Chocolate the Feel Good Food.

One of the most pleasant effects of eating chocolate is the ‘good feeling’ that many people experience after indulging. Chocolate contains more than 300 known chemicals and scientists are working on isolating the specific combinations to help explain the pleasurable effect of consuming chocolate. 

The most well known of these chemicals is caffeine and can be found in small quantities along with Theobromine which is a weak stimulant. The theory is that the combination of these two chemicals provides the ‘lift’ that chocolate brings. 

For millennia the Cacao tree grew and thrived in the shade of the rain forest and drew its nutrients from the forest floor and from the water passed down from the canopy above. Cultivated as a crop for at least 3000 years, just as the Inca have engineered many other natives to this area like potatoes, squash, corn and bananas, we can only guess these early inhabitants of Venezuela in the North of South America have created the Cacao tree as we know it, via years of ancient genetic technology.

In early modern times the Cacao beans made the largest impact on the European conquerors as they made a drink by grinding and toasting the beans, then adding hot water with vanilla, or chillies for the nobility and for priests to be used in rituals.

As Cacao became more available, people began to experiment with new ways to use it and it began to appear in cakes, pastries and sorbets. It was in 1828 a Dutch chocolate maker CJ Van Houten patented an inexpensive method of pressing the fat from the roasted beans now known as ‘cake’ of the cocoa butter.  This cake of cocoa butter was then pulverized into a fine powder and combined with potassium or sodium carbonates so the powder would  mix with water more easily. Today this is known as “Dutching”. The final product was a dark and mild tasting chocolate.

In 1849 and English chocolate maker J Storrs Fry produced what was arguably the world’s first eating chocolate.  Today the Swiss are famous for their  chocolate, and rightly so. By the late 19^th century the Swiss had developed a number or processes that contributed greatly to creating the solid chocolate candy that we all enjoy today.  The first significant development by Daniel Peter being the addition of Powdered milk (invented by Swiss chemist Henri Nestle in 1867) to make milk chocolate and the second invention by Rudolphe Lindt invented ‘conching’ which greatly improved the quality of chocolate candy by making it more blendable.
  
After this many other companies started making chocolate, including Hersheys and Cadbury and were based on their own religious ideals of abstaining from alcohol; Chocolate was seen as an acceptable substitute. In the year 1900 Milton Snavely Hershey began producing milk chocolate bars and ‘Kisses’ with great success.  He was as anti-alcohol as Cadbury & Fry and saw chocolate as a good, profitable alternative.  In ten short years he was able to purchase 2 entire towns and named them after himself.  Then in World War I the US Army added four Hershey bars to each soldier’s daily ration thus enlarging Hershey’s empire. This event completed the sequence that took chocolate from the divine food of Royalty through to the European Imperial quest for mild drugs and finally to the candy we all enjoy today.   

Since then chocolate has remained popular and after World War II many Belgian and French Chocolatiers worked on fine tuning the process and specialized in making fine quality, high grade chocolate.  Eventually in 1994 the chocolate standards were established and this has started a wave of pure chocolate bars made of 70+% Cacao.

Eating chocolate has been blamed for a broad range of health ailments from acne and tooth decay to obesity and lack of nutritional substance and on the other hand is known for being an anti-depressant to aphrodisiac.  While the jury is still out on all of the answers to these claims, recent research is helping us to better understand how chocolate consumption affects our health.Good news is that most of the associated ‘bad’ effects of eating chocolate are either overstated or entirely false.  

The latest findings are that eating chocolate neither causes nor aggravates acne and it is unproven that chocolate causes cavities or tooth decay.  In fact, there are indications that the cocoa butter coats the teeth that may help preventing plaque from forming.