I am going through the books to add details for the wiki. I have decided to do so from the perspective of the beverages section. It’s been interesting to see how many of the plot events have a drink central to it. I have some but not all of them in digital format, I’m going to pick up the rest as I can. I find it easier to search and make notes than the hardback copies. So far I haven’t come across any references to non alcoholic drinks other than the plain tea that seems to power Sethvir and herbal teas a lot of which are used for medicines. I wondered Janny, is there coffee in Athera? Or hot chocolate?
Is the Spiced chocolate mentioned in Initiates Trial a drink or a food? It’s mentioned as wafting through the air in the chapter Extrications.
Cacao was easily cultivated in mesoamerica. There would be a very few locations (in Sanshevas) that might be able to sustain the right conditions.
This would make cacao a rarity, and ‘chocolate’ - rarer still. Check out, if you are curious, how intensive the process is - to grow, to harvest, then the extremely crazy steps (there are many!!) required to process what we know as chocolate (intricate steps of fermentation all temperature controlled ) then the grinding and processing - hours and hours of labor - if you tried this at home - a lot harder than cultivation of yeast from the wild.
There was a home do yourself science nerd who does a whole thread on the subject, from growing the cacao, to harvesting, to home processing into chocolate - So, yes, there would be cocoa, on Athera, under the right climate and conditions - and it would be an extreme, uncommon delicacy.
I will go and take a look. Thank you. I am absolutely interested in all that I’ve recently finished a STEM degree leaning towards environmental science. One of the projects I was looking at was changing diets over history and where the produce came from. Same true for Coffee?