The Chocolate Exhibit

At the Field Museum, you can learn about the history, culture and science of chocolate, and even take in some interesting trivia: Americans eat an average of 12 pounds of chocolate per person each year, for example.

It’s all part of “Chocolate,” a traveling exhibition that runs through Dec. 31.

It arrives at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County next Feb. 14.

The allure of chocolate and the love affair people have with it are what made chocolate stand out as a topic worth an entire exhibition, said Virginia Trice, project administrator.

The exhibition is as much about the culture of the people who have harvested, sold and devoured chocolate over the centuries as about chocolate itself.

It includes agriculture tools, pre-Columbian ceramics and ritual objects, European silver and porcelain chocolate services, 20th-century cocoa tins, advertising signs, decorative chocolate molds, old recipe booklets, a vending machine where people once could buy Hershey candy bars for 1 cent each--even a brightly covered package that once held chocolate cigarettes.

Who first sampled the cacao seeds that would ultimately become the chocolate of Halloween treats, Easter bunny creations, Valentine’s Day candy and even military rations?

It may well have been the monkeys, rodents and birds living near the rain forest trees. They break into the football-size pods growing on tree trunks, eat the sweet pulp and spit out the bitter seeds.

The cacao plant was domesticated at an early date in the tropical lowlands of eastern Mexico. People learned to let the cacao seeds ferment, then to roast, crush and boil them with water and flavorings.

“Human beings are tinkerers,” says Jonathan Haas, an anthropology curator at the museum. “We like to try things. And when most of your diet comes from corn, you’re going to be looking for variety.”

The Aztecs later picked up on chocolate and, between the 13th and 16th centuries, treated it as a drink served to the elite in lavishly decorated vessels.

They also used the valuable cacao seeds as money.

Chocolate didn’t get sweet until the 16th century, when the Spanish mixed sugar with cacao to get rid of the bitter taste.

By 1700, London had almost 2,000 chocolate houses, similar to today’s coffeehouses before they turned into men’s social clubs.

In Italy, chocolate was the preferred drink of 18th century Roman Catholic cardinals, who had it brought in while electing a new pope.

Chocolate became less expensive to produce and therefore more accessible after a Dutch chemist in 1828 invented the cocoa press, which extracts cocoa butter from chocolate and leaves the powder known as cocoa.

Forty years later, the first box of chocolates and later the first Valentine’s Day candy box hit the scene.

Pastry chef Jacques Torres, who left New York’s Le Cirque restaurant to open Jacques Torres Chocolate retail shop in Brooklyn, N.Y., last year, calls chocolate “a magical product,” so versatile it can be made into cakes, ice cream, drinks, cookies and more.

“Chocolate is like a diamond,” he said recently. “It has a lot of different facets.”