flavor. It's fine. Well, the people, I still think that like, I don't drink alcohol and I occasionally run into an article claiming that

the people that, that insist they have to have this expensive $200 a shot scotch, that they can tell the difference. It's like they absolutely cannot. If you give them a blind taste test, they cannot tell the difference between the $200 scotch that's been aged in a specific barrel in Scotland versus something they would have gotten from Costco. It is purely a mental, I'm so sophisticated, I can enjoy this drink that tastes like gasoline. Like I have such a sophisticated palate. It's like, no, you don't.

You're just saying that. But it came from such an old building in Scotland. It has to be good. They aged this for 70 years. Yeah. They had to have done it for a reason. Them's the rules. Yeah.

And then as far as the growth of chocolate, sort of beyond this Spanish invasion and attack of the Aztecs, 1500s Europeans start importing it from the Americas. They also viewed it as exotic. Europeans start importing it from the Americas. They also viewed it as exotic. And a few of them tried to like make a point of not getting into it to seem more European. There was an Italian historian named Girolamo Benzoni, who said that chocolate, quote, seemed more a drink for pigs who got way into it, you were sort of seen as going native and also with some implication that native people are more sexual than European people like that. That also, you know, they took the racism that they were so full of and they made that part of the sexual connotation of chocolate. Yeah, but that's not the first time you're going to see them almost reference enjoying chocolate as a kind of perversion. Sure, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's just like a game of telephone. Like the poor people were like, it must be really good.

And I bet it also makes them have a lot of sex. And then the Europeans are like, all these people are saying this is what it does. So we should consider that when we bring it over. It's very dangerous and sexual this this drink well and also there is no better marketing for a substance than to have a bunch of stuffy people saying well you better stay away because it will make you have all kinds of sex right it's just so radical don't go near it yeah this is you can't handle this it's it's like okay well well, you've now guaranteed that we'll still be eating that literally 500 years later.

Good job. That always works. Yeah. Because also Europeans, they stack that marketing up with this being seen as a royal substance because it was initially common among the spanish aristocracy it was seen as like a spanish colonial good and then the spanish aristocracy spread it through other royal houses and apparently in particular there was a wedding between francis louis the 16th and princess maria theresa of spain in60. And that's seen as a landmark event of chocolate, like

hopping to the next royal house and then all the other ones from there. So this was like the sexy, dangerous royal substance to the continent of Europe. And so then people were of course obsessed with it. Like, how do you not? Yeah, weddings always have a big effect on usually like the the pastry industry or what's being eaten at the time and the fashion at the time, like whatever the bride war usually affects the dress of the era, which is because there wasn't much going on. And if there was a wedding, everyone was writing about it and talking about it. And so finally, news was like most of the peasants felt like, oh, news that isn't a war. Oh, good. Yeah, right.

And yeah, and then into modern times, we on the Valentine's episode mentioned that Cadbury put out a heart shaped chocolate box in 1861. You know, sometime between the 1600s European royal houses and today that that cultural element really got emphasized. But, you know, from there, it's kind of self propagating, like we're saying, like it becomes something everyone tells everyone else and then they think it. Well, and there's a thing that we the whole Lydia, the whole phenomenon of you mentioned that if you search for stock photos of sad woman after a breakup, she's always stuffing her face with chocolate and i think that's like the kathy comic strips i think that's a thing that she does is another

thing where she like starts eating a bunch of chocolate because she's sad yeah like that's a thing yeah yeah that came up is like the stereotypical you know oh a woman is hormonal so she craves chocolate which again i don't know if that's a marketing thing. We certainly could find no—and again, we're going to get into the chemical stuff. We certainly could find no medical connection aside from it's something you enjoy eating. But again, it's never she's having a breakup, so she sits down to eat a bunch of butterscotch candy. It's got to be chocolate. It's claiming there's something mystical about the chocolate that will make the sad woman feel better.

Yeah, there's always like a throwaway line in romantic comedies when a woman's experiencing that breakup at the beginning of the movie where her friends are like, oh, we're going to need a lot of chocolate for this. Or Elle Woods famously is sitting in bed eating a big box of chocolates after her breakup at the beginning of that movie and throws it at the screen and says liar when one of the guys is talking about love and I always think that's really funny I don't know why but like it's just become so ingrained and I love the stock photos of it which are women crying with like mascara streaming down their face and they're like just looking at a bar of chocolate. So sad. Like as if it did something to them.

I don't know. It's really funny to me. Yeah. Sad woman with chocolate is a great, great Google. And it seems to be. Why am I saying seems to be? It is culturally constructed because looking at the biology here, the short version is chocolate has incredibly small amounts of some chemicals and attributes

that maybe could be related to love, but overall there's just not enough of any of the stuff we're about to describe for it to fully be a love potion or a grieving love substance or anything else. It's just got a couple chemicals in it that would not turn people into sex freaks or anything else. Sorry, Europe, I guess. It's fine. But the first chemical here, Mort Rosenblum's book says chocolate is high in phenylethylamine. And phenylethylamine is an organic compound. It might improve a person's mood, but chocolate just doesn't have very much

of it. And then also the McGill Office of Science and Society, they say that people who are in love have had their brains studied, right? Like brain scan type of stuff. And apparently they have higher levels of phenylethylamine in their brains than the not in love people, which is a very fun set of subjects to gather, I assume. But anyway, most of the phenylethylamine that we consume in chocolate gets metabolized during digestion. So it's not going to the brain. It's not really contributing to that phenomenon. They also say you can get much more phenylethylamine from a food like sauerkraut which is extremely not chocolate in these tropes it's the opposite yeah that's that's my favorite fact in this that the true the true sex food would be sauerkraut. Yeah. Oh, no.

And Germans, famously not the sexiest society. I just love the idea of a woman sad over a breakup, and she just stuffs her face into a big bowl of sauerkraut to make herself feel better. Oh, our friends are like, oh, we're going to need a lot of sauerkraut for this. Go get the sad oompa band. We need to heal our German friend from this heartbreak. Very excited how my people are coming up in this show. It's really great.

And because also, like, as I was researching this, I ended up looking at some clickbaity stuff and then tossing it, but some of it will just tell you that thing of like, oh, chocolate has phenylethylamine. So love, love, love, but it doesn't work like that. There's no evidence of an addictive response in humans, like the idea of a chocoholic is made up. It's just that people like chocolate more than some other people. And if chocolate does have a biological impact on humans, it's oddly a healthy one. According to John R. Lupien of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, quote, cocoa is a veritable storehouse of natural minerals, more so than almost any other food item, end quote. Also, Moss and Badenoch's book excites nutritionist Deborah Waterhouse. She argues that women crave chocolate in response to a genuine bodily need for these minerals. It helps their bodies.

That's why they want it. And there's other good stuff, too. Mort Rosenblum says chocolate is full of antioxidants, also has a small amount of caffeine, which we all enjoy. Both those things make it similar to green tea. But in the end, it's mostly just chocolate. All of these different chemicals and minerals and things are at pretty low levels. And most mass-produced chocolate has a bunch of sugar in it. So in the end, it's just a treat.

And any powerful love or sex-related elements of it are stuff we've just put on it. So, so in the end, it's just a treat and, and any like powerful love or sex related elements of it are stuff we've just put on it. And really hard to over, overstate most of the chocolate you're grabbing out of the candy bar aisle or whatever. The chocolate is a flavoring for just a bunch of sugar. Yeah. Right. Like it's, you're not, it's hard to connect this with the substance that historically people were eating and drinking. Many of them would not recognize what we're consuming today. Because again, the primary ingredient is sugar or cocoa butter or whatever the other ingredients are that make it taste very smooth and sweet.

And then the chocolatey essence of it is almost just like, like barely there. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Cause really dark chocolate is, is bitter is I would say the main taste of it. Yeah.

And I mainly as an adult love bitter flavor. And so, yeah, when I've had that, I'm like, Oh, now we're, now we're doing something interesting.

Like the super sweet chocolate is just fine. But this stuff where it's it's basically all tannin type flavors and most people don't like it. Great. Really exciting. Really good. It's a very German opinion of you to have. Bitter is the best taste. But in general, I I do think that's really interesting when trying to nail down the connection between chocolate and love lust emotion whatever it's kind of the closest comparison i can think of is the connection between the color red and love, sex, emotion, whatever.

Like there's no, biologically you get excited by the color red, I guess because it's the color of blood. Like there's receptors in your brain that just, you know, there's a reason why like stop signs are red, fire engines are red, stoplights are, you know, red means stop. Your brain just is attracted to red a little bit more than other colors for evolutionary reasons. And so the connection between, okay, therefore, you know, Valentine's day hearts are red, you know, things that we connect with love are red. It's like tenuous,

but there's still a reason for it here. It really just does seem like chocolate makes you feel physically feel just enough to boost something that otherwise is purely cultural and as lydia said it's class-based it's a lot of but it's basically a superstition and whatever chocolate does do for you it's just enough to like activate a placebo effect where it's like, oh, I am getting sexually aroused drinking this. It's like, well, yeah, it's because they told you that's what happens. You know, it's same thing with all of the, the, you go to the aisle and the drugstore and it's got all the placebos, all of the probiotics and all of the supplements that don't do anything.

And somewhere in the men's aisle, there's, you know, section of herbs that will enhance sexual performance. And it's like, well, with men, so much of it is just self-doubt and anxiety and stuff like that, that if you just give them something that makes them believe it gives them sexual superpowers, it will. Because all it's really doing is making them, it's a placebo. And there are so many things in the culture that that's all they are. Yeah, because the status part of it was removed at some point, you know, and we kept up with the chocolate.

So there's something in it that we're like experiencing, obviously, other than just a bunch of sugar. Or maybe like by the time the status thing wore off, we had the sugar in it. Once capitalism got hold of it, now it's just pure how they chose to market it. Yeah, marketing. Come in the late 1800s when they started manufacturing heart-shaped boxes of chocolate and said, this is the thing you're required to buy on Valentine's Day. This is the thing you want required to buy on Valentine's day. Uh, this is the thing you want when you're sad because you know, and now their profits are based on convincing you that's what you eat when

you're sad. Now that this, this is the point in history where it's all of the cultural stuff disappears and it's just purely how somebody chose to sell it. Yeah. I wonder if they ever did advertise the sadness aspect of it. Cause that would be a wild way to, Hey, do you feel like eat this? You'll feel a little better. Like those ladies from the stock photos are like, surely this will only be in weird internet articles or whatever. And then it's on billboards. It's in time square. Like it's, it's the whole angle. No, the most, the best example of what I just mentioned, the most insidious thing, if you want to see on your shelf is where they are selling chocolate. That is, it's a diet chocolate that they've marketed as guilt-free. Oh yeah. And it's

like, well, it actually never occurred to me to feel guilty eating the normal version until you told me your version was guilt free. It's like, don't you don't you feel like a fat sack of chocolate? Well, here's some that you can feel good about eating. It's like, no, I actually never felt that. But now I do. Now, yeah, it's attached to like every emotion. Do you feel guilty? Eat eat some chocolate do you feel sad eat some chocolate do you feel like are you in love eat some chocolate yeah true time to

celebrate with some chocolate you angry sure why not chocolate yeah it even it had kind of a lasting effect of branding as an energy source like we knew, I think going in that there's some caffeine in chocolate, which is true, but apparently it's much less caffeine than coffee or tea. Like there's just a trace amount of the beans. And I was looking at various sources, countryliving.com says one cup of coffee has about 10 times the caffeine of a hot chocolate. Like it's, there's far less in chocolate. It also contains a substance called theobromine, which is relaxing and euphoric, but not energizing. But in the past, especially a couple hundred years, there was a whole push of chocolate will turn you into an

energy dynamo. There was that belief that Aztec soldiers could march all day with it. And Moss and Badenoch cite a 1906 European treatise claiming chocolate had more caffeine than coffee. And it also said tea had more than both. It was just fully inaccurate. But like lots of people across the centuries have believed that chocolate was a Red Bull or a Monster Energy drink or something. And I think it's just because they psyched themselves into thinking that was what was happening. Well, and today, like the Snickers commercials are based entirely on chocolate will manage your moods. Yeah, right. Are you acting like a monster?

You need a Snickers bar. That'll turn you back into a normal person. Like that's such a genius of marketing where it's literally being pushed as an anti-psychotic prescription medication that your anti-personality disorder can successfully be treated with a Snickers bar. Yeah, that is. Are you angry? Eat chocolate. Every emotion. They're covering the whole wheel of them.

All right. Off of that, we're going to a short break, followed by the big takeaways. See you in a sec. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.

and NPR. for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. When there's there's one other big takeaway for this, and it covers the whole history chocolate going into takeaway number two. Solid chocolate only became a more common product than liquid chocolate within the last 200 years. That's wild. And I think that will be very surprising to people. Like the chocolate bar and the Hershey's Kisses, the other like solid chocolates we have, that's really from the 1800s on. Before that, chocolate was primarily a drink.

that chocolate was primarily a drink. It'd be like finding out a few hundred years from now that like in the future, wine is only consumed in like jello form. They'd be shocked that we used to drink it because people just walk around biting off hunks of it or whatever. I'm imagining very fancy future people having like the jello shots from that one bar I used to live near, you know, like, great. Yeah, cool. Yeah, but in a very sophisticated way, like sipping the jello shots, taking little chunky bites of it, but little tiny ones. It's like on a stick, like a popsicle.

Enjoy your chunks of wine. Thank you. Yes, I just got elected president. Yes, that's what's going on now. And that's how I'm celebrating. Publicly. Yep. Because there's basically three eras of chocolate production across history.

And the first one is that origin we were talking about. production across history. And the first one is that origin we were talking about. Mesoamerican native peoples started harvesting cocoa beans from cacao trees and making hot chocolate drinks starting about 3,500 years ago. If people have heard the vanilla episode featuring guest Lydia Bug, we talked about on the episode, a kind of similar economy going on with vanilla, where one group of people who were good at harvesting it would harvest it, and then empires like the Aztecs would receive that in trade. And there was this whole Mesoamerican economy around harvesting, transporting, processing these beans from very, very finicky plants. I've been calling them the Aztecs, a better name is

the Triple Alliance, according to Charles Seaman. But they viewed chocolate as a thing for the rich in small amounts after a meal. There were also Europeans who claimed that there were people in the Triple Alliance mixing chocolate with human blood. But it turns out that's because one of the traditional ingredients of the Aztec chocolate drink was a red food coloring called annatto. So it's just they like to color it along with other things. And yeah, we think the chocolate they were drinking was very, very bitter with no added sugar. I mean, I think if you went back and drank the actual, you went back in a time machine and drank what the Aztecs were drinking, like I bet it's very difficult to mimic today what they actually had.

And I don't doubt that it was bitter. But I really have to emphasize how much stuff like this is kind of a culturally acquired taste. I think if you went back to the Aztecs and gave them a Diet Coke, they would think they were being poisoned. Or gave them a Red Bull. I think they would think you had being poisoned or gave them a red bull. I think they would, they would think you had tried to kill them. And it's like, well, this is culturally, we are used to carbonation. We are used to that sting on the tongue. Like it is kind of addictive. And they're not. And the same thing, like, you know, in some countries,

like in Mexico, a lot of candy is salty, which is crazy to us. But it's like, well, yeah, but if you grew up with that, it's the same thing with people growing up with Marmite. If you didn't grow up with it, you don't understand it. You don't understand why people would eat it or why you would want to have that on toast. So much of these tastes are, they don't objectively taste good. They're not, they don't objectively taste good. It's things that you kind of grew up with or that someone handed it to you. Like again, like a shot of scotch and said, this is fancy. This is a fancy liquid.

You like this. So the actual, sure. It feels like it set your throat on fire, but it's like, yeah, but I associate that with the feelings I got later and all of that and the atmosphere and the ritual of drinking it. That all plays into it. That kind of makes it even funnier to think about people like drinking that because it's supposed to like put you in the mood, but it tastes terrible. And they're just like choking it down. Like, well, I gotta, I gotta drink this. But you know, the placebo effect works better when on stuff that tastes bad anybody that sells fake medicine or fake supplements will tell you if you can make it taste

mediciney or unpleasant people are more likely to believe in it because it's like well it must work because it tastes horrible like a medicine you know so this you you handed this this magical potion that's going to make you do something if it tastes awful it's like oh yeah this must be a magical potion this tastes like a witch brewed this using frogs or whatever eye of newt i see this is how we market diet coke to the triple, this is how we market Diet Coke to the Triple Alliance. This is how we convince them. We'll be like, see how much you hate this? It's a magic health substance from our people.

There we go. All we'd have to do is read the actual ingredients from Diet Coke. They'd be like, oh my God. Yeah, this must be really powerful because everything you've listed there sounds like it's very bad for me. Yeah, the sting is how you know it's working, you guys. It's good. The fact that it will eat right through a turkey bone that you put into it if you let it soak overnight, that it will chew right through that. That's how you know it has power.

That's how you know it has power. Linda, and with chocolate, before researching, I had vaguely heard of drinking chocolate in Aztec times. And then, of course, we have modern chocolate today. There's a whole middle era where Europeans in the 15, 16, 1700s and even beyond tried to do drinking chocolate. Like they said, oh, I've heard of these Mesoamericans enjoying that. Chocolate in Europe will be a beverage that we drink primarily for like energy or for an alcohol type role where you do it socially. So there's this whole amazing second era where that's going on. And this lines up with the history of vanilla. If people remember that episode, the Spanish invade the Aztec empire,

the Triple Alliance, and then starting in 1519, they bring both vanilla and cacao back with them to Europe. And much like with vanilla, Spain was seen as the main country for it in the 1500s. We talked about royal marriages spreading it. And then you see many European countries adopt chocolate drinking as a fancy, energizing luxury drink. And in particular, in England in the 1600s, there start to be businesses called chocolate houses. And I know that sounds like a candy store, but a chocolate house was where men would gather to drink chocolate as they like did business deals, talked about politics, talked about culture. It was a fancy hangout bar kind of thing where you're drinking. So cute.

Yeah. And where they're drinking like liquid chocolate based on an imitation Aztec recipe. And this is what I was alluding to earlier, where they're using it as an alcohol substitute. Because normally you think of these men as drinking brandy, right? Or something like that. They're sitting around with brandy and their cigars and they're plotting eugenics or whatever. It's 1600 England or whatever they talked about back then,

you know, about colonizing this new part of the world. Yeah. You know, these barons or whatever, you think of them as sitting around drinking some sort of liquor, and they were drinking chocolate instead. The difference is that alcohol actually has chemical properties that acts as the social lubricant, that it lowers inhibitions and it makes people loosen up. And chocolate doesn't have that. Whatever effect they were getting from sitting around drinking chocolate was pure placebo as far as I know.

Right. Yeah. It's the same. The one constant through all this time is that the biological effects we were talking about, you know, like the main difference is the modern kind has a bunch of sugar added, but either way, there's just not enough of any chemical you'd talk up to really affect somebody's behavior. Yeah, I'm so sad that this isn't still a thing, because when you read about the past, a lot of what you have to keep in mind is like, well, they were really drunk at the time. A lot of people were smashed constantly.

So some of the crazy stuff they did,'m like oh yeah i know why they did that they were all like drinking at a bar together and they're like you know what's a great idea we should invade france or whatever that doesn't happen if you're sitting around drinking chocolate we should have kept doing that yeah and they uh they tried to make it in the way that the mesoamericans did uh they didn't try to include human blood or anything but they tried to make it in the way that the Mesoamericans did. They didn't try to include human blood or anything, but they tried to do that recipe, that style. And also Europeans created an increasing demand for chocolate and met it by doing horrible imperialism things. They enslaved people, they conquered places. Apparently nearly 10% of the volume of the whole transatlantic slave trade

went to Portuguese cacao plantations in Brazil, 10% of the whole trade across the Atlantic there. So this is a thing where Europeans say we're going to do that Mesoamerican beverage, and it's going to be a core part of our terrible imperialism. And that'll be chocolate for like, a couple centuries is that it's an energy drink coming from this. And I don't want to like just blow off this fact or skip right over it. The reason this is not unique to chocolate is that basically at that stage,

kind of everything worked that way. Like anything that was in demand that was being shipped around the world, whether you're talking about spices, whether you're talking about tobacco, coffee beans, anything like that, you're going to find at some stage there was a lot of slave trade involved in it because you've got any case where something grows better here, I'm pointing at an imaginary globe, but all of the buyers for it are over here whether you're talking about grapes for wine or herbs or anything you're gonna find

like europeans who enslaved people and and were using slave labor you know in their colonies or whatever to to grow the stuff harvest it put it on a boat ship it around the world, harvest it, put it on a boat, ship it around the world, and sell it in a marketplace. It's just, it kind of was universal with that kind of commodity. Yeah, totally. This chocolate ends up being the horrible imperialist commodity that everything is. You know, cotton and things. Sure.

Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. Silk, I mean, take your pick. Yeah. And also, we won't really get into it much but i'll link a bit about there being some forced labor in chocolate production today

and if you can possibly buy chocolate that's labeled as fair trade or labeled as not not forced labor that is a good thing to do it's it's a thing that goes on uh not just in the past yeah i i kind of knew that that that was still kind of a big problem today, and that fair trade chocolate is a good thing if you can find it. Because, yeah, that's sad that that's still a thing. Well, it's similar to fair trade coffee, diamonds, anything like that. The issue is the way the markets work, it's actually extremely difficult to track down the exact source of where these beans came from. contract to some middle company that then turns around and sells them on a wholesale market to Nestle or whoever. And it kind of builds like plausible deniability for everybody involved.

It's like, well, we didn't know that these, any of these beans came from this one plantation that was using the child labor. We just knew this was where they were cheapest. It takes extra effort to actually make sure that you're getting your stuff that was made by people that were at least getting paid and were not children. For sure, yeah. And chocolate remains a capitalist commodity, but a surprisingly recent turn happens where it becomes something that is eaten in a solid form. Again, only about 200 years old. And surprisingly, one incident is kind of the spark

for the whole thing. In 1806, specific year, 1806, Napoleon is the leader of France and invades and conquers Spain and Portugal. And then that sets off a set of conflicts called the Peninsular Wars. Him doing that is very disruptive to the liquid chocolate economy, because Spanish and Portuguese colonies are where the cocoa beans are coming from, for the most part. They took this opportunity, in many cases, to declare independence, because that controlling country in Europe got invaded and disrupted. So they're like, great, we're our own country now. The Spanish and Portuguese fleet that brought the chocolate to Europe gets disrupted. And so you have a thing where fancy Europeans who have been drinking chocolate as their alcohol slash coffee type hangout beverage

for a couple centuries, now this supply is interrupted. And that ends up being part of the spark for drinking coffee becoming more popular, drinking tea becoming more popular, because those are both coming from Asia, it's a separate system. There are also places where other beverages take off. There's one called salep that is from roasted orchid roots that becomes popular in the Ottoman Empire. There's also chicory, which is a caffeine free herb that becomes a coffee tasting-ish drink in France and also in modern New Orleans today. With all that going on, you also have inventors saying, what can we do with the cocoa beans we have? And they proceed to develop machines and systems that let you make solid versions of chocolate.

And that's where that comes from. Until this disruption in this particular supply chain happened, people might have just kept on doing Mesoamerican-style drinking chocolate, for all we know. So if Napoleon ever got George Bailey'd, they were like, this is... What's that show? It's a Wonderful Life? It's a wonderful life. Yeah. Like without you, we wouldn't have solid chocolate. There are so many little like kind of sliding door scenarios on history where you would never guess the repercussions of the specific thing hadn't happened that has that would seem to have no no connection whatsoever but yeah there's a lot of those i no joke i just finished reading a

biography of napoleon and i think he really would have loved any distraction in the end times when he was on little islands being exiled like oh you're an angel with news about alternative timelines great i have years to kill let's do it yeah keep talking i'm so bored yeah well from from anyone who had anything nice to say about him at the end there yeah i've been reading about that's kind of funny because i've been reading about the final napoleonic wars too it's really interesting topic oh look at us. Wow. Yeah. Napoleon buddies. We should do a Napoleon show. We'll do it later. Anyway. Great. Yeah. Sorry. Distraction. Sorry.

No, it was thrilling. Yeah. And so, so European inventors start working on this problem where they say, okay, the sliding doors has put us in a world where we're light on cocoa beans. And one of the main people in this is a Dutch inventor named Conrad van Houten. And in 1828, he develops a hydraulic press to extract cocoa butter from chocolate, which allows the creation of solid bars of chocolate. Then a German company founded by J.M. Lehmann becomes the main manufacturer of this. And they outfit new companies like Cadbury in the UK, J.S. Fry & Sons in the UK, eventually Hershey's in the US. There are other inventors that I'm going to skip over, too. There's just this progression of people, slowly in the 1800s,

inventing all the different parts of making a chocolate bar. And then initially, chiefly in Europe, and then eventually in the rest of the world, salad chocolate and bar chocolate becomes the norm. But it really takes until the late 1800s for that to be a big thing. Yeah. And the sheer volume and availability and low cost of chocolate today is one of the million little things that a time traveler from 200 years ago would faint at the sight of. Yeah. Like they would think our computers are magic, but the thing that would stun them is how

available clean water is. And then the stuff that they saw as luxury food items, how a working person can get it for almost nothing. And there's just aisles and aisles of it. And we don't even, we don't even care. We, we throw it in the trash. We it's, it's, uh, yeah, that's something that's this difficult to make. It takes this much processing work labor that it can be this abundant at this cost on the

other side of the planet, uh, is stunning. It's yeah. Or even like how now we have Cadbury chocolate like i knew of it like and we got it at easter because we had the eggs and everything and i was like this is like the best chocolate and then i moved to a city and i realized in cities you have cadbury chocolate all the time in like british section of the grocery store which is not a thing you have in a small town so when i moved to nash, I was so excited to be able to get Cadbury chocolate all the time at any grocery store. Yeah. And also a Easter is almost

like love, right? Like this is another thing where it's just a chocolate event and, you know, just kind of because we decided like there's not Easter bunny DNA in it or something. It's not related for any reason. It doesn't make sense. It's not biblical. Yeah, there'd be a dark origin for the chocolate at Easter. Oh, it's got Easter bunny DNA in it. If you eat it, you become a little bit Easter bunny, so don't eat too much.

I think that's a case where that's just pure the capitalist and advertisers taking over. Yeah. Christmas? Chocolate Santa. Halloweeneen chocolate chocolate chocolate shaped like a pumpkin easter chocolate bunny bite the ears right off the bunny it's uh yeah pick the occasion chocolate always chocolate that's it's trust us this is the day you eat chocolate. Super Bowl Sunday, chocolate. Tax day, have some chocolate to feel better about your taxes.

Legitimately surprised I haven't seen that angle in an ad. Yeah, because that is that's kind of the last step of all these eras is that once there's solid chocolate, chocolate finally becomes not just for rich people. And apparently in late 1800s Europe, there were advertising campaigns where chocolate was advertised to poorer people and specifically as a combination of an energy boost and a meal replacement. It's like, oh, this will make you peppy and it'll save you money buying a sandwich

or a turkey or something. You can just have this chocolate, keep on doing your factory labor, and it'll save you money buying a sandwich or a turkey or something like you can just have this chocolate keep on doing your factory labor and it'll be great you'll love it and and so then and from there we get this whole era where i'm sure basically every listener could walk i don't know five minutes or to whatever the nearest business is and acquire some chocolate it wouldn't be hard i could walk to my desk right now and acquire three different kinds of chocolate. Yeah. Yeah.

Within arms. Yeah. Within arms length. Yeah. I'm walled in by sauerkraut, but if I dig out of here, I think I can find some. folks that is the main episode for this week my thanks to lydia bug and jason pargin for accepting me going full german on this one das ist gut anyway i said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on patreon.com,

patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is Milton S. Hershey. You probably know that last name. Visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than seven dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring chocolate with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. exploring chocolate with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, chocolate has a fuzzy cultural and biological link to love. Takeaway number two, solid chocolate only became a more common product than liquid chocolate within the last 200 years. Plus a huge range of stats, numbers, tree growth, Mesoamerica,

all kinds of other history, and so much more. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. Lydia Bug is a tremendous humor columnist for 1-900-HOTDOG. Doing amazing comedy writing there, also guesting on their podcast. Linking that and more comedy writing from Lydia, including that Trailer Park Boys comic book anthology. And she is at YouKnowLydia on Twitter. Jason Pargin, also on

Twitter. He is at JohnDiesAtTheEN on Twitter. And that is JohnDiesAtTheEnd minus a letter. Hey, speaking of John Dies at the End, the fourth book in that series is on the way. It is Jason's newest book. It is entitled If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. Please order ahead if you think you will have any interest in reading it, or if you don't think you will but want to be surprised. Either way, pre-orders are the lifeblood of books. That is how authors keep doing what they're doing. So please check it out. Many research sources this week.

Here are some key ones. And I leaned on two nonfiction books for this episode. They're each wonderful reads. One is called Chocolate, A Global History. That's by Sarah Moss and Alexander Badenach. And the other is called Chocolate, A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light, and that is by Mort Rosenblum. Also leaned on a huge slew of online resources

from institutions like McGill University, UT Austin, NPR. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons.

I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Thank you.