As Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden gets ready for the International Chocolate Festival this Friday, Saturday and Sunday, January 22, 23 and 24, here are a few fun and interesting facts for all the chocolate lovers out there.
- Archeologists believe that the Mayan Indians of Central America cultivated cacao trees as early as the seventh century
- In 1502 Christopher Columbus was the first European to come in contact with cacao
- Twenty years after Columbus’ discovery of the “New World”, it was Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez who introduced the Europeans to chocolate by bringing back three chests full of cacao beans to the Spanish King
- In some parts of Central America, cacao beans were used as currency as recently as the last century
- Montezuma supposedly drank more than fifty cups of chocolate a day, thinking it would make him feel more passionate
- In 1847 the English made the first chocolate to eat, and in 1876 two Swiss chocolate makers, Daniel Peter and Henri Nestlé created milk chocolate
- Actually, there is a chemical in chocolate—phenyl ethylamine—which is also produced by the brain when your in love
- There are three main varieties of cacao trees: Forastero, which accounts for 90% of the world’s production, Criollo, the rarest and most prized and Trinitario which is a cross between Criollo and Forastero
- In 1753 Carl Linnaeus first formally gave the chocolate plant the scientific name Theobroma cacao. The generic name (Theobroma) means “food of the gods” in Greek which the specific name (cacao) is derived from the Mayan language