Posted November 28, 2019
We prepared our holiday season message by writing the words with chile chocolate on top of a bed of cacao beans. We bought these in the Q'eqchi' Mayan markets of Coban, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, last weekend.
Chile chocolate is a special chile used to flavor Maya cacao drinks. The cacao beans from Theobroma cacao trees are the source of cocoa, used to make chocolate. Probably most cocoa today is raised and harvested in Africa but cacao trees are native to southern Mexico, adjacent Guatemala and nearby countries.
Both the Maya, Aztec, Zapotec, Mixtec and everyone else in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, etc. all grew and drank liquids made with cacao. Several dozen other plants were used as flavorings. We have worked for many years to find each plant. We did this because the last time I spoke with Yale University professor Dr. Michael Coe, he said that if he had time to rewrite his cacao book he would do much more research on all the flavorings. So I accepted this as an inspirational challenge. FLAAR (USA) and FLAAR Mesoamerica (Guatemala) now have one of the largest photo archives in the world of the flowers, seeds, and other plant parts used to flavor cacao of the Aztec, Maya, and their neighbors.
If a chocolate or cacao or cocoa company is interested in a joint project, we have enough material for five volumes, coffee-table book style, with high-resolution digital photographs. We would like to show the world lots of new options for flavoring cocoa. And we would like to help preserve the Maya and Mesoamerica cultural heritage since each year in the Mayan markets fewer and fewer of these flavorings are being sold.