[HN Gopher] The Theology of Chocolate
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       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
        
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       (page generated 2022-03-02 23:00 UTC)