[HN Gopher] The Theology of Chocolate ___________________________________________________________________ The Theology of Chocolate Author : Thevet Score : 22 points Date : 2022-03-02 20:15 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.historytoday.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.historytoday.com) | VariableStar wrote: | Very interesting article. It shows the cultural disruption | brought upon tradition and a religious canon by a new product. | After a long time when the many theological discussions did not | solve anything the supreme argument of business interests solved | the matter swiftly. Not different from today! | MisterBastahrd wrote: | Theology is a funny thing. Once upon a time, Lent was a time of | fasting for the entire period. Then it was a period where you | didn't eat meat. Now you don't eat meat on Fridays and you give | up some other random thing for the 40 day period. I might have | gotten some of that slightly incorrect, but the main thing was | that you were supposed to give something up that you really | wanted and then refrain from eating meat on a certain day. | | Well, in South Louisiana, seafood is a huge part of the local | food culture and crawfish season starts about the same time as | Lent. It's a time of the year when crawfish are plentiful and | fat, and their shells aren't as hard as they get during the | summer and fall months. So instead of fasting on Fridays, they | gorge themselves silly with shellfish and beer when they aren't | eating fried fish and oysters either by themselves or in po-boys. | Hell, the archbishop of New Orleans even declared alligator meat | to be fish for Lent. From time to time, you will find stern | condemnations of such activities in opinion pieces from well- | heeled socialites who grew up in the upper class New Orleans area | Catholic social scene... but those are the sort of people who | would never be caught dead at an average man's crawfish boil to | begin with. | | So the local Catholics will go be pious with ash-smeared | foreheads and palm leaves drying on the rest behind the back | seats of their cars, then party it up for 6 straight Fridays. | cafard wrote: | "Pope Innocent refused the Carmelites' request and it was not, in | fact, until almost a century later that Pope Pius VI issued a | definitive ruling that clerics could drink chocolate (albeit only | away from Church premises)." | | The only Carmelites I knew were cloistered. Kind of hard to get | away from Church premises under such conditions. | qntty wrote: | Interesting, I didn't know that there were cloistered | Carmelites. I thought that mendicant == itinerant. According to | this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discalced_Carmelites | it's mostly nuns that are cloistered. Were they nuns or friars? | maerF0x0 wrote: | a little fun on the "theology" side made it all the way into | chemistry: | | > Theobromine (3,7-dimethylxanthine) is the principle alkaloid in | Theobroma cacao (the cacao bean) | | https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/theobromine | | > at name in turn is made up of the Greek roots theo ("god") and | broma ("food"), meaning "food of the gods".[9] | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theobromine#Etmyology ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-02 23:00 UTC)