At 04:50 PM 3/11/01 -0500, Deborah Birkett wrote:
>>At 03:12 PM 3/11/01 -0500, Stacie Tolen wrote:
>> >Chocolate is from the cocoa bean, which is a legume.
>
>Then Katy wrote:
>Caco beans grow on tree trunks of caco trees in football shaped pods.
>Since I understood legumes to be leafy, bushy plants with nodes on their
>roots that harbor nitrogen-fixing bacteria, I don't think Caco beans are
>legumes.
>__________
>
>On the following page, which details plant relationships, it says that
>Cacao/Cocoa/Chocolate are members of the order Malvales, and the family
>Sterculiaceae. It doesn't seem to be a member of the legume family.
>
>http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/Food/RelatedPlantList.html
>
>This is the best such list of plant relationships I've found on the web; if
>anyone knows of a more complete or accurate one, please post the URL.
>

I've been finding the same things--and coming to the same conclusion--it is
at most *distantly* related to legumes, in that they're both woody
flowering plants...  (I finally got through on the britannica site and
looked at the botanical resources.)

I've been trying to find some kind of nutrional comparison between cacao
nuts/beans/seeds and common legumes and am having a heckuva time finding
sufficient data at the moment...

However, I suspect that since the oldest records all have
drying/fermenting/roasting as part of the processing, any "chocolate" form
is way far from paleo :)  It is an interesting search, though!

Dianne