Chocolate Comes from the Amazon
This link tells us a lot about what we think we know and what we don’t know about the Americas. Trade routes around Afroeurasia are extremely well documented, but pre-Colombian trade routes around the Americas less so. We know that corn, originally cultivated in Meso-America was traded to North and South America and became a staple crop in the Andes. Native people were farming it on the east coast when the English arrived. We know that parrots and other birds were traded to what is now the American Southwest from what is now Guatemala. But Until recently we didn’t know that chocolate is originally from a tree, or a family of trees, native to the Amazon.
This means that the cocoa bean’s value was realized probably in what is now Brazil, widely used there, and traded at some point to Central America, specifically to the Olmecs or their predecessors. Most cultures in Meso-America were consuming chocolate in some form long before the Spanish arrived. It’s important to reiterate that Europeans didn’t discover chocolate (which is most likely a Mess-American word that is pronounced similarly to how whoever introduced it to the Spanish pronounced it) but did take part in its next leg of evolution. Europeans brought chocolate to Europe where they turned it into a sugary treat rather than the bitter/savory delicacy that was being enjoyed by those in what we now think of as the Americas. Europeans also brought the chocolate crop to other tropical places around the world to grow, spreading the chocolate tree’s genetics far and wide, making in a spectacularly successful plant in evolutionary terms.
The winner here is chocolate. And win chocolate wins, we all win.*
*Except for people literally enslaved on chocolate plantations. Only buy fair trade chocolate.