For the Maya and the Aztecs of Meso-America chocolate was not simply a tasty drink. It was a mind-altering, ritual substance that could be substituted for blood in religious ceremonies. Women in colonial Spanish America found it was hard to get through an entire church service without a chocolate break half-way through. The seventeenth-century French aristocrat the Marquise de Sevigne regarded chocolate as a health-food. Britons now consume on average 18 pounds of chocolate per year. This talk surveys the routes by which chocolate travelled from the forests of Central America to the confectionary shelf of your petrol station

Dr Rebecca Earle is a Reader in History at the University of Warwick, where she teaches on The Cultural History of Food in Latin America, among other subjects.