Scott Hendrix

To answer the question “What can chocolate teach us?,” Mr. Hendrix and Mr. Sogn will introduce “Bitter Water,” a project through which students will learn how chocolate has reinvented itself repeatedly and dramatically over 4,000 years of cultivation. The historical study will cover Mesoamerican civilizations, colonial conquest, industrial revolution, world trade, economics, and globalization. An interdisciplinary, inquiry-based course, “Bitter Water” will allow students to view material through archaeological, culinary, and ecological frameworks and ethnographic perspectives by examining a single common everyday item and its role in history across time and geography.