'LNoise-Water"-A Food-first of the Americas BEN FROST UNLIKE many food products we have today, chocolate has been a favorite food in America since before white man first set foot on these shores. When the Spanish explorer, Cortez, came to the New World in 1519 he discovered the native Mexicans consuming great quantities of a food-drink which they called "chocolatl." Although "atl" signifies "water" and is common enough in Mexican words, the meaning of the "choco" part of the name has never been dear. According t o an old French writer "choco" means noise. He says that the drink was named "chocolatl"' because it was beaten t o a froth, with accompanyiugnoise, hefore being drunk. The origin of chocolate is said to date from the day when an Aztec was quenching his thirst by sucking the juicy pulp which surrounds the seeds in the cacao pod. Having drunk his fill, he accidentally threw some of the seeds into the fire. A fragrant, spicy odor arose. Overcome with curiosity, he tasted for the first time the fine, full flavor of the roasted bean. However fanciful the tales of its beginnings, today the manufacture of chocolate has became a gigantic industry. More than one-fourth of the entire output of chocolate is consumed in America; in 1940 we imported $32,140,658 worth of cocoa beans -480,000,000 pounds. Until 1900 tropical America produced more than 80 per cent of
the world's cocoa crop. By 1925 the center of production had been shifted to West Africa, with the Western Hemisphere prrr ducing only 32 per cent. And by 1938 the African exports equaled about two-thirds of the world exports, while Java and other Far East tropics were also important exporters. Cocoa cultivation was developed on an imposing scale in the Gold Coast, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, the Cameroons, S i o Tome and eastward t o the imperial colonies of Ceylon and the Netherlands East Indies, so that the belt in which cocoa heans are grown practically circles the entire world. Charles Morrow Wilson (Central America) has pointed out that "Cocoa is one of the great food crops of man." The cacao tree, whose heans or seeds provide the raw material of all chocolate and cocoa, is a tropical plant, reaching a height of from 25 t o 35 feet a t maturity. The seeds grow in pods, which look like big deeply grooved cucumbers. Each pod, containing from 25 t o 40 seeds or heans, grows from nine inches to a foot in length and about half as much in diameter, and varies in color from green when it is young, t o a yellowish brown later. As they grow on the trees, the seeds, which are about the size of almonds, are embedded in a white pulpy mass which hold them in place inside the pod. It takes these pods about four months t o ripen, hut the cacao tree hears fruit-Reprinted, with permission, from The Crmun
