Read Online The Triumph of Seeds by Thor Hanson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Thor Hanson
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chocolate, coconut, and munchy nuts too!” At the time, it never occurred to me that my future career would reach this enviable moment: the opportunity to buy my favorite candy bars as a business expense. But a fact that escaped me then is extremely relevant now: from the first crunch of the roasted almond to the chewy sweetness of the chocolate and coconut finish, savoring an Almond Joy bar is an entirely seed-based experience. And while it’s tempting to chalk up Almond Joys to the same logic that Benjamin Franklin used for beer—“proof that God loves us”—there’s far more to their story. The seeds involved don’t just taste good; they demonstrate beautifully the incredible range of ways that a plant can pack lunch for its offspring.
An Almond Joy now costs eighty-five cents at our local drugstore, and I’ve paid more than a dollar for them at vending machines. But you still feel like you’re getting your money’s worth because each package actually contains two small bars. This gives buyers the opportunity to share with a friend or save a piece for later, though it’s unclear if anyone has ever done so. In my case, having two bars allowed me to eat one immediately and still have something left over to dissect. Cutting the bar in cross-section revealed its center of shredded coconut (from a pan-tropical palm), topped with almond (from an Asian tree in the rose family), and surrounded by a thin layer of chocolate (from a small New World rainforest tree). I took scrapes from each layer and prepared a microscope slide, but glancing at the package told me that none of these was the most dominant seed product in the bar. That honor rested with corn syrup, a sweetener derived from the seeds of a grass, maize, that is often used as areplacement for cane sugar (which, incidentally, also comes from a grass). But we already know from the last chapter that grasses are ubiquitous, and that their starch-filled seeds are easily transformed into sugars. The rest of the bar’s contents tell us why seeds have developed so many other ways to store energy, and why we should all be thankful that they have.
The milk chocolate coating contained cocoa butter as well as a dark, bitter slurry that candy makers refer to as cocoa liquor, cocoa mass, or simply chocolate. These products both come directly from the large cotyledons found in a mature cacao bean. Squeeze the bean in a hot press and more than half its mass drips out as cocoa butter, a fat with the important quality of being solid at room temperature but liquid above approximately 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius). Since the average body temperature clocks in at 98.6°F, chocolate, quite literally, melts in your mouth. Roasting and milling the beans produces cocoa liquor, which can be mixed with varying amounts of cocoa butter, milk, and accompanying sweeteners to give us the wide range of chocolate flavors available in any well-stocked candy aisle. Farther down on the ingredients list, Ispotted cocoa powder, another familiar cacao product, which comes from grinding the cake of dry “nibs” left over afterpressing the beans for butter.
In the wild, cacao beans reside inside the fleshy pods of a small, shade-loving tree native to forests of southern Mexico, Central America, and the Amazon. I often stumbled upon old cacao orchards in Costa Rica while searching for almendro seeds. I would glance up from a transect to find myself suddenly surrounded by their pods—bizarre, gourd-like fruits that sprouted directly from trunks and branches in varying shades of orange, purple, chartreuse, and hot pink. It’s no wonder that cacao caught the attention of the Mayans, Aztecs, and other early Americans, who developed a stimulating energy drink from the beans, and whose reverence for the species lives on in its genus name, Theobroma , “food of the gods.” It took Europeans and the rest of the world a few centuries to really acquire the taste, but cacao trees now grow
An Almond Joy now costs eighty-five cents at our local drugstore, and I’ve paid more than a dollar for them at vending machines. But you still feel like you’re getting your money’s worth because each package actually contains two small bars. This gives buyers the opportunity to share with a friend or save a piece for later, though it’s unclear if anyone has ever done so. In my case, having two bars allowed me to eat one immediately and still have something left over to dissect. Cutting the bar in cross-section revealed its center of shredded coconut (from a pan-tropical palm), topped with almond (from an Asian tree in the rose family), and surrounded by a thin layer of chocolate (from a small New World rainforest tree). I took scrapes from each layer and prepared a microscope slide, but glancing at the package told me that none of these was the most dominant seed product in the bar. That honor rested with corn syrup, a sweetener derived from the seeds of a grass, maize, that is often used as areplacement for cane sugar (which, incidentally, also comes from a grass). But we already know from the last chapter that grasses are ubiquitous, and that their starch-filled seeds are easily transformed into sugars. The rest of the bar’s contents tell us why seeds have developed so many other ways to store energy, and why we should all be thankful that they have.
The milk chocolate coating contained cocoa butter as well as a dark, bitter slurry that candy makers refer to as cocoa liquor, cocoa mass, or simply chocolate. These products both come directly from the large cotyledons found in a mature cacao bean. Squeeze the bean in a hot press and more than half its mass drips out as cocoa butter, a fat with the important quality of being solid at room temperature but liquid above approximately 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius). Since the average body temperature clocks in at 98.6°F, chocolate, quite literally, melts in your mouth. Roasting and milling the beans produces cocoa liquor, which can be mixed with varying amounts of cocoa butter, milk, and accompanying sweeteners to give us the wide range of chocolate flavors available in any well-stocked candy aisle. Farther down on the ingredients list, Ispotted cocoa powder, another familiar cacao product, which comes from grinding the cake of dry “nibs” left over afterpressing the beans for butter.
In the wild, cacao beans reside inside the fleshy pods of a small, shade-loving tree native to forests of southern Mexico, Central America, and the Amazon. I often stumbled upon old cacao orchards in Costa Rica while searching for almendro seeds. I would glance up from a transect to find myself suddenly surrounded by their pods—bizarre, gourd-like fruits that sprouted directly from trunks and branches in varying shades of orange, purple, chartreuse, and hot pink. It’s no wonder that cacao caught the attention of the Mayans, Aztecs, and other early Americans, who developed a stimulating energy drink from the beans, and whose reverence for the species lives on in its genus name, Theobroma , “food of the gods.” It took Europeans and the rest of the world a few centuries to really acquire the taste, but cacao trees now grow
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