Chocolate

Chocolate is a sweet food made from the seeds of the cacao tree. The tree grows in hot, rainy places near the equator, in parts of Central America, South America, Africa, and Asia. The seeds, called cocoa beans, grow inside large pods on the tree's trunk. Chocolate as we know it today comes in three main types: dark, milk, and white.

Chocolate has a long history. The cacao tree was first used as a food about 4,000 years ago in Central America. The Maya and the Aztecs ground the beans into a paste and mixed them with water, chili peppers, and spices. The drink was bitter, frothy, and nothing like a candy bar. Aztec rulers drank it from golden cups. Cocoa beans were so valuable that the Aztecs used them as money. A turkey cost about 100 beans.

When Spanish explorers brought cacao back to Europe in the 1500s, people there did not like the bitter taste. So they added sugar and honey. Hot chocolate became popular in royal courts across Europe. For almost 300 years, chocolate was only a drink. Solid chocolate that you could bite did not exist yet.

That changed in the 1800s. In 1828, a Dutch chemist named Coenraad van Houten invented a press that separated cocoa butter from the rest of the bean. This made chocolate smoother and easier to mix. In 1847, an English company made the first solid chocolate bar. In 1875, a Swiss maker named Daniel Peter added powdered milk and created milk chocolate. Each step made chocolate sweeter, cheaper, and more popular.

Today, the world eats more than 7 million tons of chocolate every year. About 70 percent of the world's cocoa beans now come from West Africa, mostly from Ivory Coast and Ghana. Many of those beans are grown on small farms by families who often earn very little money. Some farms also use child labor. Big chocolate companies have promised to fix these problems, but progress has been slow.

Chocolate is more than just a snack in many places. In Mexico, cooks still use cacao in a thick sauce called mole. In parts of Europe, families share boxes of chocolate at Christmas and Easter. In the United States, kids hunt for chocolate eggs in spring and trade chocolate candy on Halloween. The same bean that the Maya whisked into a bitter drink now shows up in birthday cakes around the world.