Chocolate wasn’t always romantic. How did it become a symbol of love? | The Excerpt

On the Friday, February 13, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast: Chocolate wasn’t always romantic. Harvard Professor Carla Martin explains how cacao transformed from a sacred drink into a Valentine’s Day staple — and how history, marketing and chemistry helped give chocolate its emotional power.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Dana Taylor:

Chocolate is everywhere this time of year. Heart shaped boxes, foil wrapped truffles, impulse buys at the checkout line. But the idea that chocolate equals romance isn't accidental. It's the result of centuries of cultural shifts, industrialization, and very intentional storytelling. Hello, and welcome to USA TODAY's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Friday, February 13th, 2026. As Valentine's Day approaches, we wanted to take a closer look at how chocolate went from a bitter ceremonial drink to America's go to symbol of love and what that transformation tells us about desire, labor, and consumer culture. Joining me now is Carla Martin, a social anthropologist and lecturer in African and African-American studies at Harvard University and the founder of the Institute for Cacao and Chocolate Research. Carla, thanks so much for joining me.

Carla Martin:

It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Dana Taylor:

Before chocolate was associated with romance, how was it used in earlier Mesoamerican cultures and who was it for?

Carla Martin:

If we go back thousands of years to Mesoamerica, which today is Central America and Southern Mexico, we see that cacao, the raw material that we know of that goes on to become chocolate in the present, was used in four different ways. For one, it was used as a food flavoring, and that would be for a savory application. You might think of something like mole in that way. It was used as a beverage, so something that could be drunk. There were thousands of recipes that used 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 in weddings, in baptisms, in other ritual ways. That might be where we got some of the first associations of cacao with ideas like romance. And then of course, the fourth use of it was as a currency. So at that time, literally the seeds of the cacao were the money that grew on trees, and people could use cacao beans as a local coin.

Dana Taylor:

I'm thinking of the foil covered chocolate coins I would get as a child, and I think-

Carla Martin:

Right.

Dana Taylor:

There's probably a through line there. So chocolate started as a bitter drink, not a sweet one. When and why did Europeans decide to sweeten it? And how did that change its cultural role?

Carla Martin:

Originally, in some of the recipes that involved cacao, indigenous people would use local sweeteners, things like honey or agave. And so the flavors that they were consuming were not all that different from what we consumed today. So they would put cacao, maybe corn, maybe some kind of edible flour. Vanilla is perhaps the most famous one in the present. And then of course, the sweetener like honey or agave. In the present, due to European conquest in Mesoamerica and the move of different commodity crops around the world, what people most have access to is what they began to have a lot of access to by about the 17, 1800s. And that's the presence of cane sugar or beet sugar. That is why today we see chocolate as sweet, and it is considerably sweeter than what people would've consumed historically to the point where sometimes when you're eating a bar of chocolate, you're getting about a 50, 60% sugar hit. And then only the rest of that percentage is actually something that might come from the cocoa tree.

Dana Taylor:

Jumping ahead in time to the 20th century, the US Army worked with Hershey to develop a chocolate bar for soldiers on the battlefield prior to World War II. How and why did this partnership begin?

Carla Martin:

It's a fascinating history, and it's one that also has long historical links. It wasn't uncommon for indigenous people in Mesoamerica to use these sort of rustic chocolate discs when they went on the battlefield as warriors. So many centuries ago. That was also the case during the American Revolution and the Civil War. Troops were given chocolate as something to kind of combat hunger. It contains theobromine and caffeine, which are both stimulants. We associate them with a sense of wellbeing. And so it would be given to people as a way of trying to boost their energy in difficult physical moments on the battlefield. Then of course, The Hershey Company competed for contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense beginning in the 1900s around World War I, around World War II, where they were creating very nutritious, fortified chocolate bars that could be given to troops. My understanding is that these were given to troops prior to D-Day and to other major battles. And so this has remained a significant source of nutrition and key moments in military history in the United States.

Dana Taylor:

At what point does chocolate stop being just another luxury good and start carrying emotional or symbolic weight, especially around love and intimacy?

Carla Martin:

It's interesting. When it comes to food, we as people are the ones who make meaning out of it. So there is a long history of cocoa and chocolate at times being seen as well accepted in society and at other times, not as well accepted. For example, in the early European encounters with cocoa and chocolate, the Catholic Church, which has a long history of kind of ambivalence toward the ideas of outright romance or sexuality was debating whether or not people could consume chocolate on holy days and still be considered to be fasting. Of course, the Catholic Church also celebrates a number of people known as Saint Valentine. And so there is that connection toward Valentine's Day historically and the idea of aphrodisiac foods. Chocolate came to be one of them, likely because of this historical connection with romance that goes all the way back to indigenous tradition, but also because of that sense of wellbeing, the fact that it is something that we tend to use in a social setting as a gift or as a comfort food, as something related to impulse.

And one thing that I find especially fascinating about it is for 52 weeks out of the year, we see a general trend where in 51 weeks, women are the primary buyers of chocolate. Men and women consume chocolate more or less equally. There is one week per year, however, when men become the primary buyers in the United States, and that is the week leading into Valentine's Day.

Dana Taylor:

Well, Valentine's Day existed for centuries before chocolate arrived in Europe. So why did chocolate specifically become the gift instead of pastries or other types of sugar candy or flowers alone?

Carla Martin:

There are a few different factors that played a role in that happening. One was very clever marketing by chocolate companies. So early on during the Victorian era, so mid to late 1800s, chocolate companies were creating things like heart-shaped boxes into which they would place those delightful chocolate candies and Bon Bons that many of us associate with Valentine's Day today. That could be accompanied by very elaborate Valentine's Day cards that if you look back at the Victorian era, you see that they contained lace, all different kinds of gilded papers. They were a gift that you could give to someone that was impressive and surprising. The National Confectioners Association here in the United States, an organization that brought together some of the biggest chocolate producers also began to do collective marketing efforts around key holidays like Halloween, Valentine's Day, Christmas, Easter to promote chocolate to US consumers. And so over time, we came to indelibly associate chocolate with romance in American context.

Dana Taylor:

How much of chocolate's romantic reputation comes from science, things like how it affects mood, energy, or even some of the aphrodisiac myths versus pure marketing?

Carla Martin:

There are certainly physical and psychological reasons that we have come to associate chocolate with romance. One is the melting point of cocoa butter. That's the fat that cocoa naturally contains. When we put chocolate on our tongue, it melts at about 92 degrees Fahrenheit, which is just below the temperature of our own bodies. And so you have that experience that most of us know is that silky smooth texture, that delightful melting, right? Of course, many have come to associate that with aphrodisiac qualities. Then of course, there are these chemicals that exist in chocolate, theobromine, caffeine. These are stimulants. They're also associated with a sense of wellbeing. And then we add things like sugar or nuts. Nuts have also often been associated with aphrodisiacs. We add vanilla. There's a long history of associating flowers and they're aroma with romance. And so all of these different components combine to make a sensory and psychological experience that when socialized through all of this promotion and marketing of chocolate really drives the point home about its association to Valentine's Day.

Dana Taylor:

Speaking of marketing, and we mentioned Hershey's, how did a chocolate company like Hershey's shape an entire town?

Carla Martin:

So this is a really interesting question. The Hershey Company was when it began perhaps not all that different from any other small chocolate company around the United States. There was a time when many towns had their own individual family owned chocolate firm. What was unique about The Hershey Company was the ambition of its founder and the techniques that were put into place to promote the chocolate itself. Milton Hershey was one of the first chocolate company owners to ship chocolate out of Hershey, Pennsylvania and place it in different shopping points all across the United States, which made it something that became well known to many consumers across the nation. He also invested very heavily in the town, trying to create what was his idea of a utopian vision, which essentially meant him in a mansion on a hill overlooking workers' homes and large factories and fields with cows producing dairy. And so Hershey, Pennsylvania was founded out of that vision and those working conditions.

Dana Taylor:

How did industrialization and mass production change the meaning of giving chocolate? Did it change the meaning?

Carla Martin:

It absolutely did change the meaning for many centuries, so especially through the 16, 17 and even into the mid 1800s, it was actually the case that access to chocolate was exclusively among the uber elite. When I say that, I mean royal families, the nobility in Europe or in British colonial North America. It wasn't until about the mid 1800s that with the increase of cocoa supply, and this was done through, for example, the transatlantic slave trade and large scale production of things like sugar production, cocoa, tea, coffee, and other, what we call drug crops that were driving a lot of this expansion, accompanied by industrial manufacturing and the ability to scale up production, that chocolate became something that could make its way into more people's homes. In fact, for most of us here in the United States consuming chocolate, we can only look back about 120 years, so maybe four or five generations within our families and see that chocolate was something that was familiar to us.

Dana Taylor:

Carla, chocolate advertising often leans heavily on desire and indulgent. It's not uncommon to see it marketed as a guilty pleasure. When did those themes become central to how chocolate is sold?

Carla Martin:

This is a really interesting possibility to contemplate. It is certainly the case that throughout debates in the Catholic Church and in other religious areas, there has long been a debate about the morality of chocolate consumption, especially because we know that it was associated with an exotic, distant place. It was consumed, especially for many years, primarily by women. They were seen by the clergy, for example, to be distracted by chocolate, drinking it and gossiping instead of paying attention to mass. So there's that long history there, but even in the present, we see people continue to debate about these things. Candy in the United States has been sometimes demonized and sometimes celebrated. There are examples from the early 1900s of nutritionists and dieticians promoting candy as something to be consumed for good health among even children. Those of us who grew up in the 1980s, 1990s, we know that that story entirely changed by the time that we were children because candy had actually been vilified as something to be avoided due to high sugar content.

And so as a result of all of this, chocolate is wrapped up with many different emotions that link in many ways to our own morality or a sense of guilt. It's also linked with ideas about women and their sexuality and consumption. And one just needs to do a quick search on Google images to look for women eating chocolate to see the way in which there is a stereotype of the idea of a woman eating chocolate, having this kind of aphrodisiac experience, and it replacing for her perhaps the need for a man.

Dana Taylor:

Carla, I am looking around as soon as we finish to get my hands on a chocolate bar, but thank you so much for joining me. That stories are fascinating. Thank you.

Carla Martin:

It's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Dana.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our senior producer, Kaely Monahan, for her production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts @usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. I'll be back Monday morning with another episode of USA TODAY's The Excerpt.