How Chocolate Became Food

A single bean of chocolate could buy you dinner. A hundred of them could buy a person.

In 1528, a Spanish friar named Francisco de Bobadilla interviewed Nicarao leaders and elders in what is now Nicaragua about how they conducted business. He recorded that ten cacao beans could buy you a rabbit, while one hundred beans could buy a slave. Chocolate wasn’t really a treat in Mesoamerica, it was currency. Actual, circulating, government-recognized currency, with an exchange rate, a counterfeiting problem, and an inflation policy.

Colonial documents recorded the prices of everyday goods in cacao beans. A turkey hen would cost you maybe 100 beans while an avocado cost three. The Codex Mendoza shows the Aztec empire collecting tribute twice a year from the cacao-growing region of Soconusco, demanding 200 full loads of beans each time, each load equal to 24,000 individual beans. This wasn’t an informal bartering, it was essentially a tax system. Motecuhzoma II, the ninth Aztec emperor, was known as the Chocolate King. At the height of his power his royal coffers held nearly a billion cacao beans.

A billion beans... Sitting in an ancient vault. As currency.

The Spanish, when they arrived, didn’t really understand what they were looking at. Hernán Cortés '(a Spanish conquistador known for conquering the Aztec Empire) reported back to Spain that half a kilogram of gold could be purchased for 250 cacao beans. The conquistadors had crossed an ocean chasing gold and they found a civilization that valued a tree seed more than the metal they’d come to steal.

But a currency made of food has a problem that no metal ever has to solve.