Mesoamericans called it, "Theobrama cacao - The food of the gods." We call it chocolate, and that chocolate bar you're eating got it's start almost 7,000 miles from Utah on a small cocoa bean farm in West Africa.
Dr. Silvana Martini, the professor and creator of the class, "Chocolate: Science, History, and Society." There are ninety students sitting in room 202 of the Nutrition and Food Science building at Utah State University. They passed around trays lined with sealed one-inch bags of cocoa beans and another lined with raw cocoa.
“So, the idea of the class is to first of all introduce food science to students, right," Martini said. "A lot of people don’t know about food science. They don’t know, especially for all those students who are in more basic science degree.”
She said chocolate is more diverse and complex than students might think.
“Sometimes people that are enrolled in biology, they might not like that it’s so applied, they might think it’s too basic for them?" Marini said. "So in food science you have room for biologists, microbiologists, engineers, physicists, chemists, anything business, anything that you can think of has an application in food science. Marketing is very important in food science as well. So that’s the main goal of the class itself.”
Martini's is not the only food science instructor that uses the components and history of chocolate to teach the history and science of chocolate and its value. Eighty percent of the food science programs in the country have a freshman class on chocolate making.
"So it’s a very important topic in food science," Mariti said. "And people have been studying chocolate for years and centuries and still there are problems to solve and there’s still products that we need to invent so chocolate is a very multi-disciplinary material. There are different ingredients that play a different role in chocolate so for food science it’s a lot of fun.”
In her chocolate class Martini began by sharing the history of what has become known today as a sweet treat but also has social and economic consequences in societies where it is grown.
“How chocolate evolved together with societal changes in Mesoamerica and also in Europe," Martini said. "And we’re going to talk a little more during later in the semester when we talk about how the industrial revolution changed the way chocolate is made, right? And then more current issues like sustainability and fair trade”
Cocoa beans were used as currency in Mesoamerica even before the Mayans began consuming it, and today Martini explains to her students that the controversies surrounding the cocoa bean and product derivatives can be overlooked when we bite into that brownie or sip that hot milk chocolate. In West African countries, for example, 45 to 65 percent of their economy is driven by cocoa production. She said there are some countries, even today, that are surrounded by controversy.
“The economics around chocolate is very important," Martini said. "There has been quite a bit of improvements because you know, cocoa trees are grown by small farmers and there is a lot of controversy on how much these farmers get paid because they actually, what they do, they actually get paid from the government so there has been a lot of efforts from the companies, chocolate making companies like Hershey’s, ADM, Cadbury, Nestlé’s, which are trying to benefit more and more the farmer and make sure the farmers get what they actually deserve so I think like you said, cocoa is still a very powerful economic tool.
Today, 40 to 50 million people around the world depend on cocoa for their livelihood with small family farms producing nearly 4 million tons of cocoa each year.