Cacao
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Cacao. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
or COCOA, the chocolate tree (Theobroma cacao), natural order Byttneriaceæ, and also the powder and made with it obtained from the beverage everage fruit of this tree. The tree is 16 to 18 feet high, a native of tropical America, and much cultivated in the tropics of both hemispheres, especially in the West India Islands, Central and South America. Its fruit is contained in pointed, oval, ribbed pods 6 to 10 inches long, each inclosing 50 to 100 seeds in a white, sweetish pulp. These are very nutritive, containing 50 per cent. of fat, are of an agreeable flavor, and used, both in their fresh state and when dried, as an article of diet. Cocoa and choco- CACHALOT late are made from them, the former being a powder obtained by grinding the seeds, and often mixed with other substances when prepared for sale, the latter being this powder mixed with sugar and various flavoring matters and formed into solid cakes. es. The seeds when roasted and divested of their husks and crushed are known as cocoa nibs. The seeds yield also an oil called butter of cacao, used in pomatum and for making candles, soap, etc. The term cocoa is a corruption of cacao, but is more commonly used in commerce; cocoa nuts, however, are obtained from an entirely different tree. In 1917 the world's cacao production was estimated at over 730,- 000,000 pounds. The chief cacao-producing countries, in their relative order, were: British colonies, Brazil, Ecuador, San Domingo, and Venezuela.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
ka-ka'o. See Cocoa
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's put the 1917 world crop at "over 730,000,000 pounds" — about 330,000 tonnes — with British colonies, Brazil and Ecuador leading; today the world grows roughly 5 million tonnes a year, some fifteen times as much, and about 60 per cent of it comes from Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana alone. Botanists have moved the tree out of the old Byttneriaceæ/Sterculiaceae grouping into the mallow family, Malvaceae, and the cacao genome was sequenced in 2010, opening breeding work against witches' broom and swollen shoot virus. Archaeological residues from Santa Ana-La Florida in southern Ecuador, reported in 2018, show cacao was being used in the upper Amazon some 5,300 years ago, well before its famous Mesoamerican history. What Collier's does not mention, and what now dominates public discussion of the crop, is the labour question: cocoa farming in West Africa has been the subject of sustained scrutiny over child labour since the early 2000s.
Written for this edition, 2026.