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Chocolate — Food of the GodsLesson 13 of 16

Key Terms: Chocolate

Goal: After this lesson you can define the core vocabulary from Episode 3 across all four lenses. Subject: Vocabulary | Run time: about 5 minutes

Your word bank for the Chocolate episode. Read it quick, out loud if you can. The full glossary lives in the course Resources.

Geography

Theobroma cacao (thee-oh-BROH-mah kah-KOW). The cacao tree. Theobroma is Greek for food of the gods (Coe & Coe, 2013).

Cacao Belt. The equatorial zone, about 20 degrees North to 20 degrees South, the narrowest growing belt of any major commodity (Coe & Coe, 2013).

Understory tree. A tree that grows in shade beneath a taller forest canopy. Cacao is one (Coe & Coe, 2013).

Forastero (for-ah-STEH-roh). The hardy, basic cacao variety, about 80 percent of world production (International Cocoa Organization, 2023).

Criollo (kree-OH-yoh). A rare, complex cacao, about 2 percent of production, worth many times more (International Cocoa Organization, 2023).

Agroforestry (AG-roh-FOR-uh-stree). Growing a crop under a managed forest canopy, the main defense for cacao against warming (Coe & Coe, 2013).

Social Studies

Tribute system. A tax paid by conquered peoples to an imperial power. The Aztec collected cacao as tribute (Coe & Coe, 2013).

Xocolatl (shoh-KOH-lah-tul). The Nahuatl word for bitter water, the original unsweetened chocolate drink (Coe & Coe, 2013).

Pochteca (pohch-TEH-kah). The Aztec merchant class, long-distance traders who carried cacao.

Popol Vuh (poh-POHL VOO). The Maya creation narrative, in which humanity is finally made from corn and cacao (Christenson, 2007).

Colonial extraction. An economic system where colonies provide raw materials for an imperial power to process and profit from (Coe & Coe, 2013).

Economics

Monopsony (mah-NOP-suh-nee). A market with few buyers controlling many sellers. About four companies control most cacao processing (International Cocoa Organization, 2023).

Commodity trap. When producers of a raw material stay poor while the processors capture most of the value (Fountain & Huetz-Adams, 2023).

Value-added processing. Transforming a raw input to increase its worth. Raw cacao becomes far more valuable as finished chocolate (International Cocoa Organization, 2023).

Living wage gap. The difference between what a worker earns and the income needed to live. Cacao farmers earn far below it (Fairtrade Foundation, 2023).

Fair trade. A certification with a price floor, a premium, and labor standards, linked to lower child labor (Fairtrade Foundation, 2023).

English Language Arts

Cacao (kah-KOW). From the Nahuatl cacahuatl, the raw bean and tree (Coe & Coe, 2013).

Cocoa (KOH-koh). An English corruption of cacao, likely a shipping-document misspelling (Coe & Coe, 2013).

Nahuatl (nah-WAH-tul). The Aztec language family, source of the words cacao and chocolate (Coe & Coe, 2013).

Enumeration. A rhetorical technique of accumulating details, used in the Florentine Codex (Sahagun, 1569).

Parallelism. Repeating a grammatical structure for effect, a technique in the Florentine Codex (Sahagun, 1569).

Sources

  • Christenson, A. J. (2007). Popol Vuh: The sacred book of the Maya. University of Oklahoma Press.
  • Coe, S. D., & Coe, M. D. (2013). The true history of chocolate (3rd ed.). Thames and Hudson.
  • Fairtrade Foundation. (2023). Cocoa farmer income and poverty reduction report. https://www.fairtrade.net
  • Fountain, A., & Huetz-Adams, F. (2023). Cocoa barometer 2023. VOICE Network. https://www.voicenetwork.cc
  • International Cocoa Organization. (2023). Quarterly bulletin of cocoa statistics (Vol. XLIX, No. 1). https://www.icco.org
  • Sahagun, B. de. (1569). Florentine Codex: General history of the things of New Spain (Anderson and Dibble, Trans., 1950-1982). School of American Research.
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