May 24, 2018
Recently a tanker truck hauling melted milk chocolate toppled over on a highway in Poland, coating six lanes of traffic in delicious sugary goo. The chocolate was so thick that first responders left footprints in the muck, and heavy machinery had to be brought in to scrape it off the roads. Some drivers continued on their merry way, spreading streaks of chocolate for miles. Crews raced to clean up the chocolate before it hardened on the road. The driver of the truck suffered a broken arm, but fortunately, no one else was injured.
The scientific name for the tree that chocolate comes from is theobroma cacao, which means "food of the gods." The word "chocolate" comes from the Aztec word "xocoatl," which referred to the bitter, spicy drink the Aztecs made from cacao beans. The Aztec emperor Montezuma II drank more than 50 cups of chocolate every day. It takes an almost a full year for a cocoa tree to produce enough pods to make 10 standard-sized Hershey bars!