Sex, Drugs and Chocolate: The Science of Pleasure. Paul Martin

transforming its beans into a nutritious, if rather bitter, drink. Archaeological evidence shows that the inhabitants of present-day Honduras were drinking a chocolate beverage around 1150 BC. The drink was made from fermented cacao pulp, which suggests that this early prototype of chocolate might have been a spin-off from attempts to make alcohol. The Olmec were predecessors of the Maya, and it was the Maya who really developed the use of chocolate. Hundreds of years later, the Maya were using chocolate in most of their meals, both as a drink and as an ingredient in their cooking. The drink was flavoured with ingredients such as chilli, honey or vanilla and was often consumed hot. The Aztecs may not have invented chocolate, but they did give it great prominence in their culture, using it in religious ceremonies. They even used cacao beans as a form of currency – a rare example of money that really did grow on trees.

      Chocolate did not reach Europe until the sixteenth century. It arrived, in tiny amounts and to minimal acclaim, with returning Spanish conquistadors. To begin with, no one paid much attention to this unappealing substance, although there was great interest in the travellers’ tales of how the Aztecs worshipped it. Hernando Cortés, the first of the conquistadors, had sent back thrilling reports of chocolate being served in golden goblets in the court of the emperor Motecuhzoma (‘Montezuma’) and of how this ‘divine’ drink enabled a man to walk all day without food. Despite their initial distaste for this strange and bitter beverage, the Spanish invaders quickly realised its commercial potential. The first European consumers of chocolate were Spanish monks and nuns who had picked up the habit in New Spain, as Mexico was then known. By the late sixteenth century, the Spanish were importing cacao from New Spain in significant quantities.

      The early days of chocolate provide yet another illustration of how religious and secular authorities instinctively frown upon sensual pleasure. Chocolate the nutritious beverage was regarded as wholesome and respectable, whereas chocolate the delicious drink was regarded as faintly sinful. The age-old tendency to view any new source of pleasure with suspicion is a theme we shall return to in chapter 13.

      The Catholic Church was initially uncertain about how to classify this exotic new substance. Was chocolate a foodstuff and therefore to be avoided during Lent? Was it a mind-altering drug and therefore to be banned altogether? Or was it a medicine and therefore to be lauded? In 1569, Pope Pius V ruled that as long as chocolate was consumed only as a bitter drink made with water, it was a restorative and could therefore be consumed during Lent. A relatively liberal attitude towards chocolate was convenient, in view of the huge profits the authorities were already making from it. The moral and religious status of chocolate nonetheless remained controversial. In 1636, the Jesuit-trained scholar Antonio de León Pinelo published a book on the subject, entitled The Moral Question of Whether Chocolate Violates the Ecclesiastic Fast. Despite permissive decrees from a succession of popes, more puritanical clerics continued in their efforts to suppress chocolate. In 1616 a Catholic committee condemned chocolate as a ‘damnable agent of necromancers and sorcerers’ and in 1650 the Jesuits in New Spain tried unsuccessfully to prevent its members from using the stuff. The wheel eventually came full circle, however. With the advent of commercial production techniques in the nineteenth century, chocolate Easter eggs and Christmas gifts became a symbol of Christian festivals.

      The Spanish monopoly on cacao delayed the spread of chocolate to the rest of Europe, until the Dutch East India Company started importing its own cacao. Chocolate, the drink, eventually took off in Europe during the same period when coffee and tea became all the rage. Chocolate, the costliest of the three new beverages, reached England in the 1650s and was soon being consumed socially in the fashionable coffee houses of London. Samuel Pepys was an early adopter. He mentions chocolate frequently in his diary – as here, for instance, in his entry for 24 April 1661:

      Waked in the morning with my head in a sad taking through the last night’s drink, which I am very sorry for. So rise and went out with Mr. Creed to drink our morning draught, which he did give me in Chocolate to settle my stomach.

      The chocolate of those days was a spicy drink flavoured with additives such as aniseed, ginger, pepper, cinnamon or vanilla. Its strong flavour made it an ideal vehicle for administering poison. When the composer Henry Purcell died in 1695, there were rumours that he had been killed by poisoned chocolate.

      By the eighteenth century, chocolate-drinking was firmly embedded in European society, even if it was still regarded as a trifle decadent. Casanova was a chocolate connoisseur who drank it for breakfast every morning and frequently shared it with acquaintances and lovers. He is said to have preferred chocolate to champagne. Which brings us to the Marquis de Sade.

      In a book about sex, drugs and chocolate you might have expected that an appearance by the Marquis de Sade would be in the context of violent sexual excess or drug abuse, not chocolate. In fact, Sade was another voluptuary whose hedonism happily encompassed the modest pleasures of chocolate.

      Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, the Enlightenment’s high priest of free thinking, had a voracious appetite for sweet things and adored chocolate. He ate and drank chocolate in all its many forms and used cacao butter suppositories to ease the discomfort of his haemorrhoids. On one occasion in 1768, Sade gave a ball to which he invited many guests and fed them chocolate pastilles for dessert. Unbeknown to them, the chocolate pastilles contained powdered Spanish fly, an irritant made from crushed beetles which was once favoured as an aphrodisiac. According to one (probably exaggerated) account:

      All who ate them were seized by shameless ardour and lust and started the wildest excesses of love. The festival became a Roman orgy. The most modest of women could not restrain themselves. The Marquis de Sade abused his sister-in-law and then fled with her to escape the threatening penalty of death. Many persons died as the result of the excesses and many others still suffer recurrent pains.

      Despite passing much of his adult life incarcerated in prisons or lunatic asylums, Sade managed to procure regular supplies of chocolate thanks to his long-suffering wife. In one of his many letters, he asked her to send him a chocolate cake iced with chocolate and ‘black inside from chocolate as the devil’s arse is black from smoke’. Among his other demands were boxes of ground chocolate, crème au chocolat, half-pound boxes of chocolate pastilles, large chocolate biscuits, vanilla pastilles au chocolat and chocolate bars. Sade was a stickler for the right sort of chocolate. While confined in the Bastille, he insisted that his wife provide him with a particular brand of chocolate from his regular supplier. Not surprisingly, the combination of imprisonment and chocolate made him very fat.

      Chocolate even makes an occasional appearance in Sade’s fictional works – as, for example, in an episode in One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, in which a ‘bawdy quartet’ of lechers are served chocolate by eight naked girls. More extreme carnality rapidly follows, as ‘no sooner had the chocolate been served than Blangis got a monstrous erection’.

      Chocolate had more wholesome connotations for the upright burghers of nineteenth-century England, where the four big chocolate producers – Fry, Rowntree, Cadbury and Terry – were all run by Quakers. They championed chocolate as a nutritious alternative to the demon drink, at a time when alcohol abuse and malnutrition were rife among the working classes. The nineteenth century also saw the transformation of chocolate into its familiar modern manifestation as heavily sweetened milk chocolate. In the USA, Milton Hershey started manufacturing the distinctive form of industrial milk chocolate which Americans came to love but which most Europeans find strangely unappealing. Chocolate connoisseurs have variously described the Hershey bar as gritty or grainy in texture and tasting of cheese, sourness or barnyards. One French expert said it reminded him only of vomit.

Is it addictive?

      Chocolate is not addictive. The existence of thousands of websites catering for ‘chocoholics’ does not in itself prove that large swathes of humanity are suffering from genuine addiction to this substance. In any case, the sugary milk chocolate that many chocoholics claim they are unable to resist should be thought of more as a delivery vehicle for sugar and fat, rather than chocolate in the true sense. These oversweetened products give chocolate its undeserved reputation for being addictive and generating unsightly spots. Cacao-rich