Chocolate shaped the US in unlikely ways. Here's the sweet history.

America's love affair with chocolate stretches back beyond the earliest days of the nation, more than 250 years ago.  

Indigenous tribes in central and South American began cultivating and consuming cocoa around 3300 B.C., according to some ancient evidence. When it reached Europe in the 1500s, chocolate was a delicacy.  

Today, it's estimated that Americans eat about 2.8 to 3 billion pounds of chocolate per year – about 10 pounds per person each year or the equivalent of about 100 Hershey's bars.  

Chocolate’s journey to ubiquity, in many ways, tracks the broader history of the United States. 

Jared Ross Hardesty, author of “Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Smuggling, Slavery, and Chocolate,” and a scholar of colonial America said the confection “helps us better understand some really key themes in American history” 

It’s also played a pivotal role in major milestone moments in the country, from the American Revolution to space travel. 

Here’s the story of how chocolate is intertwined in the country’s history. 

Chocolate in the Americas predates European settlements

Thousands of years before European settlers landed in the modern-day United States, the native Olmec, Maya, and Aztec civilizations in what we know as Southern Mexico and Central America began cultivating and producing chocolate.  

The word chocolate comes from the Aztec word “xocoatl,” which was a bitter, spicy drink made by grounding cacao beans with water, chili peppers and other spices. These early American civilizations used the chocolate drink in religious ceremonies, including births and marriage, and some treated it as currency.  

Chocolate didn’t arrive in Europe until the 1500s, after Aztec emperor Montezuma II introduced it to Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes, who brought it back to Spain. 

Chocolate was an alternative to tea for revolutionary colonists

Fast forward two centuries and chocolate had become a luxury across Europe and the American colonies. Although it was still consumed solely as a drink, Europeans substituted the chili peppers for spices like cinnamon and sugar.

The drink gained popularity in the American colonies in the mid-1700s as tensions with the British Empire began to rise and tariffs, or taxes, were placed on goods like tea. Colonists boycotting parliaments actions, and the taxed British goods, turned to chocolate as an alternative to tea. 

Cacao beans were largely cultivated in the Caribbean and South America. To avoid paying the British for the goods, colonists developed illegal trading networks and smuggled the chocolate into their ports.  

The drink became a symbol of patriotism during the war for independence.  

Chocolate's history is entwined with the slave trade 

The history of chocolate production has deep roots in slavery. In many of the Caribbean and South American countries that produced cacao beans, the population of enslaved people outnumbered those who were free.  

Enslaved people were forced to plant, harvest, ferment, and transport the cacao beans as European and American demands for chocolate increased. Once the beans were in the colonies, merchants of chocolate shops as far north as Boston used slave labor to transform the beans into a drinkable product. 

“Chocolate illustrates just how deeply slavery is embedded in the American economy in this time period, in the colonial revolutionary era,” said Hardesty.  

“If you want chocolate in this time period, you're going to be consuming something that's made and produced by slave labor." 

The Industrial Revolution brought the first chocolate bars 

The Gilded Age of the United States conjures images of palatial homes, extravagant parties and tables covered in decadent foods – including sugary, chocolate confections. Innovations brought on by the Industrial Revolution allowed chocolatiers to create what we think of today as chocolate. 

A Dutch inventor in 1828 discovered a way to separate the bean into cacao solids and cacao butter. Then, in 1847, an Englishman created the first solid bar of chocolate and in the 1870s, a Swiss confectioner developed milk chocolate.

Those developments trickled to America. At the 1893 Chicago World Fair, a man named Milton S. Hershey became so enamored by a chocolate machine display that he went home and began experimenting. In 1905, after selling his caramel business, Hershey opened a chocolate factory in Pennsylvania and began selling his signature milk chocolate bars.

Chocolate was included in World War military rations

A chocolate bar likely wouldn’t top the list of recommended foods for Army soldiers today, particularly as the Secretary of War seeks to raise military fitness requirements.  

But at the dawn of World War II, officials from the Army met with leaders at Hershey to develop a high-energy chocolate ration bar for soldiers that would taste “a little better than a boiled potato” and withstand the conditions of the battlefield. 

They created the contract after soldiers in World War I liked the milk chocolate bars in their ration kits so much that they were handing them out to little children they encountered.

"That kind of defeats the purpose of a ration bar, which you're supposed to eat when you're desperate for food," said Amy Zeigler, senior director of the Hershey Story Museum and Hershey Gardens.

By the end of the war in 1945, Hershey estimates it was producing 24 million units of Ration D bars per week. Between 1940 and 1945, the company says it produced and distributed more than three billion chocolate ration bars to war zones around the world. 

Hershey won the second highest number of Army-Navy E Awards, given to companies who helped in World War II production, because of the ration bars, Ziegler said.

Chocolate has traveled on many journeys, even to space 

Chocolate, too, has supported the adventurous spirit of Americans over the last 250 years, from Lewis and Clark’s journey west to NASA’s missions in space.  

In an 1806 diary entry, Meriweather Lewis wrote that he “drank about a pint” of chocolate and “found great relief” from feelings of sickness as he traveled down the Missouri River at the end of the 28-month, 8,000-mile journey commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the Louisiana Purchase.  

In July 1971, astronauts on the Apollo 15 mission to the moon also enjoyed chocolate. Hershey’sTropical Chocolate Bars, originally developed for the Pacific theater during World War II, were sent up on the mission.  

M&Ms, Mars’ candy-coated chocolates, were on the first space shuttle mission a decade later and have been on every shuttle flight since, according to the company. They’re also featured on the International Space Station menu. 

Karissa Waddick, who covers America's 250th anniversary for USA TODAY, can be reached at [email protected].