I thought that chocolate came from cocoa beans which were a lot like coffee beans. Nope!
Here’s a wiki link that tells you what cocoa really is. But I’ll give you a head-start.
Cocoa beans are big things, like coconuts. They have a few pods inside, which are gooey. Seeds are in the pods. To make cocoa you cut the beans down from the trees, bust open the beans, then lay the pods out in the sun and let them rot, ferment and ooze away from the seeds. Then you dry the seeds and make chocolate. The drying beans are also often trod upon like wine grapes and small villages still process beans on cowhides. It’s still a key part of small scale world farming. That and the fermenting, oozing in the sun part is what is neat to me. There’s no other way than this “sweating” process to do it right.
The Aztec emporer supposedly only dined on cocoa. They called it the “food of the gods,” which is still part of the scientific name of the bean.
Cool!
Also, they have nothing to do with coffee beans or the coca plant used in making cocaine.
The Ivory Coast of Africa produces 33% of the world’s cocoa supply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa
