the golden ticket, or, why does chocolate in Mexico suck?

Sometimes its easy to forget that chocolate was invented and named by native Mexicans. English has so many borrowed words and unfamiliar sounds that we take for granted the origin of the "xocol" at the beginning of the word.

It's also easy to forget in Mexico, since most of the chocolate you find here is absolute crap manufactured by Cadbury, Mars, and Nestle using obviously the shoddiest ingredients. I mean, its worse than the checkout aisle crap you find in the US. Here, like there, poor quality is masked with excess caramel, peanuts, crackers, and cookies.

Mexico harvests cocoa and there are a few companies that process the beans and manufacture chocolate here, but this is very high end, gourmet chocolate with their own shops. You can't even buy any decent chocolate at grocery stores.

Which is really sad. If you think about the availability of really good cheese in France or good wines in Italy and Argentina, it makes me wonder if its the generally high cost of chocolate production that pushes Mexico to export its beans.

Tequila is made here, which seems like it would be an equally expensive product to make, and its still relatively cheap and high quality. Actually, maybe its a bad comparison. Blue Agave grows in a variety of climate ranges so there are many regions of Mexico which have massive fields of the agave, and with the low cost of labor and a relatively simple process of distillation, maybe that drives the cost down. Cacao grows in very limited and particular climates, so maybe its the limited supply that drives up the price.

The city of musuems would not be complete without a chocolate museum, so I may have to hit that up one of these days and try to figure out the answers to my questions.

Anyway, it finally hit me that I've been craving chocolate for a few days now, so I made a special trip to the luxury grocery store Superama, and bought a bar of Lindt Swiss dark chocolate. They didn't even sell locally made good chocolate.

When I placed my one item on the conveyer belt at the check-out counter, and looked at the lonely 50 peso bill in my wallet, I felt like Charlie Bucket, spending the value of one of my typical meals on a chocolate bar.