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Today is International Chocolate Day, which I learned because the Public Domain Review shared their 2015 article When Chocolate was Medicine: Colmenero, Wadsworth, and Dufour. University of Utah professor Christine Jones studies French literature from the 17th century, and in this piece, she follows the first publication that gathers tea, cacao, and coffee into one category that circles the Earth:
If the idea of a small world seems obvious now, it was not then. Since the Age of Discovery, it had been commonplace to depict the world as a wide rectangle with each of the Four Continents at an angle: Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia. Early visual traditions represented peoples of these lands racially, painted with different colored skin, or allegorically, flanked with elephants, hunting bows, and parasols. A frontispiece added to Dufour’s 1685 edition (pictured below) participates in the visual tradition of the continents but does not follow the same logic of depicting difference. Instead, it follows the logic of the treatise: to relate the global areas associated with coffee, tea, and chocolate through their similar habits. Accordingly, the frontispiece pictures men who are racialized and dressed to evoke the Middle East, Asia, and Mesoamerica sitting in a room around a table enjoying a drink together. The world suddenly looked quite small.
In the same article, Jones mentions how selling chocolate was also part of the British Empire's project of making their Caribbean conquest feel essential to Britons at home. And the implication that follows, of course, is of enslaved Africans and indigenous Caribbean people as well as indentured British and European people, depending on the specific moment and place.
This reminded me of Gerald Horne's book The Counter-Revolution of 1776. I am not a scholar, and I have not read deeply in this field, so don't mistake me for an expert. But Horne's case is that enslaved Africans knew of each other's actions more widely than we thought, from the full reaches of the northern British colonies all the way through the Caribbean.
The enslaved people who tended cacao for the British had their own small world, and it empowered them, Horne argues. Reading the book also gave me pause, because even in my very good U.S. history classes, we barely discussed the Caribbean. Horne's work made me realize how misleading that was.
Jones' article also mentions that cocoa, coffee, and tea are not just stimulants but hot beverages. Our ideas of hot versus cold in food and beverage are so, so cultural, and can make people very defensive. I thought back to a post from one of my favorite social media people, Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte on various platforms.
Adrianna likes the spiciest foods imaginable and very, very hot beverages, which she attributes to being both Chinese and Singaporean. She linked this super interesting article, The History Behind China’s Obsession With Hot Water, by scholar Zhang Guowei, translated by Kilian O’Donnell:
As traditional medicine became broadly accepted across society, Chinese people developed an abiding faith in the beneficial health effects of hot water. By the 1830s, people in more prosperous areas near the Yangtze River Delta had come to view it as a necessity, and hot water stores known as laohuzao, or “tiger stoves,” popped up in major cities all over the region. The hot water they sold was not just for drinking, but for washing, too.
He explains that foreign beverages have permeated China, and most of these are served cold, like seltzer and energy drinks. But on social media, Chinese people both celebrated and mourned a middle-aged rock star who had started to carry the telltale Thermos bottle of hot water. A cool guy is visibly getting older, and we don't always love to see that.
As a side and closing comment, Jones' article about the Big Three stimulant drinks talks about how cacao was a puzzle to the European "four humors" system because it could have contradicting qualities at once. I think it's funny that literally one (1) foreign food came in and they scrambled like "oh no, what can this mean? Is it sorcery?" That's the sign of a very airtight scientific framework for your health.