When Chocolate Was Money

Today, you need money to buy chocolate. But hundreds of years ago, in Mexico and Central America, people used chocolate to buy other things. To be exact, they used cacao beans: the seeds that chocolate comes from.

Cacao trees grow in hot, wet places. Their fruit is called a pod, and each pod has between twenty and sixty seeds inside. The Maya grew cacao and traded it for a very long time. Later, the Mexica, also called the Aztecs, used the beans as money in their busy markets.

So how much was one bean worth? We have a list of prices from 1545, from the city of Tlaxcala, in Mexico. That was after the Spanish arrived, but many people still paid with cacao. On that list, one bean bought one large tomato. A fish wrapped in corn husks cost three beans. For a turkey, you needed a hundred beans or more.

Rich people didn't only spend their beans. They also drank them. There were no chocolate bars then. People ground the beans and mixed them with water and sometimes chili. Then they poured the drink from one cup to another to make foam. It wasn't sweet at all. It was bitter. Drinking chocolate was a bit like drinking money.

And, like money today, cacao had one big problem: fakes. Some people took real beans, emptied them, and filled the shells with mud or sand. Others made fake beans out of clay or wax. So at the market, it was a good idea to look at your change very carefully.