What we call Chocolate is also known as Theobroma cacao. The botanical name “theobroma” means “food of the gods”; it was given to the plant by Europeans during their overseas scientific expeditions of the 1700s. They endeavored to classify all plant matter on earth and thus both a genus and a species name was assigned to each plant. Carl Linneaus, a Swedish botanist who lived during the 1700s theorized that a naming convention would eliminate confusion among the hundreds of thousands of plants known at the time to exist. [Read more…]