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Americans’ love of chocolate dates back to the nation’s earliest days more than 250 years ago.
According to some ancient evidence, indigenous tribes in Central and South America began cultivating and consuming cacao around 3300 BC. Chocolate was a delicacy when it arrived in Europe in the 1500s.
Currently, it is estimated that Americans eat about 2.8 billion to 3 billion pounds of chocolate annually, which is the equivalent of about 10 pounds per person, or about 100 Hershey bars, each year.
In many ways, chocolate’s path to ubiquity traces the broader history of the United States.
Jared Ross Hardesty, a scholar of Colonial America and author of “The Rising Sun Rebellion: A Tragic Story of Smuggling, Slavery, and Chocolate,” said the confectionery “helps us better understand some really important themes in American history.”
It has also played a pivotal role in the nation’s major milestones, from the American Revolution to space travel.
It tells the story of how chocolate is involved in the history of this country.
Chocolate existed in the Americas before European settlement.
Thousands of years before European settlers landed in what is now the United States, the indigenous Olmec, Mayan, and Aztec civilizations of the region we know as southern Mexico and Central America began cultivating and producing chocolate.
The word chocolate comes from the Aztec word “chocoatl,” which was a bitter, spicy drink made by grinding cocoa beans with water, chili peppers, and other spices. These early American civilizations used chocolate drinks for religious ceremonies such as births and marriages, and some even treated them as currency.
Chocolate didn’t make its way to Europe until the 1500s, when Aztec emperor Montezuma II introduced it to Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés, who brought it back to Spain.
Chocolate was a substitute for tea for revolutionary colonists
Two centuries later, chocolate became a luxury item throughout Europe and the American colonies. Although still consumed only as a drink, Europeans used chili peppers in place of spices such as cinnamon and sugar.
The drink became popular in the American colonies in the mid-1700s, when tensions with the British Empire began to rise and tariffs were imposed on goods such as tea. Colonists boycotting Congress and buying taxed British goods turned to chocolate instead of tea.
Cocoa beans were primarily grown in the Caribbean and South America. To avoid paying the British for their goods, the colonists set up an illegal trading network and smuggled chocolate into the ports.
This drink became a symbol of patriotism during the Revolutionary War.
The history of chocolate is intertwined with the slave trade
The history of chocolate production is deeply rooted in slavery. In many of the Caribbean and South American countries that produced cocoa beans, the population of enslaved people exceeded the number of free people.
As the demand for chocolate in Europe and America increased, enslaved people were forced to plant, harvest, ferment, and transport cocoa beans. Once the beans arrived in the colonies, chocolate merchants from as far north as Boston used slave labor to process them into beverage products.
“Chocolate shows how deeply ingrained slavery was in the American economy during this period of colonial revolution,” Hardesty said.
“If you want chocolate at this time of year, you are consuming something made and produced by slave labor.”
the industrial revolution brought the first chocolate bar
The Gilded Age in the United States conjures up images of palatial homes, lavish parties, and tables covered in decadent food, including sweet chocolate treats. Technological innovations brought about by the Industrial Revolution allowed chocolatiers to create what we think of as chocolate today.
In 1828, a Dutch inventor discovered a way to separate beans into cocoa solids and cocoa butter. Then, in 1847, the British created the first solid chocolate, and in the 1870s, Swiss confectioners developed milk chocolate.
These developments also reached America. At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, a man named Milton S. Hershey was so fascinated by the display of chocolate-making machines that he went home and began experimenting. After selling his caramel business in 1905, Hershey opened a chocolate factory in Pennsylvania and began selling his signature milk chocolate bars.
Chocolate was included in World War II military rations
Chocolate bars probably wouldn’t be at the top of the list of recommended foods for Army soldiers, especially now that the Secretary of the Army is looking to increase physical fitness requirements for the military.
But when World War II began, Army officials met with Hershey’s leaders to develop a high-energy chocolate ration bar for soldiers that tasted “a little better than a boiled potato” and could withstand battlefield conditions.
They created this deal after soldiers during World War I loved the milk chocolate bars in their ration kits so much that they handed them out to the little children they met.
“That kind of defeats the purpose of ration bars, which are supposed to be eaten when food is scarce,” said Amy Zeigler, senior director of The Hershey Story Museum and Hershey Gardens.
(By the end of the war in 1945, Hershey estimates that it was producing 24 million Ration D bars per week.) The company claims that from 1940 to 1945, it manufactured more than 3 billion chocolate bars and distributed them to war zones around the world.
Ziegler said the ration bars helped Hershey win the second-most Army and Navy E Awards, given to companies that contributed to World War II production.
Chocolate has traveled to space many times
Chocolate has also supported America’s adventurous spirit over the past 250 years, from Lewis and Clark’s journey west to NASA’s space missions.
In his 1806 diary, Meriwether Lewis wrote that at the end of his 28-month, 8,000-mile journey down the Missouri River, when he was ordered by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the Louisiana Purchase, he felt “greatly relieved” by drinking “about a pint” of chocolate.
In July 1971, astronauts on the Apollo 15 mission to the moon also enjoyed chocolate. Hershey’s Tropical Chocolate Bar was originally developed for the Pacific Theater during World War II, where they were sent on missions.
Mars candy-covered chocolate M&Ms flew on the first space shuttle mission a decade later and have been used on every shuttle flight since then, the company said. It is also featured on the menu of the International Space Station.
Carissa Waddick, who covers America’s 250th anniversary for USA TODAY, can be reached at kwaddick@usatoday.com.
