How Chocolate ruled Mesoamerica

  Most major conglomerate chocolate companies we know today are not as innocent and protective of their workers as we think. The Mars company along with Cadbury and others state they do everything they can to prevent child labor and pay their workers a fair wages when in reality they push lobbyists in congress to prevent labor standards, fair trade from being implemented. To this day, many corporations still buy chocolate that is grown with the use of children and exploited labor. Fair trade was implemented to allow cacao to be grown for a fair price and prevent child labor.  Applying fair trade standards to major corporations has presented a challenge over the past 20 years. Many cacao farmers in Africa are still exploited with low wage labor that they are using to get by on a day to day basis. Fair trade is a recent movement to set a minimum wage and sell price for cacao to prevent cacao farmers from living on the breadline. Very few cacao farmers have been working with smal...

Africa to this day is still on the losing side in its attempts to reframe its position on modernization. Africa as a whole is a major exporter of many high demand goods needed by the rest of the world. The carve up of Africa by colonial powers still to this day hold economic grip over its former colonies by tying them to the currency of the oppressor. Today, nearly seventy percent of the world’s chocolate comes from the continent of Africa. Out of the seventy percent the countries of Ghana and the Ivory coast produce nearly sixty percent with over two million small-scale farms for the production of cacao. Ghana has been seen as a third world country by many modern nations for a long period of time. It lacks modern infrastructure with many people suffering from basic human necessities. Which is intriguing as the British magazines for women of Ghana portray a different message. There is a set of advertisements for Divine Chocolate which depicts Ghanan women as profitable owners of cacao ...

  Cacao in the modern-twentieth century has been a driving force of industrialization, with hundreds of thousands employed by what emerged as big industrial giants formed around the production of chocolate. Industrialization triggered a massive influx of migration to major city hubs known as urbanization. Cacao which was a drink used by mesoamericans with spiritual and cultural value was seen as a luxurious good because it took hours of human labor grinding and gritting the cacao beans to drink an addicting bitter beverage which held caloric richness that caught the eyes of the invaders. For centuries the Europeans have been experimenting with chocolate using the product for medicinal and consuming value. It wasn’t until the beginning of the industrial age when cacao held greater demand, its status as a nobility good in shambles as now it became a cheap good in which children can buy at the local market. Chocolate caught the eye of the world with the product still in high demand to...

  There is no record of when or by whom the first cacao beans were made into chocolate, The meso- Americans at some point in time must have discovered an inventive way to drink and process cacao for consumption. They developed a method on how cacao beans would be processed from the cacao pods and grinded with stone tools to form a liquid which is drinkable and contained loads of healthy nutrients for the human body in physical and medicinal ways.  This chocolate became a luxury beverage and currency in Mesoamerica was a desired product by the European colonists. For centuries after the conquests of the Americas the European spent money and research into applying cacao to meet European hierarchical tastes. Eventually a breakthrough was made, and chocolate became a popular product to eat and drink in Europe. In modern day Europe, chocolate is a widely consumed product which is loved by the youth, adults and royalty alike. So, how did chocolate transform and start Europea...

  Theobroma cacao originally grew in the Amazon rainforest and spread around South America as a wild plant in the Amazon basin. During the 16th century Portuguese colonists and pioneers discovered this crop as a luxurious good for Portugal. The Portuguese decided to increase production of the crop across two continents. As a result of growing Brazilian independence and a desperate desire to keep a monopoly on the plantation system of cacao. This plantation system has proved very lucrative for Portugal who are still exploiting the production of this crop off of forced labor to this day. How did Theobroma cacao become the dominant production of cacao in two Portuguese controlled continents. This essay will focus first production of Theobroma cacao in Brazil , cacao research by the society of Jesus which used slave labor and finally the Columbian exchange.  In the beginning, cacao was in the wild along the rivers of the amazon. The Tupi natives and other native societies gath...

At the beginning of the Age of Exploration, Spain and Portugal dominated the Columbian exchange. The Columbian Exchange was the trade of fauna, flora, and products that were brought from the new world and integrated with the old and vice versa. Wherever the Columbian exchange touched it was due to Spain or Portugal as it was their explorers who ventured further to reach the spice trades in India and China. The Colombian exchange was a biological consequence of European conquest and exploration. Chocolate was actually the biggest victim of the exchange. It was stolen from Mesoamerica and along with it the status it served in Mesoamerican communities. The Europeans at first were very hesitant to adopt using chocolate as this would have been influenced by the culture of Mesoamericans . Although, Europe was being ravaged by new disease brought over from Asia and the New world. As a result, many ventured to the Americas for a cure to diseases like the plague. Over time, they developed...