Chocolate wasn’t always romantic. How did it became a symbol of love?
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Chocolate is everywhere this time of year. Heart-shaped boxes, foil-wrapped truffles, impulse buys at the checkout line. But the idea that chocolate equals romance isn't accidental. It's the result of centuries of cultural shifts, industrialization, and very intentional storytelling. Hello, and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor.
What historical uses did chocolate have in Mesoamerican cultures?
Today is Friday, February 13, 2026. As Valentine's Day approaches, we wanted to take a closer look at how chocolate went from a bitter ceremonial drink to America's go-to symbol of love and what that transformation tells us about desire, labor, and consumer culture. Joining me now is Carla Martin, a social anthropologist and lecturer in African and African-American studies at Harvard University and the founder of the Institute for Cacao and Chocolate Research. Carla, thanks so much for joining me. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Before chocolate was associated with romance, how was it used in earlier Mesoamerican cultures and who was it for?
If we go back thousands of years to Mesoamerica, which today is Central America and southern Mexico, we see that cacao, the raw material that we know of that goes on to become chocolate in the present, was used in four different ways. For one, it was used as a food flavoring, and that would be for a sandwich. savory application. You might think of something like mole in that way. It was used as a beverage, so something that could be drunk. There were thousands of recipes that used cacao as a beverage. Chocolate was only one of them. The third was as a spiritual offering. And this is significant because people would use cacao in weddings, in baptisms, in other ritual ways. That might be where we got some of the first associations of
of cacao with ideas like romance. And then, of course, the fourth use of it was as a currency. So at that time, literally the seeds of the cacao were the money that grew on trees, and people could use cacao beans as a local coin.
I'm thinking of the foil-covered chocolate coins I would get as a child. And I think there's probably a through line there. So chocolate started as a bitter drink, not a sweet one. When and why did Europeans decide to sweeten it? And how did that change its cultural role?
You know, originally in some of the recipes that involved cacao, indigenous people would use local sweeteners, things like honey or agave. And so the flavors that they were consuming were not all that different from what we consume today. So they would put cacao, maybe corn, maybe some kind of edible flower. Vanilla is perhaps the most famous one in the present. And then, of course, the sweetener like honey or agave. In the present, due to European conquest in Mesoamerica and the move of different commodity crops around the world, what people most have access to is what they began to have a lot of access to by about the 1700s, 1800s, and that's the presence of cane sugar or beet sugar. That is why today we see chocolate as sweet.
And it is considerably sweeter than what people would have consumed historically to the point where sometimes when you're eating a bar of chocolate, you're getting about a 50, 60% sugar hit. And then only the rest of that percentage is actually something that might come from the cocoa tree.
Jumping ahead in time to the 20th century, the U.S. Army worked with Hershey to develop a chocolate bar for soldiers on the battlefield prior to World War II. How and why did this partnership begin?
It's a fascinating history, and it's one that also has long historical links. It wasn't uncommon for Indigenous people in Mesoamerica to use these sort of rustic chocolate discs when they went on the battlefield as warriors so many centuries ago. That was also the case during the American Revolution and the Civil War. Troops were given chocolate as something to kind of combat hunger. It contains theobromine and caffeine, which are both stimulants. We associate them with a sense of well-being. And so it would be given to people as a way of trying to boost their energy in difficult physical moments on the battlefield.
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