Because of the importance of chocolate and vanilla to our lives and our metaphors, this e-mail and the next report on these two fruit products.
This e-mail is a departure in that it reports not on a new fruit that the Fruit Explorer tries but on an unfamiliar fruit that is used to produce a familiar food product. More of these "fruit behind the foodstuff" e-mails will follow.
Note: This e-mail, as well as future e-mails, uses a hybrid system of referencing. Square brackets refer to an entry in the References at the end of this e-mail, while a link, which is underlined in blue (at least on my computer), represents a reference to a page on the Internet. It is an annoyance that Gmail does not have a built-in footnoting capability. I invite you to ignore these citations. There is an excessive number of them because I put them in for my own convenience; they facilitate my fact-checking.
Terminology
The cacao tree's scientific name is Theobroma cacao. The genus name, which was assigned by Linnaeus in 1753, is from the Greek Theo (god) and broma (food), and is loosely translated as "food of the gods." I infer that Linnaeus liked chocolate.
Cacao (preferred pronunciation is kuh-cow, with the emphasis on the second syllable) refers to the tree, its seed pods, and its seed. Cocoa, which originated in the 18th century as a corruption of "cacao," now refers in common speech to the powder that is used to make hot chocolate and to the drink [Coe and Coe, p. 18], but the word is also used in various specialized phrases as explained below. In addition, in loose speech and in commerce "cocoa" is used interchangeably with "cacao."
Chocolate is derived from cacahuatl, which is the word that the Aztecs used for their drink made from cacao. In Nahuatl, the Aztec language,caca is the word for cacao and atl the word for water [Coe and Coe, pp. 83, 117, 118]. One theory is that "caca-" was changed to "choco-" because "caca" is a vulgar term for feces in many Romance languages [Coe and Coe, p. 119]. This is perhaps the first example of marketeers fiddling with the name of a food. (An earlier, non-food example is Greenland.)
Natural History of the Cacao Tree
The cacao tree is an evergreen that is typically 13-26 feet high and can grow within twenty degrees of the equator (see the map below that shows the countries where cacao is grown but not the regions within each country). Its natural habitat is the understory of a tropical rain forest where it is sheltered from strong wind and experiences minimal fluctuations in atmospheric moisture [Young, 2].
Cacao's dime-sized flowers, which though small are spectacular, grow directly on the trunk or a branch similar to jack fruit. Moreover, the tree flowers all year round, so at any one time the tree might have flowers in various stages and fruit in various stages [Presilla, p 96]. The flowers are typically pollinated by midges [Young, pp. 116-42] that require shade, humidity, and a rich environment, which is the natural rain forest habitat of cacao [Young, pp. 145-46]. This means that large, open plantations suffer from under-pollination since the midges, which are so small that they look like flying specks of dust [Young, p. 117], don't like to venture from the jungle out to the trees, which are far from their preferred environment [Young, pp. 175-76]. This preference of the midges accounts for the observation that only 3 of every 1000 flowers on plantations are pollinated. (This is based on a mature tree having about 6,000 flowers and 20 pods. Other sources give different numbers, e.g., Young [p. 93].) Forward-thinking growers are increasing the productivity of their trees by planting smaller groves of trees that are close to the wild vegetation that harbors the pollinators [Young, p. 170, 178, 183]. Cacao flowers have no smell (or perhaps a barely perceptible smell [Young, p. 147]), so do not expect to be able to buy a chocolate perfume. (No sooner did reason lead me to write that sentence than I googled "Chocolate perfume" and found scads of them. Reason cannot resist the power of Capitalism, which is not to be denied.)
The cacao tree produces a fruit, which in this e-mail is called a seed pod, that looks like a small, colorful, elongated football. It is yellow, orange, red, purple or green, ellipsoidal, ridged, and from about four to sixteen inches long, depending on the variety; see pictures below. A seed pod might be smooth, wrinkly, or warty. Inside the seed pod is a pulp that is white (or yellow), moist, slippery, sweet, and quite good to eat. Some say that the pulp tastes somewhat lemony, like a mango, or like a lychee nut [Presilla, p. 2]; it tastes nothing like chocolate. Distributed throughout the pulp are, typically, between 30 and 40 seeds, where each seed is typically a little less than an inch long. The seeds are intensely bitter and not good to eat [Young, pp. 106-107]. Therefore, the reproductive strategy of the cacao tree is that it produces seed pods, and the seed pods are picked by monkeys that eat the delicious pulp and then discard the inedible seeds [Buford, p. 73, Young, p. 106]. In this way the seeds are dispersed, and the cacao tree is propagated. It is ironic that the seeds that the monkeys discard on the jungle floor are the real treasure. In a video starting at about 4:00 you can watch someone cut open a seed pod, eat some pulp, and spit out a seed. The first picture shows a tree with fruits that are in different stages of ripening.
I have encountered several reference to hand-pollinating cacao flowers, but I have seen no discussion of why hand-pollination is not utilized commercially. Given the constant grousing about the low productivity of cacao trees, hand-pollination seems like an approach that should be considered. Perhaps it is too labor intensive to be economic.
[Continued in Part 2]
