Chocolate wasn’t always romantic. How did it become a symbol of love?
The Excerpt
USA TODAY
4.1 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 13 February 2026
⏱️ 16 minutes
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Summary
Chocolate wasn’t always sweet — or romantic. Once a ceremonial drink and even a form of currency, cacao has a long history before becoming a Valentine’s Day staple. Harvard Professor Carla Martin explains how marketing, industrialization and chemistry helped turn chocolate into a symbol of love — and why men buy the most chocolate one week a year.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Chocolate is everywhere this time of year. |
| 0:05.0 | Heart cheap boxes, foil wrap truffles, impulse-wise, add the checkout line. |
| 0:10.0 | But the idea that chocolate equals romance isn't accidental. |
| 0:14.0 | It's the result of centuries of cultural shifts, industrialization, and very intentional storytelling. |
| 0:30.6 | Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Friday, February 13, 2026. As Valentine's Day approaches, we wanted to take a closer look at how chocolate went from a |
| 0:36.6 | bitter ceremonial |
| 0:37.7 | drink to America's go-to symbol of love and what that transformation tells us about desire, |
| 0:43.5 | labor, and consumer culture. Joining me now is Carla Martin, a social anthropologist and lecturer |
| 0:49.7 | in African and African-American studies at Harvard University and the founder of the Institute for |
| 0:55.3 | Cacao and Chocolate Research. Carla, thanks so much for joining me. It's a pleasure to be here. |
| 1:00.2 | Thanks for having me. Before chocolate was associated with romance, how was it used in earlier |
| 1:07.3 | Mesoamerican cultures and who was it for? If we go back thousands of years to Mesoamerica, which today is Central America and |
| 1:16.6 | Southern Mexico, we see that cacao, the raw material that we know of that goes on to become |
| 1:23.3 | chocolate in the present was used in four different ways. |
| 1:26.6 | For one, it was used as a food flavoring, |
| 1:29.2 | and that would be for a savory application. You might think of something like mole in that way. |
| 1:34.7 | It was used as a beverage, so something that could be drunk. There were thousands of recipes |
| 1:39.7 | that used to cacao as a beverage. Chocolate was only one of them. The third was as a spiritual offering, and this is significant because people would use cacao as a beverage chocolate was only one of them. The third was as a spiritual |
| 1:45.0 | offering. And this is significant because people would use cacao in weddings, in baptisms, |
| 1:52.1 | in other ritual ways. That might be where we got some of the first associations of cacao with |
| 1:57.9 | ideas like romance. And then, of course, the fourth use of it was as a currency. |
| 2:03.6 | So at that time, literally the seeds of the cacao were the money that grew on trees. |
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