Chocolate shaped the US in unlikely ways. Here's the sweet history.

America's love affair with chocolate stretches back beyond the earliest days of the nation, more than 250 years ago.

Indigenous tribes in central and South American began cultivating and consuming cocoa around 3300 B.C., according to some ancient evidence. When it reached Europe in the 1500s, chocolate was a delicacy.

Today, it's estimated that Americans eat about 2.8 to 3 billion pounds of chocolate per year – about 10 pounds per person each year or the equivalent of about 100 Hershey's bars.

Chocolate’s journey to ubiquity, in many ways, tracks the broader history of the United States.

Jared Ross Hardesty, author of “Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Smuggling, Slavery, and Chocolate,” and a scholar of colonial America said the confection “helps us better understand some really key themes in American history”