Doing just fine if you ask me. Today I got to go on a chocolate tasting tour where I learned all about the process of how chocolate came to be this beloved “candy”. We began with learning about the first consumers of chocolate who were the natives . They used it as more of an energy drink saying a worker could go with minimal food by just drinking this “chocolate cocktail” throughout the day. Originally it had a spicier and bitter flavor since it was mostly mixed with water and little to no sugar was involved with the making of the drink.

The drink was then moved to and popularized in Spain by the wealthy as a sort of medicinal drink but many used it in the wrong way so it could easily be the worst thing for your case. It was soon after that people like the Swedish started adding sugar into the chocolate which made it taste a whole lot better. The problem with this was that through their process of grinding the cacao never got small enough so it would have a grainy texture when eaten. This is where Lindt comes in, he made the “mistake” of leaving the grinder on over the weekend which lead the the cocoa being fine enough to be fully mixed and taste much better. Because of this the first dark chocolate was born.

A few others tried to expand on this by adding milk into the milling process but this just bred bacteria and cause the chocolate to go bad and mold. To combat this a pharmacist, who was looking to help out his patients who were getting sick from milk, came up with dehydrated milk which could be in the milling process to create milk chocolate. From there the success of chocolate greatly grew thanks to its accessibility to the market of children. Lindt later combined his company with Sprüngli giving birth to the massive chocolate company we know today. Chocolate has changed very much since its history with the natives and is now one of the most popular desserts in the world.

Coffee and chocolate seem to have a lot in common in Costa Rica because of their importance of quality over quantity. They are both relatively low harm to the environment and can even coexist sometimes with the fact the cacao trees thrive under the shade. Both have the big problem of shrinking farms and less supply every year because its either too hard to maintain or people don’t want to move to more sustainable methods. Lastly we ate lunch at a farm to table restaurant called riverside and then moved on to a lecture on ecotourism. Overall Britt, Sibö, and Riverside try to make a commitment to not importing anything and making everything they can in house. This helps out both the local economy and environment in many ways.