Temptation and deception...Chocolate is not as good as you think

When lovers are in love, the brain produces a chemical called phenylethylamine, which is also found in chocolate, which may be one of the reasons why it has become a sweet symbol of Valentine's Day.

However, everything has its bright and dark sides, and chocolate is no exception.

Slaves, murder, conspiracy... What we are going to talk about today is the darkest side of chocolate.

The Chocolate Trade and Slavery

The cacao tree is a small tree native to America that can grow to about 16 to 18 feet (about 5 to 6 meters) tall, with slender, pointed leaves in an oval shape and small flowers.

Cocoa fruit. Copyright image. Reproduction may cause copyright disputes.

Most cacao trees take at least three years to produce cocoa pods, which are up to 10 inches (30 cm) long and contain 40 or more seeds.

The cocoa beans are pure white when they are just peeled, and they have no chocolate aroma at all. These cocoa beans will ferment for about 3 to 9 days, slowly turning into dark brown and producing chocolate aroma. After that, they will be dried, roasted and ground to separate the cocoa beans from the shells. Then, the cocoa beans will be ground and made into various chocolate products.

Cocoa pods still need to be picked by hand, a time-consuming, labor-intensive process that has long been closely associated with slavery in the chocolate trade.

The spread of cocoa around the world began during the Age of Exploration. Some historians believe that Christopher Columbus intercepted a ship carrying cocoa beans in 1502 and brought them back to Europe, thus making the rich history and flavor of cocoa known to European nobility.

In the 18th century, the world was obsessed with chocolate. Countries competed with each other to control its production and distribution, even at the cost of their lives. European merchants saw the huge market and profit space for cocoa and quickly flocked to America to establish cocoa trading companies in Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil and the West Indies.

It is estimated that over a period of 200 years, about 12 million Africans were captured and transported to the Americas. Jamaica was designated by the British to grow cocoa in the early days. France's slave trade in Africa reached its peak between 1783 and 1792, with an estimated 160 million livres of cocoa, sugar, coffee and cotton flowing into France in 1785 alone.

By the early 20th century, Sao Tome and Principe, one of Africa's oldest colonial cities, had become the world's third-largest cocoa exporter after Ecuador and Brazil. Although slavery had been abolished for about half a century, some regions still used slaves to harvest the cocoa fruit.

Workers harvest cocoa on a farm. Copyright image. Reproduction may cause copyright disputes.

Journalist Henry Nevinson described conditions on a cocoa plantation about six miles from the port of São Tomé in 1906:

The plantation owner's house had separate buildings for overseers or "gangers" to live in, as well as areas for domestic slaves and possible coerced sex slaves.

Opposite was the slave quarters for the plantation workers. It was a row of long sheds, some as high as two stories, arranged like a military barracks. Some quarters were isolated, while others were walled off like stables.

Other buildings were used to store cocoa and work equipment, while a large barn served as a kitchen for the slaves. Each family had their own space here to build a fire and cook.

At the other end of the yard was an infirmary, with a large pan in the center for drying cocoa beans. Here, the slaves gathered two or three times a week to receive food or dried fish. At 6 p.m., the men responsible for feeding the cattle and horses brought in large bales of hay.

At this time every Sunday, slaves were "treated" to a small glass of wine, and adults might also be given tobacco, surrounded by intimidating overseers armed with whips or long sticks and barking dogs. The distribution of food was carried out in silence, with everyone moving in a circle in a line, reminiscent of military drill.

Wages were paid monthly. The minimum wage for men was fixed at less than 10 shillings, and for women much less. In 1910, this was equivalent to £39 in purchasing power, or the average daily wage for a skilled worker. The money could only be spent in the plantation shop, which meant that any profits went straight back into the pockets of the plantation owners.

Nevinson spoke to a doctor he interviewed who confirmed that on one of the plantations, the annual slave mortality rate was between 12 and 14 percent. Being a slave on a cocoa plantation in Sao Tome for three or four years was even considered an achievement at the time. Child mortality was also high at the time, with one in four children dying each year, which made slaves very expensive.

As a direct result of Nevinson's observations, and the negative publicity generated by the British abolitionist movement, Portugal suspended all shipments of "servants" to the islands in 1909. The following years saw a complex legislative effort to reform the Portuguese government's attitude toward slavery and forced labor.

But the problem of slavery and cocoa processing goes far beyond any legislation that could reform it, being embedded in the culture of cocoa production. With plantations often located in remote areas, vulnerable local people fall prey to exploitation, while land is controlled by crime, bribery and corruption.

Today, Ivory Coast produces a third of the world's cocoa, and a 2002 study showed that more than 284,000 children are still forced to work as slaves on cocoa farms in Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon and Ivory Coast.

Chocolate, Murder, and Disaster

For centuries, chocolate has been used as a means of murder, seduction, and deception.

There are many adapted stories, such as the one about a 17th-century Mexican bishop who, after a dispute with the women of his parish, deprived them of the right to drink chocolate during worship, and in revenge they poisoned the bishop's chocolate and killed him.

In 1913, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, a man was seen behaving strangely, and next to him was an open box of chocolates on the sidewalk. Witnesses said he looked "excited" and then ran away in a panic. Children from the neighborhood came out of the house and almost ate the chocolate on the ground, but were stopped by the servants in time. When the police arrived, they found that the chocolate had been added with enough mercury dichloride to kill two adults.

Perhaps one of the saddest chocolate murders in the United States in the early 20th century occurred in 1911, when the frozen body of a 5-year-old boy was found in a swamp outside of New York. He had acid burns around his mouth, an empty medicine bottle under his body, and a chocolate bar found nearby. Police theorized that the boy had been lured away from home with chocolate as bait and then force-fed poison. The child was wearing very expensive clothes, and some suspected that he was part of a kidnapping plot from out of town that went awry.

On September 8, 1925, newlywed Miss Agnes Price of Gloucestershire, England, received a box of chocolates by mail, which simply said "from Harry". Since Price knew a man named Harry, she did not suspect anything. She took a bite of the chocolates, immediately tasted a strong bitter taste, and immediately spat it out.

Her husband, Mr. Smith, cut open a chocolate and found a blue substance inside, which was later identified as strychnine. It was later confirmed that before marrying Price, Smith had had an affair with a woman named Annie Davenport, who was said to have given Miss Price the poisoned chocolate out of jealousy after she became pregnant.

Copyright images in the gallery. Reprinting and using them may lead to copyright disputes.

Christina Edmunds, known as the "Chocolate Cream Killer", was convicted of three counts of murder by poisoning and one count of actual murder of a child in Brighton in December 1871. At her trial at the Central Criminal Court in London, she was declared insane and committed to Broadmoor Asylum.

She was 34 and unemployed. She had been putting strychnine in many of her chocolate creams, buying chocolate from confectioner John Maynard, poisoning it, returning it and then selling the poisoned chocolate to people across Brighton through Maynard.

In Britain, from the 19th century onwards, there were hundreds of cases of people using poisoned chocolate to silence, instill fear or make people disappear. And it wasn’t just Britain. In the 18th century, the Pasha of Rhodes in Turkey planned to kill the Knights of Malta by poisoning the water supply that supplied the Knights with coffee and chocolate.

In fact, it’s not just poisoned chocolate that has the power to cause pain. In 1926, a Berlin confectionery company was forced to stop its campaign after dropping chocolate “bombs” from airplanes to promote its products, leaving onlookers on the ground bruised and battered. The “bombs” were “hard chocolate wrapped in tinfoil.”

The above content about chocolate comes from the book "The Dark History of Chocolate" by British food historian Emma Kay.

The content of this book is very unique. It not only describes in detail the origin and development of chocolate, but also reveals how European colonists at that time enslaved and exploited local indigenous peoples and made huge profits by taking advantage of the world's growing demand for chocolate, as well as the social history stories of murder, looting, superstition and conflict that have been associated with chocolate for hundreds of years.

Dark and light, sweet and decadent, perhaps this is the charm of chocolate.

Source: Book "The Dark History of Chocolate"