I'm really loving this book (thanks SJ).

A favorite snippet thus far -

.

The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories. Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolately café mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle’s Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bitter sweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much. And, thanks to Sophie and Michael Coe’s book The True History of Chocolate, I remembered that cacao beans were used as currency at the moment of European contact. When Christopher Columbus’s son Ferdinand captured a Maya canoe in 1503, he noticed that whenever one of the natives dropped a cacao bean, “they all stopped to pick I up, as if an eye had fallen.” When you know such trivia, an act as mundane as having an overpriced breakfast drink becomes imbued with meaning, even poetry. Plus, I read a women’s magazine article called “5 Fabulous Morning Rituals,” and it said that after you “bask in bed” and “walk in nature” you’re supposed to “ponder the sins of the conquistadors.”