Cocoa
The cocoa tree (also known as cacao) comes from Central and South America, but humans spread them across the world centuries ago so they could enjoy the delicious chocolate desserts they could make from the plant’s seeds. As the world warmed, people carried these seeds out of the traditional tropical zones to the rest of the world.
Shade-loving trees, cocoa trees generally grow as part of an understory in mature tropical forests. They rely on tiny midges to pollinate their flowers. Monkeys breaking the seed pods to eat the pulp inside will frequently disperse seeds, propagating the tree without human help.
#Human relationship
People of the Fifth World harvest, ferment, and dry the seeds of the cocoa tree to make chocolate, which they generally make into desserts. Common chocolate desserts include beverages (mixed with coconut milk, vanilla, sugar cane juice or honey for sweetener, and occasionally coffee). Sometimes they mix chocolate with chili pepper, as in traditional Mayan recipes.
#Cocoa People
When a community focuses on its relationship with cocoa to make a living, it can shape their lives in a wide variety of ways. To truly focus on cocoa, communities have to become gardening villages, usually practicing swidden cultivation. Because cocoa trees require shade from a mature canopy, though, these communities must take particular care to keep the forest healthy, strong, and diverse. The community’s relationship with coca can still come to define it in a number of unique ways, though. Some examples include:
- A community’s approach to swidden cultivation may involve a regular cycle of different guilds of plants at different stages, moving around the jungle in a regular pattern, often planting cocoa trees as part of the last stage in the cycle, in the shade of tall fruit and hardwood trees planted earlier. This complex cycle requires a community to make careful plans years in advance, making complex calendars and astronomy very important to them. This can influence the way they think about everything else, garnering them a reputation for patience and meticulous planning, regularly setting plans in motion that will take years or decades to bear fruit.
- Some communities develop varieties of cocoa trees with beans that have unique flavors found nowhere else. People from neighboring communities can often gain status and prestige by handing out the rare and unique chocolate made from such beans as gifts, making it a valuable trade good and giving the chocolate people prestige, status, and valuable luxury goods in return.
- While a community that specializes in cocoa and cattle both, or who allies themselves with the right kind of cattle people might have access to everything they need to create milk chocolate, most cocoa people make dark chocolate. Some of these communities have festivals in early spring, when they’ve harvested the cocoa beans and the first fruits and nuts start to appear. They gather all the fruits and nuts they can and dip them in the chocolate, sometimes waiting for the chocolate to dry around them and sometimes consuming them straight away. Such chocolate festivals usually play an important role in the social lives of the communities that host them. Some communities make these particularly complex affairs, inviting neighboring communities to join them. Under such conditions, a village’s population could swell to many times its normal size for several weeks. Such villages might have seasonal hierarchies, with a president, prime minister, boss, chief, or king who rules for the duration of the festival, with the usual egalitarianism restored when the festival ends.
- Rather than trying to make something sweet, some communities ferment cocoa beans into an alcoholic chocolate beverage. With about the same alcohol as found in beer, these often play an important role in the community’s life. An individual’s first brew might mark her passage into adulthood. The community might not consider a marriage or other important agreement finalized until the parties involved share a brew over it. A custom like this might make the cocoa bean or the tree’s leaves important symbols of office for one who recites or advises on the village’s laws and customs. Such communities often create ceramics so that they can store the brew in pots and trade them with neighboring communities. These often become valuable luxury goods.