The Bittersweet Story of Chocolate

the old slave quarters, Roça Bombaim     Getty, Mark Fletcher

It's the 1820s and Europeans are developing a taste for chocolate, which, up to now, has come at great pains from Central America. Enter São Tomé and Príncipe, off the western coast of Africa. When the Portuguese discovered that cacao would grow well there, they at last had a use for the islands, which they had been the first Europeans to find, more than 400 years earlier. And thus began a cycle of land clearing, plantation building, slave importation ~ and cacao exportation: http://moreintelligentlife.com/node/4789