From Filipino champorado to Brazilian brigadeiro, chocolate has been melted and moulded into many treats around the world. Cacao is known as ‘the food of the gods’, it’s been used as currency and is key to Valentine’s Day exchanges and Easter egg hunts. It supposedly can treat everything from coughs to concussions, but is chocolate actually good for you? And why have humans valued cacao for so long?
In this episode, Lee Tran talks to chef Juan Carlos Negrete Lopez about Mexico’s 4000-year-old chocolate history.
The way that cacao was used back in the day was more focused on drinks, for ceremonial purposes and only like high ranks of Indigenous societies used to drink it.Juan Carlos Negrete Lopez, chef
At one stage at his Maiz restaurant in Sydney, he served ceremonial cacao made the traditional way, with pure cocoa: “zero per cent sugar, zero per cent added anything.”
Chocolatier Fiona Harrison also uses cacao to celebrate culture – 65,000 years of culture, in fact. She runs Australia's first Indigenous chocolate company and fills her bars with native foods – like Illawarra plums and pepperberry – to highlight their medicinal and cultural importance.
Just as blocks of chocolate can vary – from plain white bars to dark chocolate studded with fruit and nuts – so can their health benefits.
We have the white chocolate, which is the least chocolate of all chocolates.Saman Khalesi, senior lecturer and discipline lead in nutrition at Central Queensland University
Saman Khalesi offers a health expert’s perspective on which chocolates you should actually unwrap, what the 70% cocoa description on dark chocolate actually means – and why you should never feed this sweet stuff to your dog.
Credits
Should You Really Eat That? is created by Lee Tran Lam
Mixed by Max Gosford
Artwork: Grace Lee
Theme music: Sydney Sunset by Nooky
Transcript
This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal of the Eora nation. I'd like to pay my respects to elders past and present and recognise their continuous connection to Country.
Saman Khalesi: We have the white chocolate, which is the least chocolate of all chocolates.
Fiona Harrison: He said to me, you know, you're Australia's first Indigenous chocolate company.
Juan Carlos Negrete Lopez: We had like the 100 per cent ceremonial cacao: zero per cent sugar, zero per cent added anything.
Lee Tran Lam: In 18th-century France, the royal pharmacist treated Marie-Antoinette’s headaches with chocolate. Mesoamericans used cacao medicinally thousands of years ago. And today, we see headlines about chocolate supposedly being a health food – but is it really?
I’m Lee Tran Lam and you’re listening to Should You Really Eat That?
This show explores the cultural, social and nutritional confusion over the staples in our diet.
Should you embrace olive oil, native ingredients and chocolate? Or skip the butter, salt and soy? It can be bewildering keeping up with what’s quote unquote good for you and so many different beliefs shape what we consume – what’s fact and what’s fashion and whose perspective is being overlooked? Untangling all of this can be tricky, which is why I started this podcast!
Today’s episode is on chocolate.
From Filipino champorado to Brazilian brigadeiro, chocolate has been melted and moulded into many treats around the world. Mesoamerican societies applied cacao to snakebites, Soviet inmates weren’t allowed to receive chocolate, in case it led to prison breaks – and European hospitals stocked chocolate for prescriptions. Cacao is known as ‘the food of the gods’, it’s been used as currency and is key to Valentine’s Day exchanges and Easter egg hunts. It supposedly can treat everything from coughs to concussions, but is chocolate actually good for you?
And why have humans valued it for so long? Let’s hear from someone with a strong cultural connection to cacao.
Juan Carlos Negrete Lopez: Hello, my name is Juan Carlos Negrete Lopez, and I'm the head chef and co-owner of Maiz Mexican restaurant in Sydney, New South Wales.
I grew up in Mexicali – this is in Baja California, Mexico.
So I guess my earliest memory from cacao will definitely be a Mexican hot chocolate with cinnamon, spices, a little bit of sugar. It’s, I guess, a modern interpretation of the original hot cacao that it used to be consumed in Mexico. It was consumed by the Olmecs, which was a civilisation pre-Aztecs, and pre-Mayans in the territory that now it's called Mexico.
Lee Tran Lam: Around 4000 years ago, the Olmecs were “probably the first to ferment, roast, and grind cacao beans”, according to Smithsonian magazine.
There’s some debate over the origins of the word ‘chocolate’ – but here’s one popular theory.
Juan Carlos Negrete Lopez: The word chocolate itself, it's from the Nahuatl ‘xocóatl’, which means xoco, bitter and atl, water. So xocolatl means bitter water.
The way that cacao was used back in the day was more focused on drinks, which was used for ceremonial purposes and only like high ranks of Indigenous societies used to drink it, but with time, cacao was used as a food source.
There's plenty of of different drinks made out of cacao: tascalate, there's the tejate, there's the pozol and atole. Yeah, all these are from different regions in Mexico.
Lee Tran Lam: These drinks flavour cacao with corn, spices and other ingredients.
Juan Carlos Negrete Lopez: It almost became like a soup in itself, that it was an energy drink that people used to drink to sustain their energy levels. I started to get more interested as a chef to try to find the real taste and the real origin of cacao.
Lee Tran Lam: Cacao trees likely originated in the Amazon and ancient vessels unearthed in Ecuador suggest we began drinking the crop 5,300 years ago.
Juan Carlos Negrete Lopez: Cacao is the raw plant, and the plant is naturally bitter, though fermentation will allow it to have different properties and make it less bitter. Obviously, the bars that we consume right now has very very little percentage of actual cacao. It's like a bar that is sold with added everything, like sugars, powdered milks and it's far from its original state.
Lee Tran Lam: Cacao beans were traded as currency and people even counterfeited them! Knock-off cacao seeds – made of clay – have been found in old sites in Guatemala and Mexico, Smithsonian magazine reports.
Juan Carlos Negrete Lopez: Yeah, the significance of cacao was extremely, extremely high back in the day. It was part of their cultural activities.
Lee Tran Lam: Cacao was also prized for other reasons.
Juan Carlos Negrete Lopez: Yeah, it was definitely used as medicine. When I drink a cup of really pure, beautiful cacao, the energy is like drinking a cup of coffee. You do get a feeling of there's something happening in there. [Laughs]
Lee Tran Lam: When Juan Carlos opened Maiz, an early menu showcased Mexican hot chocolate.
Juan Carlos Negrete Lopez: We were using Frido Cacao. They import their cacao from Mexico. We had like the 100 per cent ceremonial cacao: zero per cent sugar, zero per cent added anything.
Lee Tran Lam: If creamy sweet hot chocolate is like easy listening music, drinking 100 per cent cacao has the vitality of hardcore punk. The intensity is bracing and medicinal.
Juan Carlos Negrete Lopez: Just chocolate and water. And a lot of people were surprised on the flavour and the richness and the effect of the cacao and how there's no need for milks and sugars. Milk and sugar came after cacao flew to Europe.
Lee Tran Lam: That sweet milky chocolate has a brutal history – with the sugar and cacao grown by the world’s enslaved populations.
Chocolate was originally enjoyed by the elites – like Marie Antoinette. Her pharmacist Sulpice Debauve disguised the bitterness of her headache medicine with cocoa and almond milk. He pressed this mixture into discs she called pistoles. Today, you can buy non-pharmaceutical versions of these sweets in Paris at Debauve & Gallais, the chocolate business he started in 1800 with his nephew.
When you think of chocolate, you might think of Swiss milk blocks, bars from Belgium, Dutch hot chocolate – European treats. But in Modica in Italy today, they actually grind their cacao like the Aztecs did, using a Mexican stone tool called the metate.
And chocolate detected on a 2500-year-old plate in the Yucatan hints at the long Mexican tradition of making mole.
Juan Carlos Negrete Lopez: The mole that we all know today which is like a dark sauce with different spices and chilies and chocolate.
Lee Tran Lam: Currently, the world’s most famous mole is served at Pujol in Mexico City. The acclaimed restaurant is known for keeping its mole alive, like a sourdough starter. Its mother mole is more than a decade old and “has outlasted three Mexican presidencies”, says the Michelin guide.
In Australia, cacao is being used to showcase a culture that’s 65,000 years old.
Fiona Harrison: I'm Fiona Harrison, a proud Wiradjuri woman of the Lachlan River on the Central Tablelands of New South Wales. And I'm speaking to you today from beautiful Gundungurra land. I'm the CEO and founder of Australia's first Indigenous chocolate company, Chocolate On Purpose.
I think my earliest memory of eating chocolate would be Easter, finding the eggs. And I think I wore a lot more of it than I actually ate.
Lee Tran Lam: When Fiona started making her own chocolate, she flavoured it with Indigenous ingredients like quandong, Illawarra plums, rainforest lime and pepperberry.
Fiona Harrison: The chocolate's the vehicle to deliver the magic of the native ingredients and share the wisdom of them.
Lee Tran Lam: When Fiona began her business over a decade ago, she’d melt her chocolates with a microwave and rest them on an unconventional piece of stone.
Fiona Harrison: I was looking around at where can you get a piece of granite? Because I didn't need like a benchtop, I just needed something to put on a table. And they referred me to the funeral home next door. And the lady in the funeral home was so lovely. She was so excited to have a different kind of job. She sourced this granite slab – it's not a tombstone, so don't freak out [laughs]. It's all above board.
Lee Tran Lam: Now Fiona makes award-winning bars using proper equipment and her motto is Chocolate For Good. She uses her sweets to highlight reconciliation, diversity and cultural understanding. Fiona remembers the day someone reminded her of the platform she had.
Fiona Harrison: He said to me, you know, you're Australia's first Indigenous chocolate company. And I was going, oh, wow, that's so powerful – like, it was the truth.
I love the way, many times, the traditional use of the native ingredients is actually confirmed with modern scientific research.
One example is the Illawarra plum. It is full of sticky sugars, which are beneficial for gastrointestinal health.
It tastes like a musky, deep musk taste. What I love is that because most of the native fruits are tart – but when you put them in the chocolate, they sort of just meet in the middle and bring each other into alignment. It's a really nice way to deliver the native fruit in a familiar way that gets the person's palate talking and you know, having conversation. And so it's always an opportunity because of these health benefits to be able to segue to bigger Indigenous issues like Close the Gap.
We often had to just move people aside at the markets so that others could come in and have a look at the chocolate, because they just really want to know.
Lee Tran Lam: For NAIDOC Week one year, Fiona found a new chocolate mould called Topography and used its contours to tell a story about First Nations culture.
Fiona Harrison: And when I looked at it, I just saw Country – because it had rivers, like flat bits that flowed through the chocolate bar, that were the rivers. And I added a fruit called ngurp, it’s muntrie berry, because the flecks of the fruit along the river look like they had fish in there.
Lee Tran Lam: Western names for native ingredients – like Davidson plum – appear on Fiona’s chocolate bars, but she includes the Indigenous words on the labels, too.
Fiona Harrison: When I hear and speak my Wiradjuri language, it takes me to a depth of connection I've never known before. It's like it resonates and the old people are with me. And I just really felt the language name for the fruit straight away said to you, ‘this isn't just like an apple’.
Lee Tran Lam: Although there are over 250 Indigenous languages in Australia, Fiona’s noticed similarities in pronunciation between some of them.
Fiona Harrison: The emphasis is on the first syllable. So for example, macadamia is boombera. Boom-ber-a. Illawarra Plum is daalgaal. So when you see a double ‘a’, it's a long ‘a’, daalgaal. Davidson plum is ooray [or-ray]. When you see a double o, it's an ‘or’ sound, not an ‘oo’. The finger lime is gulalung. So when you see a ‘u’, it's an ‘oo’, it's not an ‘ah’.
Lee Tran Lam: Learning how to say quandong and other native ingredients in language may take time, and some people may stumble or not feel confident in their pronunciation – but Fiona prefers people try and get it wrong, than not try at all. She once read a quote about attempting pronunciation that’s really stayed with her.
Fiona Harrison: He said, when people won't even try and pronounce my name, that greatly offends me because it's like they have more interest in how they feel than how I do. And I'd much rather enjoy them trying to pronounce it and reassuring them that, ‘thank you, this is how you say it’, because then I know I've been seen and I think it's the same for the names of the plants.
Despite the industry being built on the back of Indigenous cultural intellectual property, based on ancient food knowledge systems, there's less than 2 per cent representation by Indigenous people and ownership in that Indigenous supply chain. What I hope to do is to contribute to helping Indigenous growers to play a larger game in the supply chain. And when we engage in the activities of our ancestors, there's a healing.
Lee Tran Lam: Fiona’s using her chocolate for cultural impact. But can chocolate be good for us in other ways?
Saman Khalesi: My name is Saman Khalesi or Sami. I'm a senior lecturer and discipline lead in nutrition at Central Queensland University. I've been teaching and researching nutrition for more than 10 years now and also lead a research group called HealthWise.
I was born in Tehran, the capital of Iran, and my earliest memory of chocolates are probably the sweet taste and smell of warm chocolate milk my mum used to make my sister and I on cold winter nights.
Lee Tran Lam: You’ve probably seen those possibly too-good-to-be-true headlines about how chocolate is supposedly healthy for you. To make sense of these claims, we need to understand how chocolate is made. Sami explains that cacao is harvested, fermented, dried and ground into cocoa mass or chocolate liquor.
Saman Khalesi: And then they can be separated to the two main ingredients that are used for chocolate making, which are cocoa butter and cocoa solids.
Lee Tran Lam: Cocoa butter is the fat, and cocoa solids are what’s left over – and when people make health claims about chocolate, they’re usually referring to cocoa solids. And the amount of cocoa solids in a block really affects the flavour profile.
Saman Khalesi: Dark chocolate is the one that contains a high percentage of cocoa solids. It's usually richer in flavour and it's a little bit bitter just because of that cocoa content of dark chocolate. But then we have milk chocolate. So it is creamier and sweeter in taste – mostly because of the added milk and high sugar content.
We have the white chocolate, which is the least chocolate of all chocolates. It's sweet, obviously and creamy and it doesn't have that bitterness associated with dark chocolate at all.
Lee Tran Lam: When you see a block that says it’s 70 per cent cocoa, you might recognise it as dark chocolate. But what does that 70 per cent actually mean?
Saman Khalesi: 70 per cent of that chocolate bar weight is coming from cocoa itself. It could be cocoa solid and cocoa butter. And that remaining 30 per cent could be sugar and other ingredients. Usually anything that is more than 70 per cent dark is considered ‘healthier’ sort of a chocolate compared to the other types.
Lee Tran Lam: OK, so does that mean that chocolate is healthy for you?
Saman Khalesi: Chocolate is no superfood and we probably don't have a superfood other than fruits and vegetables, if you will. But cocoa solids is the one part of chocolate that is rich in a group of chemicals called polyphenols.
Lee Tran Lam: Polyphenols are linked to a range of health benefits, from reducing blood pressure to improving heart health.
Saman Khalesi: But so many other fruits and vegetables also have this chemical called polyphenols.
Lee Tran Lam: That said, if you’re choosing your chocolate based on healthy pay-offs, then it makes sense to go dark.
Saman Khalesi: Now the darker the chocolate, the healthier amount of cocoa solid and more health benefits obviously. Dark chocolates have seven times probably more polyphenols compared to the white chocolate and a lot more compared to also the milk chocolate. The health benefits of cocoa solid can be really easily offset by the high sugar and fat content of the chocolates.
Lee Tran Lam: If you’re eating dark chocolate because it has more polyphenols than green tea, or because it has nitric oxide, which helps dilate blood vessels – just remember chocolate doesn’t have a monopoly on these health benefits.
Saman Khalesi: There's a lot of polyphenols in grapes, a lot of polyphenols in apples and all other sorts of vegetables. And for nitric oxide, there’s a lot in beetroot juice, for example, or kale.
Lee Tran Lam: Sure, this treat isn’t as healthy as leafy greens – but as anyone who has turned to emergency chocolate during a break-up or a crappy workday knows, a sweet hit can feel great.
Saman Khalesi: A lot of the mood change that comes with consuming chocolate is pretty much because of the sugar content of chocolate, because it promotes the release of serotonin, which is a feelgood hormone. And in many cases, it also can be related to another chemical component found in chocolate.
Lee Tran Lam: Theobromine is also found in chocolate. When I had Mexican hot chocolate that was purely cacao and water, I was buzzing on theobromine afterwards. I was wired!
Saman Khalesi: It also is a very mild stimulant, similar to caffeine. But in higher amounts, it can lead to feeling restlessness and headache and nausea, the way that too much consumption of caffeine does.
Lee Tran Lam: Theobromine means ‘food for the gods’ – but it’s poisonous to dogs and small animals. That’s why you should never feed chocolate to your canines.
But if you want to choose a bar that’s potentially better for you, should you try one that’s loaded with fruits and nuts?
Saman Khalesi: it comes to both a personal choice. Some people like the taste of maybe nuts and some people are allergic to nuts. So it depends on what sort of you go to in terms of taste. If we are choosing a chocolate bar and we can't stand a 85 per cent dark chocolate, better to go with a chocolate bar that has more probably nuts and dried fruit in it compared to a pure white chocolate.
Lee Tran Lam: The Davidson plum in Fiona’s chocolate bars, for example, offers 100 times as much vitamin C as oranges do.
Saman Khalesi: A square or two can be both satisfying. It can improve the mood and provide some health benefits, but also not adding that extra energy that we don't need to. For people who are going for a long hike or a long bike ride, that extra energy could be something helpful for them. So having a bar of chocolate handy could help.
Lee Tran Lam: And if darker chocolate is better for you, why not try a fully 100 per cent cocoa bar?
Lee Tran Lam: Well, the first time I did this, my brain completely shortcircuited and could not comprehend what I was eating. The chocolate was so bitter, like the blackest coffee I’d ever tried – I could only handle the tiniest sample. I ate more 100 per cent cocoa blocks, including a square from the makers of the world’s most expensive chocolate, and they all had such intriguing but musically bitter notes, I had to ration my bites – until I got to Firetree’s 100 per cent chocolate, which was so easy to eat I consumed half the block without trying. These one-ingredient chocolates can be so wildly different. Even the writer of a Guardian article titled: 100% cocoa bars are 99% utterly horrible made the case for trying one sugar-free brand.
But that doesn’t mean you should go overboard with eating it.
Saman Khalesi: Too much of any good thing is a bad thing, like even if you consume too much of vitamins that can be toxic for your body, even if you consume 100 per cent chocolate too much, that extra polyphenols and theobromine that it contains can have negative impacts as well. So moderation is the key as always in the nutrition and dietetics area.
Lee Tran Lam: Hershey’s knew this when they designed a chocolate bar for American troops – they made sure it didn’t taste that much better than a “boiled potato”.
And there’s more to chocolate than health – whether it’s the messy joy of an Easter egg hunt, or the way it can aid romance. French pastry chef Dominique Ansel has been an accomplice to over 100 marriage proposals and his bakery helped hide a wedding ring in a marshmallow flower that blooms when it’s warmed up by his signature hot chocolate.
But let’s not forget the problematic side to chocolate production, and its links to child labour, deforestation, farmer exploitation and other issues. Check out chocolatescorecard.com which ranks brands on key sustainability issues, and learn about ethical bean to bar makers like South Pacific Cacao, an award-winning social enterprise that benefits farmers on the Solomon Islands. Or Luisa Abram, who helps preserve the Amazon rainforest through her bars flavoured with wild cacao.
Juan Carlos Negrete Lopez: Every time we spend a dollar, the way we spend it, we're voting on how we want to shape the world right?
Lee Tran Lam: Should You Really Eat That? is an SBS podcast. It’s written and presented by me, Lee Tran Lam. Thank you to the SBS Audio team, Max Gosford and Joel Supple for their contributions and guidance. A major shout-out also goes to Caroline Gates for helping launch the show. The brilliant artwork is by Grace Lee and the theme song is Sydney Sunset by Yuin artist Nooky. The email address for the show is audio@sbs.com.au.
On the next episode of Should You Really Eat That?, we’re sprinkling salt on edamame, soaking bean curd in spicy laksa and exploring all things soy. Follow on your favourite podcast app and feel free to spread the word and tell people about the show.
