How Chocolate Works

the show. Welcome to the show. Hey, I'd like to shout out a little Bit Sweets for for no reason other than they make awesome candy. Well send it to us from time time in a little while. Well, we're doing chocolate today and little Bit Sweets in Brooklyn, New York now has a retail space. Oh yeah, congratulate at Chelsea Market. You ever been there? That's awesome? I have not. Oh wait, is that the one like the it's relatively new and awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder if they're

Rubanelbos with like Mario Batali and all that. Doesn't he have a place there? I don't know. I think he does. I've been through there though. It's it's a cool place, that's neat. So congratulations to Liz and gen of little bit Sweet sound seem at Chelsea Market they make great chocolate. And I'm gonna ask Liz after this is released if we screwed it up really bad or if we got it pretty pretty good? Oh the chocolate thing, because she'll know, well, sure,

she's a chocolate tour. That's right. Um, okay, that was nice to be chucked, um chuck. Yes, well you just kind of screwed up my intro question. Oh really, what was it? I have ever had chocolate? Do you know about chocolate? Yeah? I know a little bit about chocolate. I do too now. Um. And I was surprised at reading this article how closely this episode will probably resemble our coffee episode. And you're gonna say that it's just

like they're almost like to beans in the same pod. Yeah, and some of the processes are similar, and uh yeah, I totally thought the same thing. Yeah, people are exploited in much the same way. There's child slavery involved, fair trade swoops in tries to like correct back. There's beans, there's roasting, they're drying. Yeah, all sorts of similar processes.

And there's a ficionados who I imagine can tell the difference between a bean grown one place and being grown another place, because it makes a difference, as we'll find true. I think we should finish out. Maybe we could make a sweet and do wine and then most kind of three similar Well, no, we we gotta put it in with our like beer and cheese. We'll call it the good Life sweet. Let's add yachts at the end, just to cap it off. Beer, wine, cheese, chocolate, yachts. I

never realized how ugly that word is until just now. Yachts. That's the way I said it. Even if you say it like it's spelled as you come up with yachts. Stupid word, So chuck. Yes, chocolate. It turns out um is actually a pretty ancient thing, like eating chocolate. It grows from the cacao tree. Well consuming chocolate, right, okay, yes,

nice cat Um. They found a bowl from somewhere in Mesoamerica that dates back to I think BC UM and it has residue chocolate residue in it still, yeah, traces of it um, So we know that people have been consuming chocolate since at least BC it's highly unlikely that we just happened to find the first bowl that was ever used to consume chocolate for the first time. Um, and we know that the first first record of somebody mentioning chocolate came about three d the Maya. We're drinking

it back then, that's right. Yeah, they offered it to the odds. Yes, it was highly cherished, it was, but it was a beverage and for chocolate's life it has been a beverage. Uh, gritty, frothy, kind of a bitter beverage. And then sometimes they would add cinnamon, hot pepper, um, hot pepper, and chocolate. By the way, yeah, I do too, like the chili chocolates A nice sipping chocolate. Well no, I mean that the hard variety. It's good in like

a sipping chocolate too. Really you can come across that, okay, yeah. Um. So the Maya were the ones who like really kind of founded chocolate consumption as we understand it, and then it was adopted by the Aztecs, who had a pretty um short memory span apparently because the Aztecs the Triple Alliance conquered the Maya at some point and said, hey, we like this chocolate. But we're gonna forget that we

at it from the Maya. We're gonna say we got it from the god catzel Kotal, right, and he was the a god who was kicked out of the dominion of God's forgiving chocolate to the Aztecs, as the Aztecs tell it, which is not nice. What getting kicked out? Yeah, for sharing your chocolate, you know, yeah, because you're out chocolate and you got kicked out of the pantheon. That's right. In the Aztecs, um called chocolate. I'm pronounced that huacatl.

I think that's probably right. Um. And this thought to meant I mean bitter water, and like you said, they would add certain spices to it to make it more palatable. But the gods and the kings and everyone thought it. You know, it was like, uh, like a super drink, so they would drink like tons of it. Well yeah, months a Zuma was apparently, um fond enough of it that he drank like fifty cups of it a day.

That's crazy. I think we said that in another one that sounded familiar it did to me, Yeah, or maybe he drank lots of coffee. I wonder what it was. I don't know. Um, it was a currency. Yeah, there was. Actually it was an actually a sixteenth century az Tech document that is basically a currency exchange for cocao. You no, the being for chocolate beans. Yeah. It's like a hundred of them buys a turkey. Ye. And it's a one for one exchange for a good tamalia. That's a pretty

good deal. I take that. Yeah. Um, But the point is this chocolate, like the it was sacred to the Mesoamericans. It was currency. It was a big deal. Uh. And then the Spaniards came along and they said, what are you guys drinking? And they took a sip and they spit it out, and then they tried it again, like maybe it's okay. And there's some pretty good quotes about what the Spaniards thought of chocolate and how it tasted. Yeah.

One of them, uh, comes from a Jesuit missionary and he said it is is loathsome to such as they're not acquainted with it, having a scum or froth. That is very unpleasant taste. Yeah. I also saw another quote that said, um, it was a Spaniard who referred to chocolate as a bitter drink for pigs. Yeah, I get, I mean really bitter chocolate I can't stomach no, and that's what they were drinking. I mean like the concept of sweet chocolate came thanks to Europe, and it came

about this time. So, um, who was it that conquered the Aztecs? Cortez the killer Um. Cortez basically said all right, I'm gonna take this chocolate and we're gonna see what Europe does to it. And Europe went crazy for it. Of course they sweetened it, right, that was the That was Europe's big addition to chocolate, adding sugarcane or honey or molasses or something to the chocolate to sweeten. And all of a sudden, Europe is like, we like this,

let's enslave the people. Cortez comes back and says, good news. They love the chocolate, and monte Zuma and the rest of the Triple Allianes for like, that's great, we don't care. It's like, don't know, this does pertain to you. There's good news and bad news. Bad news is you have a new great father, meet my thunderstick, the boomstick. Uh

so what the Europeans did? They enslaved them for a while, and then the demand rose, so they said, hey, why don't we just start growing this stuff in territories that we um have conquered, which is you can only grow the cacou tree within about twenty degrees north or south of the equator the tropics. Yeah yeah, um, and it likes very wet conditions. And it's also apparently the cacou tree is really um finicky, which we'll talk about but um.

When they did figure out that they could plan it along the tropics, the cost of chocolate dropped tremendously in Europe, which was necessary to make it, you know, something that wasn't just for royalty, right. And then still at this time people were consuming it as a drink even in Europe as well, but they were sweetening it um. And then so you would have a person who got ahold of the beans, roasted them, uh, and then made their own chocolate and then sold it all in one place.

Then the industrial revolution happened and everybody applied the principles of industry to everything. It basically, smash everything right exactly, and see what happens to using machine and smash it unless you're a luddy. And then you smash the machine itself. Right. Um. There was a Dutch entrepreneur name Conrad Johannes van Houten. Do you think in the millhouse? How can you not know? Um?

And he was the first one to press the cacao bean um, which separates and we'll get into all this later, but essentially separated the cacao into the butter and the powder, the dry part, right. And he figured out if you add a little more butter back into it, which is strange, Um, you can make a bar. Yeah. Or if you ad a little alkali, be a little less bitter, a little more palatable. And then Joseph Fry and englishman said, hey, why don't we have a little sugar, maybe a little

more cocoa butter, And now we have the first chocolate bar. Okay, so I have it wrong. Joseph Fry invented the cocoa, the chocolate bar. Van Houten invented Dutch cocoa, which is a sweeter cocoa powder. And Rodolph Lynt, if you you might recognize that, still, how do you not like lint? He invented conking in seventy nine and we'll get into what that is later, but it's a pretty important process. But it's conk like the shell. Yeah, because the first

like a shell. Um. But we'll get into what that means. But it basically makes it smoother and more affordable. You can mass produce it as like the chocolate bars we know and love. And then uh, in the early nine hundreds, all this is going on within a few decades. There's like all these sudden quick advances in chocolate that that takes chocolate from this frothy, gritty, bitter drink to chocolate as we understand it today, starting in the ninety century.

And then I think in the nineteen o four early d a guy with the last name of Nestley about to add milk powder, and then we had milk chocolate and the humanity achieved its pinnacle. That's right, Uh, Henry or Henry Nestlee and Milton Hersheet very important dudes. Um, And that was that was for milk chocolate. But you know, you can also make dark chocolate less bitter by some of the same processes, because you know, when you buy the dark chocolate has a percentage of and the higher

the percentage, the more bitter it is. I can't go above like seventies. My max is it? Do your your mouth just start catching on fire, your teeth fall out or what happened? Like that bitter chocolate taste some people love super super bittery. I'm a super taster with bitter. Um. Do you remember in our taste episode we talked about super tasters. Like, since that episode, I've noticed that with bitter, like I taste it way more than most people. Yeah,

and um, how do you like your chocolate? Like I can handle dark chocolate, but like it tastes really bitter to me. But like I can barely handle grapefruit. I had to train myself to enjoy grapefruit, and I don't like grapefruit. Yeah. Maybe you're a bitter super taste too, maybe, but if you I can tell you that just practice makes perfect with drinking grapefruit to Oh well for me eating chocolate, right, um? And I like I sprinkle a little sea salt on it now too, which is really

like that? Oh yeah yeah that's pretty good. Yeah. Um, all right, So let's get into the seed or the bean a little bit. Uh. They growing pods on a tree, and the tree itself is they grow taller than ft. But for um cultivation, they trim them so they don't grow above ten or twelve is the height that they try to keep them at. Yeah, because people I climb up and pick them. Yeah, this is this is something I find very interesting about climb I think they use

a long along tool like a telescopic um knife. Yeah. Um, but this is it's the cocao trees are so fickle that they actually have kept chocolate production as like a family business. Yeah. You can't mass produce these things. You

can't mass harvest these things. It's still got to be done by hand because the pods and the seeds don't all ripen at the same time, so you can't just drive a machine in there and be like get all those pods out, and so you have to do them like individually, one by one when they're ready to come off the tree. Plus. Um. The harvesting a seed pod, which is about the shape of a long orange football

about twelve inches long. Um. The way you harvest it is really important because if you break off the bloom that it's growing out of, you will damage it so that no other pods grow out of that. So it's a really really finicky tree. It is, you know, um of the world's cocao is grown by just two and a half million farmers, all of them working five to ten acre plots, family plots, like a family farming business

for sure. Yeah, we like we said earlier it was earlier it was meso America, but now most of the farms are in Africa and West Africa. Codvoir is like the chocolate coco producing that ivory coast. Yeah, okay, but they prefer copdvoir, I think so. Uh yeah, they produce more than a million metric tons just on the cope

davoir excuse me per year. Um. There are only three types of three varieties of bean, and the they are the for for astero, and it's the most common because it yields the most beans, has the most chuckolated taste too, yeah, and it's the hardiest, so they do better. Um. And then on the other side of the coin you have the creolo, which is very complex but very difficult to grow, very delicate, and the small percentage of all the cacao

beans that are harvested, right. And then there's the trinitario, which is a hybrid of the creoleo. So how we're saying it in the forest stero that somebody took a forest stero to Trinidad where they were growing creolo and they hybridized. So you have like basically this full spectrum of finicky and then different tastes of chocolate. Yeah, and they and like we said earlier, like with coffee and

like with grapes for wine. If you're in aficionado, you know what what geographical location will produce different flavors and tastes. And companies when they make chocolate are very picky about and secretive about exactly where they get their beans. Some it's all one farm, uh something I like to do a nice blend, but that's a trade secret. But um, just because you have a forest stero bean and one part of the country doesn't mean old tastes the same

as in the other part. So so not only do these different varieties produce different tastes, like depending on where you grew a specific variety, it'll tastes different from that same variety grown elsewhere. That's right, um. And those trees we should say are called the theod roma cocao. They were named by linneus Um and it translates to cacao, food of the gods. And those those three varieties aren't the only three, but they're the three dominant varieties growing worldwide.

Oh they're more than that. Okay, Um, so I guess we should get into a little bit about the process. Yeah, because what interested me is the all those European additions to the process of producing chocolate are still based on the original ancient means of growing and producing chocolate. So it's like, go through the process of producing chocolate, then you just take it through these additional steps to make chocolate as well. You understand it, which is pretty cool

because they're still they're doing this ancient method. Yeah. Like still you've heard there's more than one way to skinn of cat, there's only one way to make chocolate. You know. Machinery he has improved, but you're right, it's still the same, which is really neat. Uh. So you have these ripen pods like we talked about, they change color from green to orange. Uh. And then it's time to cut them down. Uh. And then the beans and pulpa removed and left to ferment,

which is exactly what you think. They cover it up with banana leaves and stuff and let the moisture seep out of it slowly. Um. Yeah, and this is one of the few things where alcohol is just a byproduct of the fermentation process rather than the goal, right, because they I'm sure some people drink this chocolate alcohol, but the part is discarded, is it. Yeah, as far as I know, I don't think Nestleie's bottling it or anything. Yeah, but I bet the farm workers might have a wonder

what that tastes like. I'll bet it's awful. I'm sure it is. Uh So, in the in the cacao bean um there's things like bacteria and yeas that produce acids and gases, and they break down some of those sugars over the course of this the this uh fermentation process, and they're gonna end up dark brown in the end, right after about a week of fermenting ye and then they pack them in the jute bags, take them to the buyers. They grade the beans because you know, they

it's very specific, like the quality of the bean. You'll get a certain price, you know, depending on how good they are. And then it goes on to the next step, which is where the companies who produced chocolate by the seeds from the buyers. That's right, and that those sugars being broken down in the fermentation process become very very important at this step because the first thing you do is you take all of your cocao beans and roast them.

And when you're roasting and I in this article it says that sometimes you you just roast the nibs first. I've found that pretty much everybody roasts the bean and then roast the nibs separately later on. Yeah, the nib is actually the meat. Yeah, what's actually what becomes chocolate, right. A cacao bean has a shell that you take off in the meat inside is a cocoa nib um. So you roast the bean first, and then later on you

roast the nib itself. And as you're roasting it, what you're doing is creating something called the Mayard reaction, which is basically the sugars that were broken down and exposed during fermentation are combined with amino acids that are also present in the cocao, and when placed together in the presence of heat, you have something called flavor compounds that

are produced. And depending on the amino acid present, whether it's cheese or whether it's beer or whether whatever it is bread um, the the sugars and the amino acids are going to react differently to create different flavors, and with chocolate specifically, these different amino acids produced chocolate flavor. Yeah, it's uh, non intematic browning. And if it's not just chocolate, I mean if you like pretzels, or if you like if you like the flavor of anything, well, no, that's

not true. It's only certain things to have this reaction. Yeah, like um, bread when it's toasted or baked. Um, a steak when it's browned, anything important, French fries. Uh. And so the roasting process it's anywhere from thirty minutes to a couple of hours at about two fifty degrees fahrenheit or higher. And every company has their own methods for this. You know, everyone's gonna have their own specific like roasting process,

but that's a general thing, right. Uh So the next thing that happened is you need to to get that nib extracted, and so they quickly cool the beans and send them through what's called a cracker and a fanner that splits the shell and blows off the shell and you're left with a nib. And then at that point the nib is ready to go to the mill to be ground well, or it's roasted and then ground into chocolate liquor. So it's it's roasted again before its ground. Yes, okay, yeah,

yeah for sure. Like if anything, the nibs the thing you want to roast. For sure. This article insinuates that, um, you might not roast the bean, You're just gonna roast the nib. You definitely roast the nib first because that's where the flavor compounds come from. But you can roast the nib inside the bean too, right yeah, okay, like as a two step process. So now it goes to the grinder a melingingur, which is French, and there are these big granite rollers that basically basically mash up those

nibs into a paste they called the mass. Then that goes into a press at about six thousand pounds per square inch a man, it's a whole lot. Uh so much that it actually melts the cocoa butter into a liquid called chocolate liquor. Pressure from pressure, just from pressure in friction. Oh okay, well that produces he So that's your chocolate liquor, even though it's not alcoholic at all. And that was Van Houten that came up with the process you just described, right, He's the one who figured

out how to separate powder from buttery. Yeah, Millpool, Millhouse van Mountain. Uh. So then you've got your two components. It basically separates, and you've got your liquid cocoa butter at this point and your powder. Um, it's called a press cake, your dried powder is or cocoa cake cococake. I like that better actually do too. Um. So depending on what where, what what your purpose is from here,

you might go in some different directions. If you're just gonna make like Nestley Quick, you know, chocolate milk mix, you're going to pulverize that powder into a finer powder. So that's another thing I saw on the Gara Deli site when they were describing how they make chocolate. It sounds like you would pulverize that that um cocoa cake no matter what. And then the harder or the more you pulverize it, um, the the smaller the micron of

the the chocolate cocoa powder UM. And so the the finer that is, the less grainy your end result chocolate will be. So, like Garrett Delli says, that they grind there's down to nineteen microns because they want a very smooth product exactly because circura delli. And then the butter or whatever you introduced back into, whether it's cocoa butter or say like um, canola oil or something, you can

also have an impact on the quality of the chocolate made. Yeah, and if you're reintroducing cocoa butter, it's a better quality obviously than vegetable oil. Um. All right. This is also where you add in sugar some other flavorings. Let the thin what is that I was hoping you don't. It's an emulsifier, so you know, makes it a fluffier, lighter all right. That to me is like the fact of the podcast. Like how many times have you looked at an ingredients list? Have been it's left up in Yeah,

it's an emotive fire friends, that's the fact of the podcast. Yeah, strangely all right, I haven't picked mine yet. Maybe cococake good. Uh So, next up we have the process that Lint figured out early on that we talked about conking. And some people say this was an accident because he forgotten left it in a monoge're too long, right, which may be true, who knows. But basically what you get is a smooth liquid, which makes it easier to mold into

chocolate bars. So I looked again on the Gara Deli site. They had UM. Basically the conquer or, the conking machine is just like a huge vat with two paddles, like constantly going around. Yeah. I've seen other ones too. Uh. It was just bizarre how this article reads like like they almost I think they literally call it a magic

process that people don't fully understand. And basically to me, it was like, no, you're just kind of mixing these ingredients together for a very long time and such that the cocoa powder, every grain, every micron of cocoa powder becomes coated with cocoa butter. It's just really intense mixing exactly. It's not magic, right, Yeah, I just thought that was really strange. Yeah, that article agreed, it was really insane.

Clown posse is conking is magic? Yeah, that's funny. Uh, So it's not magic, it's just really really thorough thorough mixing. UM evenly distributes that cocoa butter that polishes the particles, makes everything super smooth and delicious, generates a little bit of heat, yeah, which helps create more flavor compounds because um, in this time, it's with the sugars and the amino acids in the milk, mining with those things in the

chocolate too, which takes you to flavor country. And it's where the that Malliard Malliard, that's what I'm talking about reaction happens. Yeah, because it happens again because it's producing heat, and then finally it introduces air, which removes even more bitterness. So that that's the purpose of the magic of conking.

Then we have to temper it. Tempering. They don't even really say what it is either, So you know how like if you make candy, you have to have a candy thermometer or else it's gonna just be completely screwed up. And like a candy recipe will be like, do not go past this temperature. So they figured out that there's six stages of crystal formation. Well, we gotta say what tempering is. First I thought, I was, well, it's stirring. Oh,

it's magic stirring. It's stirring, heating and cooling and reheating while you're stirring. Yeah, that's what tempering is exactly. But what you're doing on a chemical level, uh, is that you're you're forming cocoa crystals, and there's six types of cocoa crystals that can possibly form in chocolate, and they've figured out that type five crystals are the ones that

make the best chocolate. So you want to heat your chocolate up to the point where all these Type one through four crystals turn into type five crystals, but not so much that your type five crystals turn into type six crystals, because at that point, um, you're fired. If you're work in a chocolate factory. Man, you make type six crystals, you're in big trouble. Well, they have machines that do this now, right, but before sure fire you on the spot for making type six crystals, or if

you set the machine wrong, they can find you. Right, you're gonna get fired. One where you're another that someone's getting fired. But you also don't want it. So you don't want the temperature to go to stop before it hits nine degrees fahrenheit, which is apparently the magic temperature for type five crystal. Spirrel fields just have type four crystals, which apparently aren't any good. So think about this process that's been undergone that started with picking seed pods by

hand fermending them under bananalys. How they figured that out though, Like who first looked at these disgusting looking things and said, hey, I bet that would be good? Like haven't you wondered how many people had to die to figure out like what we can and can't eat it? Like along the way there there had to be a lot of like, well, so we stay away from that. Uh, let's try this weird looking thing next. Who's up the first people to

eat anything? I'm sure the first person that looked at the cow and said, you know that in that furry creature inside that lies some pretty nice meat. Uh yeah, I agree. I like that Stuff's like going back to the beginnings. But this process is just mind boggling just to make chocolate. And I'm really glad that all these people came together to contribute to chocolate, to the creation of chocolate as we understand it and love it today.

Greed sir, Yeah, I love chocolate. So the tempering process, in the end, besides the chemical gobbygook, is gonna define how hard and shiny and glossy that chocolate is gonna end up being. So have we made the chocolate. Yes, we have. I think you just cool it and then you press it into bars or whatever. Uh and chuck. That seems like a fantastic place to put a message. Break, what do you think? Okay, so we're back to chocolate. Yeah,

so back to chocolate. Uh. We should talk about a guy named Milton Hershey who was a great guy because he made chocolate inexpensive and able to get it into the hands of children for just a few pennies a bar back in the day. And now people love it worldwide. They do, and now they can love it in all sorts of weird ways to like. You know, I love the chocolate cover potato chips. Yeah, those are good. Chocolate cover bacon. I can't I don't know if I've ever

had it or not. It's good. Um. Yeah, pretty much chocolate and anything's fine. Yeah. I like the salt, like the heat. Um. Along with chocolate. You can get chocolate facials these days. I don't know about that though. Why not? Yeah, I don't know. Give me a mud mask, but made of chocolate, made of mud. Um. We should probably say who eats the most chocolate in the world. The Americans probably know. The Americans eat about half as much chocolate as the Brits, the Germans and the Swiss. The Swiss,

they each eat about twenty four pounds a year. The average Swiss person eats twenty four pounds of chocolate. Oh man, I'm sure they're like toblarone. See. I don't like chocolate snobs because I like a variety of chocolate. People that turn their nose up at like a milk chocolate bar, It still tastes good. I like milk chocolate, but also like the nice dark chocolate. You're equal opportunity chocolate. Dad, chocolate, dude, it's so good. But Americans eat about twelve pounds a year,

by the way, tended twelve. Uh, there's still a lot of chocolate. It is chocolate. Um, so we talked earlier. Well, I guess let's talk a little bit about the health properties of chocolate. Yes, because that's a big deal. Um. They have things called flavonoids and finelics, antioxidants that help protect your heart, same stuff that's found in wine. If you're eating the dark chocolate, milk chocolate is not good for you, no, but but it is in some ways,

which I will mention in a second. Okay, Um, but it can help prevent bad cholesterol or your risk of heart disease. That's if you're eating dark chocolate and not a ton of it, like an ounce and a half or so, right, And I think the pure the chocolate, the better it is for you, the more flavoroids present. Um. There's also long it's also been long suspected that chocolate has an effect on your mood and that it improves

your mood. And I saw a study from two thousand seven that finally it was like, okay, I think we all agree that chocolate improves the mood. How how long does it last? And they figured out that like, if you're in a bad mood or in any kind of mood, chocolate will improve your mood. It has a noticeable effect, but it only lasts for three minutes. Really yeah, and

it's almost instantaneous too. So the researchers were like, well, it's not possible that it's all of these Like there's cannabinoids which are also found in pot um, there's uh, there's other compounds that have an effect on our neurow transmitters. But it's not possible to eat chocolate and have your mood improved via that because it takes about an hour for those compounds to get to our brain and then allows for three minutes. Yes, and it's immediate, okay, So

it's not those, it's not those. I think that it's the flavor and the taste and the pleasure that comes from chocolate hitting the tongue. Well, that's like a good pan fried steak is good for my mood too, exactly, you know, right, So you should eat steak and chocolate a lot because it's good free mood every three minutes at least. I won't know how long steak class though,

I don't know. But the other, the other exceptional thing about chocolate hitting your tongue and having probably an effect on your mood is that remember that um that point that they bake chocolate crystals too degrees. Well, your tongue is ninety something and change. It's usually more than that, so you're the chocolate melts and those flavor crystals melt

just perfectly just touching your tongue too. Yeah, just because it's a close to our own body temperature, that would have some sort of effect on your That would explain why it happens immediately with good chocolate too. Uh. We should talk about theo bromine for a second. It's a chemical compound. It's an alkaloid that's in chocolate and some other foods, plant based foods, and it has a similar

effect is caffeine. And they do use it just like caffeine to help treat heart conditions, some heart conditions like narrowing of the blood vessels or stimulating the heart. And that's also the thing in it that is bad for your dogs. Oh yeah, theobromine, which is why you don't want to feed your dog chocolate. No, you don't think most everyone knows it's by now. A little bit will make them just kind of sick. But if they eat too much, they can kill them. It'll make them dead. Yeah,

which is the worst kind of sick. And we mentioned earlier the child labor uh, sort of like with coffee, exploiting kids to mine these coffee beans and um, as many as two hundred thousand children work in the cacao fields alone, I think. Yeah, and that's just an ivory coast. So um, and some of them are child slaves. So um. If you want to not do that, you search out fair trade or organic. Apparently organic chocolate isn't grown from those farms supposedly but technically has nothing to do with

it being organic. No, but I think they just said that the organic farms aren't uh slave farms. So fair trade as always might call you a little more. What else is there? You got anything else? I don't think I have anything else. And the Japanese apparently have a day two days for chocolate exchange exclusively. There's Valentine's Day where women give men chocolate, and then there's a White Day a month later, which is apparently invented by a

candy maker, where men give women chocolate. And even if you don't like the woman who gave you chocolate, you're still obligated, obligated to give her chocolate. It's um geary chucko, which means obligation chocolate. You see. I ignore all those like clearly corporate sponsored. Right do you call your mom a Mother's Day and just go go to hell? I do? Oh you don't yet, and she appreciate the call. Remember this year now Mother's Day that's different. Mother's Day and

Father's Day. I'll endorse those. Those are completely blatantly made up holidays. Yeah, but I don't buy them anything. It's not like there's a well you can you figured out a way to stick it to the man. It's not a gift behind that that I have to get. I believe that there's a woman UM invented Mother's Day and by the end of her life was like actively vocally protesting against the celebration of it because it's been hijacked by UM the greeting card companies. Yeah, I'll I'll usually

do a like go lunch or something like that. Nice, that's all my mom wants his time? Sure, you know, yeah? Good? Good for you, Chuck, your good son, try to be UM. Okay, well that's it for us talking about Chuck his relationship with his mom, right, I think so. Well, and chocolate. There's a whole other list of things we can get into it that's not for this room. Chuck is a good son. UM. If you want to learn more about chocolate, right, Yeah, you can type that word into the search bar at

how stuff works dot com. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this one from a teacher because you put out the call to teachers, how can we fix the system? I feel like we did that together and we got a lot of calls and emails from teachers. Not calls, just emails. Call out. Uh, so this is and there are a lot of great emails and I can only pick one. So this is from Colin. Hey, guys, have been a history teacher for

the past seven years. It is my profession of choice and I look forward to being an old fossil of a teacher one day. You're asking about problems with the educational system and possible solutions. I come from an interesting angle. I'm a public school teacher and spent the past six years at an inner city middle school. There, I experienced the following challenges one through three. One parents essentially being absent,

therefore having the teachers do the parenting. Number two, lack of accountability for students while everything is pushed onto the teachers. And number three unrealistic to ends by the federal government that is not supported by sufficient funding or resources. Can you see that list written on a chalkboard? Yeah, like that as a teacher list. As a teacher list. Uh. And lastly, my probably most unfortunately, a lack of respect

for my profession. My people have been called parasites and lazy by certain politicians and are accused of doing next to nothing and just enjoying summer vacations. In reality, we are often underpaid and overworked. These are teachers who There are teachers who do make a good wage. That is often after twenty plus years in a school system. My wife and I, due to the economy, have received just one raise in seven years, so after three quarters of a decade, we're still almost making the same as a

first year teacher. And uh then he went on to um talk about charter schools sort of at length, which I won't get into, but I think we should do a podcast on charter schools at some point. We need to do a podcast on like education and education system. Yeah. Sweet. Uh So, anyways, guys, sorry for the book. I'm sure an email this long would never be read on the show that was Reverse Psychology. It was and it worked, but you guys rock and thanks for taking the time

to even read it. Have a great day. Colin, thanks Mr C. We appreciate your writing in. We appreciate everybody writing in. I mean, like, if you put all of them together, you start to get a clear picture. Because you know, he named just three there, We've gotten all sorts of different suggestions. Test standardized testing is a big one that sure coming up. Um, yeah, there's there's a

lot wrong we found out. Like I think we're kind of hoping to fix things, but right now I'm just realizing what a daunting task is basing the US education system. We'll do our part by podcasting and running our mouths about it. Okay, well, uh, if you want to get in touch with us to let us know anything, um, how to fix anything, a toaster, oven, the education system, what have you, you can tweet to us, s y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com,

slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email probably work best to stuff podcast at Discovery dot com. That's right, right, that's right. And then of course you should always visit our home on the web. Make it your homepage Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com. Brought to you by the all new Toyota Corolla