Chocolate

Chocolate is a food made from the roasted seeds of the cacao tree. Long before it was sweetened and made into bars, it was drunk as a bitter, frothy, often spicy drink by the Maya and the Aztecs, and cacao beans were valuable enough to be used as money.^[1] In the Aztec world you could pay for goods with cacao beans, which is the only time in history that money genuinely grew on trees, and could also be drunk.

The bar

For most of its history chocolate was a drink. The first chocolate bars meant for eating were made in Britain in the 1840s, and milk chocolate followed in Switzerland in the 1870s. Before that, anyone wanting to eat chocolate had to wait for their drink to go cold, and even then it would not set.^[2]

Dogs

Chocolate contains theobromine, a chemical that humans can break down easily but dogs and cats cannot. It is poisonous to dogs, and dark chocolate is more dangerous than milk chocolate because it contains more theobromine. Dog owners are advised to keep chocolate out of reach, a piece of advice that has been followed by dogs only reluctantly.

• Humans: chocolate fine.
• Dogs: chocolate not fine.
• Cats: not fine, and not interested (they cannot taste sweet).
• Trees: chocolate fine, eventually.

See also

• Dog – which must not have any
• Brown – its colour
• Cat – which would not taste it anyway
• Peanut – a frequent travelling companion
• Vending machine – where chocolate waits

References

1. Cacao, C. (2002). Money That Grew. Pod Press.
2. Bar, B. (1999). “Waiting for It to Set”. Confectionery History 1847: 1.
3. Theobromine, T. (2010). Not for Dogs. Vet Books.