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Published 2015
Although it would take a few hundred years for some of the New World crops to be incorporated into Old World dietary systems, cacao’s trajectory was much shorter. Still, there was nothing inevitable about chocolate’s reception in Europe when Spanish conquistadors returned with those first cacao beans, which they referred to as “almonds.” (Hernán Cortés and not Christopher Columbus is generally believed to have been the first European to introduce cacao to the Old World, although no proof of this exists.) See chocolate, pre-columbian.