Stuff You Should Know - How Chocolate Works

Episode Date: November 19, 2013

People have been consuming chocolate for at least a couple thousand years, but it's only been in the last hundred that humanity has arrived at its crowning achievement: the smooth, creamy milk chocolate bar. Find out about the history of chocolate, how it's made and how it affects your mood in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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from HowStuffWorks.com. [♪ upbeat music playing Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and I'm with Charles W. Chuck Bryant. He's with me right now, drinking his La Croix. That's right. And Jerry's over there, fresh back from San Francisco. Like, everything's coming up aces in this room right now.

Just because we're here. Yeah, just because it's Stuff You Should Know. That's right. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. Hey, I'd like to shout out a little bit sweets. For no reason other than they make awesome candy. Well, yeah. You send it to us from time to time.

Although, it's been a little while. Well, we're doing chocolate today, and little bit sweets in Brooklyn, New York, now has a retail space. Oh, yeah, congratulations. At Chelsea Market. You ever been there? That's awesome. I have not. Yeah. Oh, wait, is that the one that's relatively new and awesome? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I wonder if they're rubbing elbows with Mario Batali and all that. Doesn't he have a place there? I don't know. I think he does. I've been through there, though. It's a cool place. That's neat. So congratulations to Liz and Jen of Little Bit Sweets. Congrats, you guys.

Go see them at Chelsea Market. They make great chocolate. And I'm going to ask Liz after this is released if we screwed it up really bad or if we got it pretty good. Oh, the chocolate thing? Yeah. Yeah. Because she'll know. Well, sure.

She's a chocolate tour. That's right. OK, that was nice of you, Chuck. Yeah. Chuck. Yes. Well, you just kind of screwed up my intro question. Oh, really? What was it?

Have I ever had chocolate? Do you know about chocolate? Yeah, I know a little bit about chocolate. I do, too, now. And I was surprised at reading this article. How closely this episode will probably resemble our coffee episode. I know you're going to say that. It's just like they're almost like two beans in the same pod.

Yeah. And some of the processes are similar. And yeah, I totally thought the same thing. Yeah, people are exploited in much the same way. Yeah, true. There's child slavery involved. Sure. Fair trade swoops in and tries to, like, correct that.

Yeah, there's beans. There's roasting. There's drying. Yeah. All sorts of similar processes. And there's aficionados, who, I imagine, can tell the difference between a bean grown one place and a bean grown another place, because it makes a difference as we'll find.

True. I think we should finish out. Maybe we could make a sweet and do wine. And then those would be kind of three similar. Well, no, we got to put it in with our, like, beer and cheese episodes, too. We'll call it the good life sweet. Let's add yachts at the end, just to cap it off.

It won? Oh, yachts. Yeah, beer, wine, cheese, chocolate. Yachts. Yachts. I never realized how ugly that word is until just now. Yeah. Yachts.

That's the way I said it. Even if you say it like it's spelled, is you come up with yachts. Yeah. Stupid word. So, Chuck. Yes. Chocolate, it turns out, is actually a pretty ancient thing.

Yeah. Like, eating chocolate. It grows from the cacao tree. Well, consuming chocolate. Right, OK, yes, nice catch. Yeah. They found a bowl from somewhere in Mesoamerica that dates back to, I think, 1,300 BCE.

Yeah. And it has residue, chocolate residue in it. Still? Yeah. Yeah, traces of it, yeah. Yeah. So we know that people have been consuming chocolate since at least 1,300 BCE.

It's highly unlikely that we just happened to find the first bowl that was ever used to consume chocolate for the first time. Right. And we know that the first record of somebody mentioning chocolate came about 300 AD. The Maya were drinking it back then. That's right.

Yeah. They offered it to the gods. Yes. It was highly cherished. It was. But it was a beverage. And for 90% of chocolate's life, it has been a beverage, gritty, frothy,

kind of bitter beverage. And then sometimes they would add cinnamon, hot pepper. Yeah. I like hot pepper and chocolate, by the way. Yeah, I do, too. Like the chili chocolates. So good. A nice sipping chocolate.

Well, no, I mean the hard variety. Oh, gotcha. It's good in like a sipping chocolate, too. Oh, really? You can come across that. OK. Yeah. So the Maya were the ones who really kind of founded

chocolate consumption, as we understand it. And then it was adopted by the Aztecs, who had a pretty short memory span, apparently. Because the Aztecs, the Triple Alliance, conquered the Maya at some point and said, hey, we like this chocolate. But we're going to forget that we got it from the Maya. We're going to say we got it from the god Ketzelkotl.

Right. And he was a god who was kicked out of the dominion of gods for giving chocolate to the Aztecs, as the Aztecs tell it. Which is not nice. What, getting kicked out? Yeah, for sharing your chocolate. You know? Yeah, because you're out chocolate.

And you got kicked out of the Pantheon. That's right. And the Aztecs called the chocolate, I'm going to pronounce that huacatelle. I think that's probably right. And this thought meant, I mean, bitter water. And like you said, they would add certain spices to it to make it more palatable.

But the gods and the kings and everyone thought it was like a super drink. So they would drink tons of it. Well, yeah, Montezuma was apparently fond enough of it that he drank like 50 cups of it a day. That's crazy. I think we said that in another one. That sounded familiar.

It did to me, too. Yeah. Or maybe he drank lots of coffee, too. I wonder what it was. I don't know. It was a currency? Yeah, there was actually a 16th century Aztec document that is basically a currency exchange for cacao pods.

No, for chocolate beans. There's like 100 of them buys a turkey. And it's a one for one exchange for a good tamale. That's a pretty good deal. Yeah, I'd take that. But the point is, it was sacred to the Mesoamericans. Yeah, it was currency. It was a big deal.

And then the Spaniards came along. And they said, where are you guys drinking? And they took a sip and they spit it out. And then they tried it again. They're like, maybe it's OK. And there's some pretty good quotes about what the Spaniards thought of chocolate and how it tasted.

Yeah, one of them comes from a Jesuit missionary. And he said, it is as loathsome to such as are not acquainted with it having a scum or froth that is very unpleasant taste. Yeah, I also saw another quote that said it was a Spaniard who referred to chocolate as a bitter drink for pigs. Yeah, I mean, really bitter chocolate, I can't stomach. No, and that's what they were drinking.

I mean, like the concept of sweet chocolate came thanks to Europe. And it came about this time. So who was it that conquered the Aztecs? Cortes. Cortes, the killer. Cortes basically said, all right, I'm going to take this chocolate,

and we're going to see what Europe does to it. And Europe went crazy for it. Yeah, of course, they sweetened it. Right, that was Europe's big addition to chocolate. Well, yeah. Adding sugarcane or honey or molasses or something to the chocolate to sweeten it. And all of a sudden, Europe is like, we like this.

Let's enslave the people to throw it. Cortes comes back and says, good news, they love the chocolate. And Montezuma and the rest of the Chipotle lines feel like that's great. We don't care. He's like, no, no, this does pertain to you. Yeah, good news and bad news. Right, exactly.

Bad news is you have a new great father. Meet my thunder stick. Sure, the boomstick. So what the Europeans did, they enslave them for a while, and then the demand rose. So they said, hey, why don't we just start growing this stuff in territories that we have conquered, which is you can only

grow the cacao tree within about 20 degrees north or south of the equator. The tropics, yeah. Yeah, and it likes very wet conditions. And it's also, apparently, the cacao tree is really finicky, which we'll talk about. But when they did figure out that they could plant it along the tropics, the cost of chocolate

dropped tremendously in Europe. Yeah, which was necessary to make it something that wasn't just for royalty. Right, and then still at this time, people were consuming it as a drink, even in Europe as well. But they were sweetening it. And then so you would have a person who got a whole of the beans, roasted them,

and then made their own chocolate and then sold it all in one place. Then the Industrial Revolution happened, and everybody applied the principles of industry to everything. You basically smash everything. Right, exactly, and see what happens. Use a machine and smash it, unless you're a Luddite,

and then you smash the machine itself. That's right. In 1828, there was a Dutch entrepreneur named Conrad Johannes van Houten. Do you think it a millhouse? Yeah, how can you not? No. And he was the first one to press the cacao bean, which

separates, and we'll get into all this later, but it essentially separated the cacao into the butter and the powder, the dry part. Right, and he figured out if you add a little more butter back into it, which is strange, you can make a bar. Yeah, or if you add a little alkali, be a little less bitter, a little more palatable, and then Joseph Frye, an Englishman,

said, hey, why don't we add a little sugar, maybe a little more cocoa butter, and now we have the first chocolate bar. OK, so I have it wrong. Joseph Frye invented the chocolate bar. Van Houten invented Dutch cocoa, which is a sweeter cocoa powder. And Rodolf Lent, if you might recognize that.

Oh, yeah. How do you not like Lent? He invented conking in 1879, and we'll get into what that is later, but it's a pretty important process. But it's conk like the shell. Yeah, because the first machine was shaped like a shell. But we'll get into what that means, but it basically makes it smoother and more affordable.

You can mass produce it as the chocolate bars we know and love. And then in the early 1900s, all this is going on within a few decades. There's all these sudden quick advances in chocolate that takes chocolate from this frothy, gritty, bitter drink to chocolate, as we understand it today, starting in the 19th century. And then I think in the 1904, early 1900s,

a guy with the last name of Nestle thought to add milk powder. And then we had milk chocolate, and the humanity achieved its pinnacle. That's right. Henry and Nestle and Milton Hershey, very important dudes. Sure. And that was for milk chocolate.

But you can also make dark chocolate less bitter by some of the same processes, because when you buy the dark chocolate, it has a percentage of cacao. And the higher the percentage, the more bitter it is. I can't go above like 70s my max. Is it? Yeah. Do your mouth just start catching on fire?

Your teeth fall out or what happened? Like that bitter chocolate taste. Some people love super, super, bitter-y. I'm a super taster with bitter. You remember in our taste episode, we talked about super taster. Since that episode, I've noticed that with bitter, I taste it way more than most people.

Interesting. Yeah. How do you like your chocolate? Like, I can handle dark chocolate, but it tastes really bitter to me. But I can barely handle grapefruit. I had to train myself to enjoy grapefruit. Yeah, I don't like grapefruit.

Yeah, maybe you're a bitter super taster, too. Maybe. But I can tell you that just practice makes perfect with drinking grapefruit juice. Oh, well, for me, eating chocolate. Right. And I sprinkle a little sea salt on it now, too, which is really good.

Do you like that? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah. All right, so let's get into the seed or the bean a little bit. They grow in pods on a tree. And the tree itself is, they grow taller than 25 feet,

but for cultivation, they trim them, so they don't grow above 25 feet. Yeah, about 10 or 12 is the height that they try to keep them at. Yeah, because people might climb up and pick them. Yeah, this is something I find very interesting about. Or not climb. I think they use a long tool.

Like a telescopic knife. Yeah. But the cacao trees are so fickle that they actually have kept chocolate production as like a family business. Yeah, you can't mass produce these things. You can't mass harvest these things. It's still got to be done by hand,

because the pods and the seeds don't all ripen at the same time. So you can't just drive a machine in there and be like, get all those pods out. And so you have to do them individually one by one when they're ready to come off the tree. Plus, the harvesting a seed pod, which is about the shape of a long orange football, about 12 inches

long, the way you harvest it is really important, because if you break off the bloom that it's growing out of, you will damage it so that no other pods grow out of that. So it's a really, really finicky tree. It's kind of cool. It is cool. 90% of the world's cacao is grown by just 2 and 1 half million farmers, all of them

working five to 10 acre plots, family plots. It's like a family farming business for sure. Yeah, like we said earlier, it was Mesoamerica, but now most of the farms are in Africa, in West Africa. Yeah, cacao is like the cacao producing. Was that Ivory Coast? Yeah, they prefer cacao. Really?

I think so. OK. Yeah, they produce more than a million metric tons just on the Cote d'Ivoire, excuse me, per year. There are only three types of, three varieties of bean. And they are the Forastero, and it's the most common, because it yields the most beans. It has the most chocolatey taste, too.

Yeah, and it's the hardiest, so they do better. And then on the other side of the coin, you have the Criolo, which is very complex, but very difficult to grow, very delicate, and a small percentage of all the cacao beans that are harvested. Right, and then there's the Trinitario, which is a hybrid of the Criolo.

Is that how we're saying it? Yeah. And the Forastero, that somebody took a Forastero to Trinidad, where they were growing Criolo, and they hybridized. So you have basically this full spectrum of finicky and the different tastes of chocolate. Yeah, and like we said earlier, like with coffee and like with grapes for wine, if you're an aficionado,

you know what geographical location will produce different flavors and tastes. And companies, when they make chocolate, are very picky about, and secretive, about exactly where they get their beans. Some, it's all one farm. Some, they like to do a nice blend, but that's a trade secret.

But just because you have a Forastero bean and one part of the country doesn't mean it'll taste the same as in the other part. Right, so not only do these different varieties produce different tastes, like depending on where you grew a specific variety, it'll taste different from that same variety grown elsewhere. That's right.

And those trees, we should say, are called the Theodoroma cacao. They were named by Linnaeus. And it translates to cacao, food of the gods. And those three varieties aren't the only three, but they're the three dominant varieties grown worldwide. Oh, they're more than that. OK.

So I guess we should get into a little bit about the process. Yeah, because what interested me is all those European additions to the process of producing chocolate are still based on the original ancient means of growing and producing chocolate. So it's like, still go through the process of producing chocolate, then you just take it through these additional steps to make chocolate as we understand it,

which is pretty cool, because they're still they're doing this ancient method, like still. You've heard there's more than one way to skin a cat. There's only one way to make chocolate. Machinery has improved, but you're right. It's still the same, which is really neat. So you have these ripen pods, like we talked about. They change color from green to orange.

And then it's time to cut them down. And then the beans and pulp are removed and left to ferment, which is exactly what you think. They cover it up with banana leaves and stuff and let the moisture seep out of it slowly. Yeah, and this is one of the few things where alcohol is just a byproduct of the fermentation process rather than the goal.

Right. Because I'm sure some people drink this chocolate alcohol, but for the most part, it's discarded. Is it? Yeah, as far as I know. I don't think Nestle's bottling it or anything. Yeah, but I bet the farm workers might have a nib. I wonder what that tastes like.

I'll bet it's awful. I'm sure it is. Yeah. So here we go. 2023 is already well underway, everybody. So don't wait any longer to level up your small business. And the way you can do that is by joining up with stamps.com. That's right, because with stamps.com,

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So in the cacao bean, there's things like bacteria and yeast that produce acids and gases. And they break down some of those sugars over the course of this fermentation process. And they're going to end up dark brown in the end. Right after about a week of fermenting. Yep. And then they pack them in the jute bags, take them to the buyers.

Degrade the beans, because it's very specific, like the quality of the bean. You'll get a certain price, depending on how good they are. Right. And then it goes on to the next step. Which is where the companies who produce chocolate buy the seeds from the buyers. That's right.

And those sugars being broken down in the fermentation process become very, very important at this step. Because the first thing you do is you take all of your cacao beans and roast them. And when you're roasting, in this article, it says that sometimes you just roast the nibs first. I've found that pretty much everybody roasts the bean and then roast the nibs separately later on.

Yeah, the nib is actually the meat. It's actually what becomes chocolate. Right, a cacao bean has a shell that you take off and the meat inside is a cocoa nib. So you roast the bean first. And then later on, you roast the nib itself. And as you're roasting it, what you're doing is creating something called the mayard reaction.

Yeah, man. Which is basically the sugars that were broken down and exposed during fermentation are combined with amino acids that are also present in the cacao. And when placed together in the presence of heat, you have something called flavor compounds that are produced. And depending on the amino acid present, whether it's cheese or whether it's beer

or whatever it is, bread, the sugars and the amino acids are going to react differently to create different flavors. And with chocolate specifically, these different amino acids produce chocolate flavor. Yeah, it's non-enzymatic browning. And it's not just chocolate. I mean, if you like pretzels or if you like. If you like the flavor of anything.

Well, no, that's not true. It's only certain things have this reaction. Oh, really? Yeah, like bread when it's toasted or baked, a steak when it's browned. Anything important. French fries. And so the roasting process, it's anywhere from 30 minutes

to a couple of hours at about 250 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. And every company has their own methods for this. Everyone's going to have their own specific roasting process. But that's a general thing. So the next thing that happened is you need to get that nib extracted. And so they quickly cool the beans and send them through what's called a cracker and a fanner.

That splits the shell and blows off the shell. And you're left with the nib. And then at that point, the nib is ready to go to the mill to be ground. Or it's roasted and then ground into chocolate liquor. So it's roasted again before it's ground? Yes. OK.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Like if anything, the nib is the thing you want to roast for sure. This article insinuates that you might not roast the bean. You're just going to roast the nib. Gotcha. You definitely roast the nib first. OK. Because that's where the flavor compounds come from.

But you can roast the nib inside the bean too, right? Yeah. OK. Like as a two-step process. Gotcha. OK. So now it goes to the grinder, a mélangeur, which is French. And there are these big granite rollers

that basically mash up those nibs into a paste they called the mass. Then that goes into a press at about 6,000 pounds per square inch. That's a lot, man. It's a whole lot. That would crush you flat. Yeah. So much that it actually melts the cocoa butter into a liquid called chocolate liquor.

Pressure from pressure. Just from pressure and friction. Oh, OK. Well, that produces heat. Yeah. So that's your chocolate liquor, even though it's not alcoholic at all. And that was Van Houten that came up with the process you just described, right? He's the one who figured out how to separate powder from butter.

Hey, Bart. Yeah. Mill pool. Millhouse Van Houten. So then you've got your two components that basically separate. So you've got your liquid cocoa butter at this point and your powder. It's called a press cake. Your dried powder is.

Or cocoa cake. Cocoa cake. I like that better, actually. I do, too. So depending on what your purpose is from here, you might go in some different directions. If you're just going to make Nestle Quick chocolate milk mix, you're going to pulverize that powder into a finer powder.

So that's another thing I saw on the Garadelli site when they were describing how they make chocolate. It sounds like you would pulverize that cocoa cake no matter what. And then the harder, the more you pulverize it, the smaller the micron of the chocolate cocoa powder. And so the finer that is, the less grainy your end result chocolate will be. So like Garadelli says that they grind theirs down to 19 microns. Because they want a very smooth product.

Exactly. Because they're Garadelli. Right. And then the butter or whatever you introduce back into, whether it's cocoa butter or say like canola oil or something, is going to also have an impact on the quality of the chocolate made. Yeah, and if you're reintroducing cocoa butter, it's a better quality, obviously, than vegetable oil.

Yeah. All right. This is also where you add in sugar, some other flavorings. Lecta thin. Yeah, what is that? I was hoping you don't. It's an emulsifier. Oh, OK.

So it makes it fluffier, lighter. All right. That, to me, is like the fact of the podcast. Like how many times have you looked at an ingredients list and been like, well, it's like that. Yeah. It's an emulsifier, friends. That's the fact of the podcast.

Yeah, strangely. All right. I haven't picked mine yet. Maybe cocoa cake. So next up, we have the process that Lent figured out early on that we talked about conking. And some people say this is an accident because he forgotten, left it in a molange or too long.

Right. Which may be true, who knows. But basically what you get is a smooth liquid, which makes it easier to mold into chocolate bars. So I looked, again, on the Ghirardelli site. They had basically the conker, the conking machine, is just like a huge vat with two paddles like constantly going around.

Yeah, I've seen other ones, too. It was just bizarre how this article reads. Like they almost, I think they literally call it a magic process that people don't fully understand. Basically, to me, it was like, no, you're just kind of mixing these ingredients together for a very long time. Yeah. And it's such that the cocoa powder, every grain, every

micron of cocoa powder becomes coated with cocoa butter. Yeah, it's just really intense mixing. Exactly. It's not magic. Right. I just thought that was really strange. Yeah, that was a little weird. That was a works article.

Agreed. It was really insane clown posse-ish. Like conking is magic. Yeah, that's funny. So it's not magic. It's just really, really thorough, thorough mixing. Evenly distributes that cocoa butter. It polishes the particles, makes everything super smooth

and delicious, generates a little bit of heat. Yeah, which helps create more flavor compounds. Yeah. Because in this time, it's with the sugars and the amino acids in the milk, combining with those things in the chocolate, too, which takes you to flavor country. And it's where that mali-yard, mali-yard? That's what I'm talking about.

Reaction happens, yeah. Yeah, because it happens again because it's producing heat. And then finally, it introduces air, which removes even more bitterness. So that's the purpose of the magic of conking. Then we have to temper it. Tempering, they don't even really say what it is either. So you know how, like, if you make candy, you have to have

a candy thermometer, or else it's going to just be completely screwed up. And like a candy recipe will be like, do not go past this temperature. So they figured out that there's six stages of crystal formation. Well, we've got to say what tempering is first. I thought I was.

Well, it's stirring. It's magic stirring. It's stirring, heating, and cooling, and reheating while you're stirring. Yeah, that's what tempering is. Exactly. But what you're doing on a chemical level is that you're forming cocoa crystals.

And there's six types of cocoa crystals that can possibly form in chocolate. And they figured out that type five crystals are the ones that make the best chocolate. So you want to heat through your chocolate up to the point where all these type one through four crystals turn into type five crystals, but not so much that your type five crystals turn into type six crystals.

Because at that point, you're fired if you work in a chocolate factory. Man, you make type six crystals, you're in big trouble. Well, they have machines that do this now. Right, but before they fire you on the spot for making type six crystals. Yeah, or if you set the machine wrong, they can fire you. Right, I'm sure.

You're going to get fired one way or another. Yeah, someone's getting fired. But you also don't want the temperature to go to stop before it hits 93 degrees Fahrenheit, which is apparently the magic temperature for type five crystals or else you'll just have type four crystals. Yeah, which apparently aren't any good. So think about this process that's been undergone that

started with picking seed pods by hand for mending them under banana leaves. Well, how'd they figure that out, though? Like, who first looked at these disgusting looking things that said, hey, I bet that would be good? Like, haven't you wondered how many people had to die to figure out what we can and can't eat as human beings along the way?

Yeah. There had to be a lot of like, well, so we stay away from that. Yeah. Let's try this weird looking thing next. Who's up? Well, the first people to eat anything. I'm sure the first person that looked at a cow and said,

you know, I bet in that furry creature inside that lies some pretty nice meat. Yeah, the cow went, no. Yeah, I agree. I like that stuff. It's like going back to the beginnings. But this process is just mind-boggling just to make chocolate.

And I'm really glad that all these people came together to contribute to chocolate, to the creation of chocolate as we understand it and love it today. Agreed, sir. I love chocolate. So the tempering process in the end, besides the chemical gobbity gook, is going to define how hard and shiny and glossy

that chocolate's going to end up being. Yeah. So have we made the chocolate? Yes, we have. I think you just cool it and then you press it into bars or whatever. And Chuck, that seems like a fantastic place to put a message break.

What do you think? Yes. Stuff is shouldn't run. 2023 is already well underway, everybody. So don't wait any longer to level up your small business. And the way you can do that is by joining up with Stamps.com. That's right, because with Stamps.com, you're going to be able to print your own postage

and shipping labels right there from your home or office or home office. And it's ready to go in minutes. You can get back to running your business sooner than later. Yep, Stamps.com is like the post office elevated. They have rates you literally can't find anywhere else, which comes in handy because postage rates just increased again, like up to 84% off of USPS and UPS.

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and that free digital scale, no long-term commitment to your contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the page, and enter our code STUFF. This message is brought to you by Discover. Did you know you could reduce the number of unwanted calls and emails with online privacy protection, the latest innovation from Discover?

Discover will help regularly remove your personal info, like your name and address, from 10 popular people search websites that could sell your data. And they'll do it for free. Activate it in the Discover app. See terms and learn more at discover.com slash online privacy protection. OK, so we're back to chocolate.

Yeah, so back to chocolate, we should talk about a guy named Milton Hershey who was a great guy because he made chocolate inexpensive and able to get it into the hands of children for just a few pennies of bar. Yeah. Back in the day. And now people love it worldwide.

They do. And now they can love it in all sorts of weird ways too. Like, you know, I love the chocolate-covered potato chips. Yeah, those are good. Chocolate-covered bacon. I can't, I don't know if I've ever had that or not. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, pretty much chocolate in anything's fine.

Yeah, I like the salt, I like the heat along with chocolate. You can get chocolate facials these days. I don't know about that, though. Why not? Yeah, I don't know. Give me a mud mask. But made of chocolate. No, made of mud.

We should probably say who eats the most chocolate in the world. The Americans probably. No, the Americans eat about half as much chocolate as the Brits, the Germans, and the Swiss. Yeah, of course the Swiss. They each eat about 24 pounds a year. The average Swiss person eats 24 pounds of chocolate a year. That's a Toblerone.

Oh, man, I'm sure they're like Toblerone. See, I don't like chocolate snobs because I like a variety of chocolate. People that turn their nose up at like a milk chocolate bar. It still tastes good. I like milk chocolate, but also like the nice dark chocolate. Your equal opportunity to chocolate eat it. Love chocolate, dude. It's so good.

But Americans eat about 12 pounds a year, by the way, 10 to 12. That's still a lot of chocolate. It is. Man. There's a lot of chocolate. So we talked earlier, I guess let's talk a little bit about the health properties of chocolate. Yes.

Because that's a big deal. They have things called flavonoids and phenolics, antioxidants that help protect your heart. Same stuff that's found in wine. If you're eating the dark chocolate, milk chocolate's not good for you. No, but it is. It is in some ways, which I will mention in a second. But it can help prevent bad cholesterol or your risk of heart disease. That's if you're eating dark chocolate and not a ton of it, like an ounce and a half

or so. Right. And I think the purer the chocolate, the better it is for you, the more flavonoids present. There's also long, it's also been long suspected that chocolate has an effect on your mood and that it improves your mood. And I saw a study from 2007 that finally was like, okay, I think we all agree that chocolate improves the mood. How?

How long does it last? Yeah. And they figured out that if you're in a bad mood or in any kind of mood, chocolate will improve your mood. It has a noticeable effect, but it only lasts for three minutes. Really? Yeah. And it's almost instantaneous too.

So the researchers were like, well, it's not possible that it's all of these, like there's cannabinoids, which are also found in pot. There's other compounds that have an effect on our neurotransmitters, but it's not possible to eat chocolate and have your mood improved via that because it takes about an hour for those compounds to get to our brain. And then it lasts for three minutes? Yes. And it's immediate.

Oh, okay. So it's not those. It's not those. Oh, okay. So the flavor and the taste and the pleasure that comes from chocolate hitting the tongue. That's like a good pan-fried steak is good for my mood too. Exactly. You know?

Right. So you should eat steak and chocolate a lot because it's good for your mood every three minutes at least. I don't know how long steak lasts though. I don't know. But the other exceptional thing about chocolate hitting your tongue and having probably an effect on your mood is that remember that point that they baked chocolate crystals to is 93 degrees while your tongue is 90 something and changed.

It's usually more than that. So the chocolate melts and those flavor crystals melt just perfectly just touching your tongue too. Yeah, just because it's close to our own body temperature. Right. That's pretty neat. So that would have some sort of effect on your... that would explain why it happens immediately.

Gotcha. That's a good chocolate to you. We should talk about theobromine for a second. It's a chemical compound. It's an alkaloid that's in chocolate and some other foods, plant-based foods. And it has a similar effect as caffeine and they do use it just like caffeine to help treat heart conditions, some heart conditions like narrowing of the blood vessels or stimulating the heart.

And that's also the thing in it that is bad for your dogs. Oh yeah. Theobromine. Huh. You don't feed your dog chocolate. No, you don't. I think most everyone knows this by now. Yeah.

A little bit will make them just kind of sick, but if they eat too much, it can kill them. It'll make them dead. Yeah, which is the worst kind of sick. And we mentioned earlier the child labor sort of like with coffee, exploiting kids to mine these coffee beans. And as many as 200,000 children work in the cacao fields. And Cote Duvore alone, I think. Yeah, and that's just in the Ivory Coast.

So and some of them are child slaves. So if you want to not do that, you search out fair trade or organic, apparently organic chocolate isn't grown from those farms. Supposedly, but technically it's nothing to do with it being organic. No, but I think they just said that the organic farms aren't slave farms. Gotcha. Fair trade, as always, might cost you a little more. What else is there?

You got anything else? I don't think I have anything else of the Japanese apparently have a day, two days for chocolate exchange exclusively. There's Valentine's Day where women give men chocolate. And then there's a white day a month later, which is apparently invented by a candy maker. Where men give women chocolate. And even if you don't like the woman who gave you chocolate, you're still obligated to give her chocolate.

It's Geary Choco, which means obligation chocolates. Yeah, see, I ignore all those clearly corporate sponsored. Right. Do you call your mom on Mother's Day and just go, go to hell? I do. No, you don't. Yeah. And she appreciates the call.

She's, I'm so glad you remembered me this year. No, Mother's Day, that's different. Mother's Day and Father's Day. I'll endorse those. Those are completely blatantly made up holidays. Yeah, but I don't buy them anything. It's not like there's a, well, you know, you figured out a way to stick it to the man. It's not a gift behind that that I have to get.

I believe there, a woman invented Mother's Day and by the end of her life was like actively vocally protesting against the celebration of it because it'd been hijacked by the greeting card companies. Yeah, I'll usually do a, like go to lunch or something like that. Nice. That's all my mom wants is time. Yeah, sure. You know.

Yeah. Good. Good for you, Chuck. You're a good son. I'll try to be. Okay. Well, that's it for us talking about Chuck's relationship with his mom. Right.

I think so. Okay. Well, I mean, and chocolate. There's a whole other list of things we could get into. But that's not for this room. Chuck is a good son. If you want to learn more about chocolate, right? Yeah.

You can type that word into the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this one from a teacher because you put out the call to teachers. How can we fix the system? I feel like we did that together and we got a lot of calls and emails from teachers, not calls, just emails. He can't call out, he can't. So this is, and there were a lot of great emails and I can only pick one.

So this is from Colin. Hey, guys, I've been a history teacher for the past seven years. It is my profession of choice and I look forward to being an old fossil of a teacher one day. You're asking about problems with the educational system and possible solutions. I come from an interesting angle. I'm a public school teacher and spent the past six years at an inner city middle school. There I experienced the following challenges one through three, one parents essentially being absent, therefore having the teachers do the parenting.

Number two, lack of accountability for students while everything is pushed onto the teachers. And number three, unrealistic demands by the federal government that is not supported by sufficient funding or resources. Can you see that list written on a chalkboard? Yeah. Like that is a teacher list. It's a teacher list. And lastly, my probably most unfortunately a lack of respect for my profession.

My people have been called parasites and lazy by certain politicians and are accused of doing next to nothing and just enjoying summer vacations. In reality, we are often underpaid and overworked. These are teachers who, there are teachers who do make a good wage. That is often after 20 plus years in the school system. My wife and I, due to the economy, have received just one raise in seven years. So after three quarters of a decade, we're still almost making the same as a first year teacher.

And then he went on to talk about charter schools, sort of at length, which I won't get into. But I think we should do a podcast on charter schools at some point. We need to do a podcast on education and education system or something. Like a suite. Yeah, a suite. So anyways guys, sorry for the book. I'm sure an email this long would never be read on the show.

That was a reverse psychology. It was. It worked. But you guys rock. And thanks for taking the time to even read it. Have a great day. Colin. Thanks, Mr. C. We appreciate you writing in.

We appreciate everybody writing in. I mean, like if you put all of them together, you start to get a clear picture because, you know, he named us three. Yeah. We've gotten all sorts of different suggestions, tests, standardized testings, a big one that sure coming up. Yeah, there's, there's a lot wrong we found out. Like I think we're kind of hoping to fix things, but right now I'm just realizing what a daunting

task is facing the U.S. education system. Yeah, we'll do our part by podcasting and running our mouths about it. Okay. Well, if you want to get in touch with us to let us know anything, how to fix anything, a toaster oven, the education system, what have you, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email, it should probably work best, to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com. That's right, right?

That's right. And then of course, you should always visit our home on the web, make it your home page, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Brought to you by the all new 2014 Toyota Corolla. You're ready to travel in 2023 and since 1981, Gate One travel has been providing more of the world for less. Let Gate One handle the planning for you with affordable escorted tours and European

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