4. Chocolate comes from the cacao tree, which was a real pain to cultivate
We’ve only mentioned the cacao tree in passing, but there is a reason Quetzalcoatl had to teach people how to cultivate it. As for most things in life, patience is very much a virtue when it comes to the cacao. The cacao is an evergreen tree that grows to only 4-8 meters in height. Once planted, the cacao takes 5 years to produce its first pods. Though the tree can live for decades, it has a peak pod-producing time of only 10 years. And from their first flourishing on the branches, those pods take 5 months to ripen.
Cacao trees aren’t half fussy about where they will grow, either. They need plenty of shade, rainfall, humidity, and good soil drainage. Hence they are very vulnerable both to dry seasons and especially heavy rainfall, making them a very labour-intensive tree to grow. But despite all this, the Mesoamericans were not to be discouraged, and began cultivating the trees a very long time ago indeed. Recent research suggests that the first cacao tree was domesticated 3, 600 years ago. Their success in this domestication, as evidenced by archaeological finds of cocoa residue on pottery, is nothing short of remarkable.
