The Aztecs had a word for cacao beans: 'cacahuatl.' They also had a word for the drink made from them: 'xocolatl' — bitter water. That name survived, slightly mangled, into nearly every language on Earth. The drink itself was treated as sacred, intoxicating, and far too valuable for commoners.

The beans were money. Literal currency. In the 16th century, a tomato cost one bean. A turkey cost a hundred. You could pay your tribute to the Aztec Empire in cacao. Counterfeiters carved fake beans from mud and wax. When Spanish conquistadors looted Montezuma's treasury in 1519, they found a billion cacao beans stored there — a larger hoard than his gold.

Cacao had become currency because it was valuable, portable, and impossible to fake at scale — the same properties gold has. But unlike gold, the beans were perishable, which kept the economy flowing. You had to spend them.

The drink itself was unrecognizable to modern chocolate lovers. It was served cold, bitter, frothed aggressively, and spiced with chili, vanilla, and achiote. Montezuma reportedly drank fifty cups a day. When the Spanish brought it to Europe, they stripped out the chili and added cane sugar. The bitter ritual drink became the sweet dessert.

Today, 75% of the world's cacao grows in West Africa — Ivory Coast and Ghana — a continent the bean didn't reach until the 1800s. The tree that was once worshipped by emperors is now grown, mostly, by farmers earning less than two dollars a day.

Money moves strangely through history.