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Photo, sea of chocolate, Blondel’s in Lausanne – E Wallace 2007

A startling discovery when I moved to Switzerland was that Swiss people buy good chocolate for themselves. They buy it just to eat it. I came from a culture where you ate candy bars, a far cry from good chocolate, and  you offered the finer stuff as a gift. People still offer it, of course, and when I’ve interviewed heads of chocolate companies such as Favarger in Versoix and Lindt near Zurich, they are quick to point out that gift-giving is a basic ingredient in their businesses.

Now it seems that chocolate has, from the time it was discovered, been used to impress, to flatter, to show that you think well of someone. Cornell University researchers studying pottery vessels from 1100 BC in
Puerto Escondido, Honduras have discovered that people there fermented the pulp and made a beer-like drink from it, according to a story in Xinhua.

This was news to me, so I decided to hunt for details. I found them on the Cornell University web site, but in a news release dated 1998. Just goes to show: chocolate keeps well, at least in its web stories form.

But then, in fairness to Xinhua, which in the past five years has become a much stronger international news agency, I pursued this further and discovered that this week UPI, the US-based wire service, reported the story again, based on an article run a few days earlier by the Los Angeles Times. There I learned that the  old Honduran drink had an alcohol content of 5%. I also read that the Chinese were drinking wine 7,000 years ago, so Honduras is far being a record-holder for inventing alcoholic drinks with its chocolate.

But why the sudden interest in this story, which was earlier (1998) published by Science Daily as well IN that article I learned that chocolate drinks may account for the "remarkable longevity" of the community where the pottery was found. Why have wars when you can drink chcolate beer together?

It turns out the Guardian also picked up the story this week, adding a nice academic touch, that the chemical found in the pottery that showed the researchers that people drank alcoholic chocolate is called theobromine. And  lo and behold, the Guardian explains why we are all interested anew in this rather dated story: the news peg is that Cornell’s Henderson published a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US, reporting on his 10 years of work in Honduras. Here’s Softpedia’s report, where one of the research team people is interviewed briefly.

Oddly enough, I can’t find the original PNAS article. Does it exist? Is this a recycled chocolate story that is nearly 10 years old? One thing is clear: we love to read about chocolate.

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