Chocolate

By Romana Annette 03/14/2009

Chocolate is a 2009 martial arts movie starring Yanin Vismistananda as an autistic girl, with intense fighting skills, who discovers a list of debtors who owe her horribly ill mother money, so decides to go collecting, only to find herself up against an organized crime ring.  There are supposed to be no stunt doubles or wires, just impossible body contortions.  It is quite violent, and not very sweet…

Oops, wrong chocolate; I daydreamed for a moment and got off topic.  Chocolate is a bean found in pods on cacao trees.  Cacao trees only grow within a forty-degree band centered on the equator.  They are native to South America, but about two-thirds of harvested cacao is now grown in West Africa.  This is fortunate, since it prevents South American drug cartels from ever seizing control of the world supply of chocolate.  Chocolate is the only thing really worth going to war over.

The use of chocolate in Aztec and Mayan societies at least dates back to 1100 B.C.  Somehow, the Native Americans learned how to turn the cacao beans into chocolate, even though the process does not look that obvious.  Perhaps it was taught by extraterrestrials; after all, they are shown in carvings and in lines at the Plains of Nazca drinking cups of chocolate.  But who taught the extraterrestrials?  Then again, Nazca is in Peru , so it would have been Incas, and more likely coffee, anyway.

Chocolate has been shown to be habit forming.  I have heard that 15% of men and 85% of women can develop strong cravings for chocolate.  However, overdosing seems rare, since eating too much chocolate seems to turn off any desire rather quickly.

Chocolate is quite beneficial, if one leave off the sweetener and milk products.  In fact, chocolate deserves to be the fourth food group, so long as the manufacturing process keeps down the lead contamination from the shells of the seeds.

The use of chocolate spread throughout South and Central America.  Recent findings indicate that it even reached the Anasazi, in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, at least a thousand years ago. 

Not everyone can partake of this fabulous substance.  We do not have to share any chocolate with our horses, dogs, parrots, small rodents, and cats, because they are unable to metabolize the chemical theobromine found in chocolate, which is toxic in sufficient concentration.

So far, no one has proven that chocolate is really that essential to our lives; it just seems that way.