Chocolate FTW!

Well right now i'm chewing a thing i like to call a "french" choco... it's gooey.. it sticks to your teeth.. and if you done the BIG mistake of chewing it hard.. you'll have your teeth stuck together for a good 5 minutes atleast. So.. where DID chocolate start up?

Well... chocolate was not actually today's chocolate. You probably know of the cocoa tree right? But did you knew this tree was first "discovered" in the rainforests of America and that the Aztecs and Mayans were drinking a kind of hot choco at that time? Polishing their weapons and drinking hot choco.. reminds me of the hamburger invented by the romans... but that's another story.

Well we all know the Spanish conquistadors (gay word btw), took over (as in pwned, killed, assimilated) the civilisatons there and since they eventually found that choco tree they figured.. hey.. let's take it back home! And that's how it reached the breast of civilisation.. Europe. There, a lot of alchemists have been working with it and it soon became a delicacy. Heh.. now if your reading this.. you can safely go and drink some hot choco or eat some chocolate and think of yourself as a prince/princess.. just remeber to turn the clock back a few centuries ;)

Chocolate will not suffer many turns until the Industrial age. Time consuming and hand made, chocolate back then was a bit hard to make and not generaly distribuited to the general population. That's until people started "enslaving" machines to do their job. From the press to the chocolate machine.. who said machines arent good for anything :)

A little dates here... 1700 choco machine made by.. who.. who? yes! A french dude! Doret by his name. It was a hydraulic machine but a bit later, Debuisson another french dude.. used a steam powered machine to make the tasty paste. Ow..yea.. dident i tell ya? Choco back then was more like a paste then actaull candybar. That latter form was invented in 1828 by a dutch dude, namely Coenraad Van Houten, (Conrad van hoot :), which made a machine that squeezed out cocoa butter (leaving the powder we call cocoa) and made cocoa both more consistent and cheaper to produce. In 1875 Daniel Peter used his condensed milk forumla to mix it with the choco powder and voila.. milk chocolate.

During the Golden Age choco was widely advertised and publicised as beeing a great energy source and a even curing latergy. It was around that time people started drinking hot choco for breakfast and quicly becoming a trend. Also the world wars helped the popularity of candy bars... in World War I, chocolate was part of every United State’s soldier’s rations.

From that period to today chocolate has become part art, part technology, and part... traditional... why? Well one thing you don't probably know is that coco is still harvested by hand. No automated machinery. There's even a Choco Stock Market for prices and transactions.

Also did you knew that the choco that you eat is also used for medicinal porposes and cosmetics? Theobromine, a chemical found in chocolate, enlarges blood vessels and is used to treat high blood pressure. In addition, cocoa butter is used in cosmetics and ointments—and even as a coating for pills. Plus, leftover cacao husks make good mulch and cattle feed. Amazing! ;p

As you can see choco is one of those few "stuffs" that really bind people of diffrent religions, skin color and beleifs by giving them a common ground... YEY for chocolate!

Now wheres my other bar...