cacao

The upper Amazon, in what is now southeast Ecuador; Theobroma cacao used and domesticated by the Mayo-Chinchipe around 3300 BCE, reaching Mesoamerica some 1,500 years later, where the Maya and Mexica made it a sacred drink, bitter and spiced and unrecognisable as the sweetened product now called chocolate

Out of the upper Amazon and up the Pacific coast, into Mesoamerica, then Spanish conquest from 1519, sweetened in European courts, plantation cultivation exported to São Tomé and then to West Africa where Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire now grow over 70 percent of the world's cocoa, into a global commodity market held by European and American corporations

Cacao is one of the most complete examples of extraction in the food system, and the record of where it starts was itself misattributed until recently. The tree was used and domesticated in the upper Amazon about 5,300 years ago, roughly 1,500 years before it reaches Central America, which is where the story is usually told from. The Mexica used it as currency and offering. The Spanish stripped the ritual, added sugar and made it a European luxury. Today Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire produce over 70 percent of the world's cocoa, an estimated 1.5 million children work in West African cocoa farming, and the farmer receives around 6 percent of the retail price of a bar sold out of a hundred billion dollar industry. Cacao has now been moved twice: once off the continent that domesticated it, and once away from everyone who grows it.