Cooper the Cocoa Bean

I wrote this as an assignment for school but I like it =] (the part with all of the digestive system words is what we had to actually do for the assignment)

           Mmmmm. I remember waking up to the smell of the fresh Brazilian air. How I loved those days…. Oh, hello! I did not realize you were there. I am Cooper; just another piece of garbage dumped into this here lake. You see, I used to be a young, healthy cocoa bean that grew up on Mr. Mendes’s plantation here in the plains of Brazil.

Mr. Mendes was a nice man and treated us all very well. When it came time for me to be picked, I was more than ready for the excitement that was to come. I had heard many stories about the processes of being ground, turned into chocolate, and being digested, but never imagined the experience that I had myself! From the stories I was told by my grandparents and parents and friends, becoming chocolate sounded like so much fun, but it was the absolute opposite. First of all, Mr. Mendes and his helpers violently ripped me and my family off of the tree, slicing our stems so close to our tree that I felt as bad for it as I did for myself! I had no idea what was going to happen next, where we were going to be taken, or anything for that matter. All I knew was that I was cruelly thrown into a rough, handmade basket attached to some man’s back. It was not only me in there, but hundreds of other cocoa beans, including my brothers and best friends. Finally, after what seemed like decades to us beans, we were dumped into a humungous bin in a warehouse that must have been a couple of miles long.

            Not knowing what was ahead, there was a mass panic amongst ourselves. Soon enough, we were dumped onto a weird platform that moved and was taking us to some kind of machine. Before I could figure out what it did, I heard miniscule screams; I started to get a bad feeling about the situation. I did not have time to think much about this before I looked up and saw small metal spikes, kind of like what the men on the farm used to cut us off the trees. Instantly, I was chopped into a powder. The pain was so excruciating, but I managed to get through it. My next stop was a nice packaged box that was being shipped to the United States, I believe. I arrived at the Hershey factory (I only know this because so many men were shouting orders back and forth during our trip) sometime that same week and I was excited to see my new surroundings, yet I was sad that I would never again be able to wake up to that warm Brazilian air.

            The first part of terror in the American factory was being poured with all of my friends into a large pot that was full of boiling ingredients. Not only were we screaming, but I noticed every other ingredient of the mixture shouting out in pain. I think that I was being made into something called chocolate, which humans apparently find very delicious. Our entire mixture of ‘food’ was then poured onto a moving platform. This one lead to a scary looking contraption that moved up and down and up and down, pounding viciously on down on the platform. As I approached it, all of my fears came rushing back. Luckily, it only took a minute to get through. I was now a morphed cocoa bean, far from my tree in Brazil to this - this disgrace to all bean-kind.

You think my horrid journey is over? Think again! Hundreds of other ‘chocolate bars’ and I were once again put into different boxes and shipped to some suburb of a big city. I was finally stocked on the shelf of a local Exxon® station. To my astonishment, I was one of the first to go. An arrogant woman with one of those small four-legged creatures in her bag bought me shortly after I was put out; and so begins my journey through the body of this bigheaded woman.

            She must have been very hungry because as soon as she walked out of the store, the woman threw the wrapping off of me and took a gigantic bite using her incisors she quickly began to masticate as soon as I entered her oral cavity. I zoomed past her canines and bicuspids (which were unnecessary to digest me), stopping for a little longer at her molars to ensure that I was small enough to swallow. Lucky for her, her hard palate did a lot of work in breaking me down into smaller pieces.

Chemical digestion kicked in A her saliva started to mix in; this slightly burned (those crazy enzymes!). I could feel all of my contents being pulled apart and realized I was beginning to deglutinate. Her tongue moved side to side, back and forth, switching the molars that were going to chew me.

After all of the chaos in her oral cavity, I had turned into this big ball of bolus. When she swallowed, I slipped past her soft palate and noticed the uvula. Boy was that tempting to try and grab. I wanted to get out of there so badly! I went by her epiglottis; lucky for her it was working or else I would have gone to her lungs and no one would have enjoyed that. Next stop was her esophagus. The mechanical digestion process of peristalsis began working, and very efficiently at that. This was the one and only part of my voyage that was remotely enjoyable. The wave-like movements that pushed me down were some-what soothing compared to all of the previous commotion.

Suddenly, I plopped into a hole that resembled a cave. It was the stomach, more specifically the cardia. Not too long after I arrived there, I moved to the gas chamber: the fundus. It was so full! I must have made it even more chock-full of gas because seconds after I entered, there was a strange rumbling noise and then something came out of her mouth. My next stop was the body of the stomach. You remember when I told you about the boiling pot that my friends and I were mixed into? This felt the same. The gastric juices burned like the fiery depths of the underworld; there was no end to the burning until I reached the last part of her stomach, the pylorus. There, her stomach finished me off. By now I was just a foul clump of chyme sitting and wasting precious time at the bottom of this lady’s stomach.

At last, her pyloric sphincter opened and I passed into the small intestine. The first portion of this was the duodenum and again, the burning sensation of enzymes placed me in a world of pain. This time it was caused by bile which is made in the liver and held in the gall bladder. Also, her pancreas was excreting digestive enzymes to finish the digestion of carbohydrates, fats, and the small amount of protein that was part of my mixture. These were actually rather soothing because they helped to break down the stomach’s enzymes. And I’m not done! Along with all of that her pancreas creates glucagon, insulin, and somatostatin, but we will get into that another time. After all of that, I moved into the second part of her small intestine, called the jejunum. This takes all of the broken down substances like carbohydrates and proteins that allows them to pass into the bloodstream by the process of absorption. Almost exactly like the jejunum, the ileum absorbs fats. I could feel myself becoming lighter and increasingly more dried out from all of the products being removed from me and put into the woman’s body. Villi, which are small finger-like extensions of the small intestine, increase the surface area and helped a lot with my absorption. From the small intestine I go through the ileocecal valve into the large intestine.

Before I got to the large intestine, I passed this odd looking thing hanging off of the ileocecal valve that I believe to be called the appendix. I hear that humans do not use it anymore. It seems odd to me. But anyway, the large intestine began with the cecum which connects the small and large intestine and absorbs any access salt and water from any undigested food. As of there, I moved to the ascending colon. I swiftly glided upward through the smooth walls until I reached the transverse colon and then into the descending colon. I felt like I was going down a massive slide, and I had fun for a little bit. Next, I glided into the sigmoid colon, around the ‘S’ shape and dropped into her rectum. There I sat for hours on end. By now I was an unpleasant glob of feces. I was joined by the woman’s other meals coming down into that chamber, just waiting. The stench became so potent that I wanted to get out of there more than I have wanted anything in my whole entire life. Slowly, I made my way down the six inches of the rectum and into the anus. This woman must have been close to a bathroom because I was not in there for very long. Her internal and external sphincter worked together to force me and the other food out of her body. I dropped into an odd bowl filled with water, and before I had the time to take in my surroundings, the lady pushed a handle and made all of the water swirl and then disappear through more tubes.

And so I ended up here in this lake full of other people’s feces, hearing the stories of their journeys through the digestive system. I am older now but I hope that I will be able to pass my story onto the cocoa beans in Brazil that are still so naive about the world. This ends my story and please, next time you eat a piece of chocolate, remember me and my journey.

Reviews

[Kaitlin]

omg! i remember this...unfortunately
mine, however, was not this long lol.

[Kerwin]

This is awesome! I love it. Very, very original. IT must have taken you some time to write this?