Cultural Compass / SCIENCE AND MYTHS
Of Valentine and Chocolate
Saint Valentine and chocolate formed an alliance long ago, but the saint never got to taste the elixir extracted from cocoa beans, the scientific name of which is theobroma cocoa — food for the Gods.
It all started with disobedience. Seeing how lonely legionnaires grew as nights fell, against the express dictates of Emperor Claudio II, Roman doctor Valentino officiated mass-marriages. The Emperor deemed incompatible soldiering and matrimony, and the good doctor paid his insubordination dearly. Emperor Claudio II had him decapitated. Valentino lost his head but conquered posterity as the martyr of love, claiming in the process a spot in the Catholic Calendar: February 14.
Curiously, Saint Valentine’s day coincides with pagan fertility bacchanals.
Delicious Currency
The late Yale Professor Michael Coe, author of The True History of Chocolate, affirmed cocoa was domesticated at least one thousand years before Saint Valentine, becoming a staple of pre-Hispanic diets, pharmacy and rituals. Mayans and Aztecs had chocolate for a divine gift, in particular the aphrodisiacal properties. Emperor Moctezuma, chroniclers assured, drank two large cups of the sour drink before engaging his harem. An example followed by Casanova and Madame de Pompadour to, she boasted, keep the flames of desire burning during the visits of His Majesty, King Luis XV.
Christopher Columbus brought chocolate to Spain. Spaniards found the drink so foul tasting, wrote a priest, it was better suited for feeding pigs. But chroniclers accompanying Columbus did acknowledge that natives in the New World professed such reverence to chocolate that cocoa beans passed as currency. One cocoa bean bought a tomato, ten beans a pumpkin, one hundred got you a turkey and one thousand a slave.
Etymology
Chocolate derives from the Mayan word chocol, to which Aztecs added the Nahutl atl, ‘water,’ turning it to xocoltl, ‘sour water’.
Modern Chocolate
Sweetened with cane sugar and honey, Chocolate took Europe by a storm. One clarification: At first, chocolate was a delicacy reserved for the aristocracy. England prohibited the working classes to consume it. British moralists thought the strange substance induced to contemplative lethargy, relaxation and carnal conversation — the euphemism for sex in cultured circles. Tea, said the industrialists, let laborers drink tea to keep awake, alert and productive!
Ironically, the industrial revolution propelled mass production of chocolate powder. In 1861, Richard Cadbury created the first heart-shaped box with a Cupid aiming its arrow to the masses and chocolate became Saint Valentine’s best ally.
The Science of Persuasion
Has science proven chocolate’s aphrodisiac properties? Miami psychotherapist, Dr. Nubia Santos, responded at a Downtown Arts + Science Salon: “Chocolate contains neurotransmitters that contribute to feelings of happiness and excitement during sex. But science has not proven a direct effect on the libido. What is real is our propensity for auto-suggestion. Chocolate is delicious, sweet, and we live bombarded by marketers heralding the link between chocolate and sex. It follows that experiencing the slow melting of such sumptuousness in our mouths we can feel sexy.”
And poetry looms not far behind. Wrote the Nicaraguan author Gioconda Belli: “When I eat chocolate / I think of you in the language of biting, / I think of your legs, / your foot…”
