Marcy Norton

Traces the uses of the two products from the early European encounters onward on both sides of the Atlantic. Both were associated with Mesoamerican religious rituals, but Europeans started to like them anyway and then adopted them while suppressing their religious use among indigenous peoples. Norton argues that, although the conventional wisdom is that Westerners adopted tobacco first as medicine and then only later as pleasure, the documentary evidence is to the contrary—they got in the habit, and then some scholars touted its medicinal effects. Meanwhile, when they started consuming chocolate, they drank it as Mesoamericans did, even adding the same or similar spices, and categorized it in the apothecary according to Mesoamerican principles (it was “cold,” not “hot,” as Western principles would have held)—even if those influences were never acknowledged. Chocolate also primed Westerners to adopt coffee and tea later.… (mehr)