Where Does Chocolate Come From? 🍫 | The Scrapbook Crew | History Song for Kids

Sniff, sniff! Something sweet is growing on a page of the Scrapbook. Pip wants to know: where does chocolate come from? The crew turns the page to a warm, rainy forest, where cacao pods grow right on the tree trunk and tiny flies, as small as a pinhead, carry pollen from flower to flower. Snip snips open a cacao pod full of sweet, sticky white goo and twenty to sixty seeds, and Pip takes a bite... bleh, it's bitter! Then the beans rest, dry in the sun, get roasted and ground into a thick brown paste. Long, long ago, the Maya and the Aztecs drank chocolate bitter and foamy, sometimes with chili pepper, and the Aztecs even used cacao beans as MONEY: one bean for a tomato, two hundred for a turkey! Old Tuk remembers the market (or did he read about it?), and then the whole crew sings "Money on a Tree"! In this episode kids learn: • chocolate comes from the seeds of the cacao tree, which only grows where it's warm and rainy • cacao flowers and pods grow right on the tree trunk • tiny flies, as small as a pinhead, carry pollen from flower to flower • a cacao pod is full of sweet white pulp and twenty to sixty seeds: the cacao beans • raw cacao beans are bitter • the beans rest in their pulp, dry in the sun, and are roasted and ground into a brown paste • long ago, the Maya and the Aztecs drank chocolate bitter, with no sugar, sometimes with chili pepper • they poured it from up high to make lots of foam • the Aztecs used cacao beans as money: one bean could buy a tomato, and a turkey cost two hundred beans • much later, people added sugar and milk and made chocolate bars • today, most cacao grows in West Africa Chapters 0:00 Something sweet is growing! 0:18 Chocolate comes from a tree 0:29 Flowers on the trunk and tiny flies 0:48 Snip opens a cacao pod 1:04 Is the seed sweet? 1:15 From bean to chocolate 1:35 Chocolate was a bitter drink 1:54 Pouring it from up high 2:03 Beans were money! 2:26 Tuk drinks all his money 2:39 Sugar, milk and chocolate bars 2:52 Song: Money on a Tree! 4:16 What did we learn? Facts checked with: Smithsonian Magazine — A brief history of chocolate World History Encyclopedia — Chocolate in Mesoamerica Archaeology Magazine — Cacao as currency (1545 Nahuatl document) National Park Service — Pollinators: the chocolate midge Natural History Museum, London — Flies are saving your chocolate cravings Science News Explores — Blooms on the chocolate tree are crazy-hard to pollinate University of Vermont Libraries — Cacao tree: natural history BBC Science Focus — How is chocolate made? The Scrapbook Crew is a hand-made paper cut-out cartoon. Every episode is researched, written and directed by a real person; the characters and voices are storytelling tools.