Margrit Schulte Beerbühl: Faszination Schokolade: Die Geschichte des Kakaos zwischen Luxus, Massenprodukt und Medizin

The Fascinating History of Chocolate: Between Luxury, Mass Product and Medicine

Abstract: Since the arrival of chocolate on the European continent about 500 years ago the drink has experienced a continuous process of transformation through migration, imitation and innovation. It has been transformed from a luxury of the few to a cheap mass product that has considerably contributed to the obesity of our western population. The last decade has seen further changes: a new culture of luxurious chocolate consumption has evolved and research has been carried out to turn chocolate into a functional food following new scientific findings on the healthy properties of pholyphenol flavanoids in chocolate.

The paper aims to explain the changes from an interdisciplinary as well as from a transnational approach. The history of chocolate is a deeply transnational and entangled one. Chocolate has always been a sweet and a medicine. On the one hand it has remained a global product, for the areas of cultivation and production are spatially separated. The big chocolate companies have become multinational enterprises offering increasingly standardised products all over the world. On the other hand the process of globalisation has been entangled with a growing diversification of chocolate products on a local or regional level combined with a continuing appropriation and construction or reconstruction of local, regional or national identities.

Chocolate is a sweet which has fascinated people’s creativity more than any other colonial hot drink. The physiological properties of theobromine in the cocoa beans which raise the serotonin level as well as its cultural properties as a comfort, a souvenir, a small present, or a sweet seduction have contributed and will contribute to its continuing fascination and change.

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