Chocolate by Sarah Moss (ebook voice reader .TXT) 📕

world’s cacao is now grown, chocolate is still not often consumed. The same is true of the Arab world, and of Asia generally. Japan is a notable exception to this, coming in well below northern European per capita consumption, but on a par with Spain and Portugal, which were once the centres of chocolate consumption in Europe.

It is also worth remembering that for much of the period after 1945, these ‘global’ trends in chocolate production applied mostly to countries west of the ‘Iron Curtain’, although this is not to say that the Eastern Bloc was without chocolate. Probably the most famous chocolate to be produced on the far side of the ‘Iron Curtain’ came from the Soviet Union’s Red October factory, which until recently was in the heart of Moscow. Founded originally by a German confectioner in 1867, the factory was stopped by the revolution in 1918 and restarted under the name Red October. The company soon established a number of popular treats, with imagery not drawn so much from that of the socialist tradition of stylized workers and peasants, but (like a number of aspects of Soviet society) from the Russian national tradition. Popular Red October chocolates thus feature motifs such as playing bears, as well as the very popular bitesized chocolate bar called Alyonka, presumably the name of the little girl on the label.

In other Soviet Bloc countries, similar native chocolate industries developed on the foundations of what had gone before. In East Germany, the centralized ‘Sweets Combine’ (and later the ‘People’s Own Enterprise Chocolate Factory Halloren’) took over Germany’s oldest chocolate factory (built in 1802) in Halle (not to be confused with the town of the same name in Belgium, which is home to Côte d’Or) and in 1952 introduced the Hallorenkugel, a fondant-filled bonbon, which soon became a much-desired luxury. Later on, the brand Zetti brought out a range of chocolates, including the Zetti Bambina, which was modelled on the milk-rich Kinder chocolate in the West. The more rurally oriented economy of Bulgaria developed its own native chocolate brand, the label of which, also following the long-established tradition in the industry, featured a photo of a cow in a meadow. In the absence of a visible brand name, this, the only chocolate officially available, was simply known as ‘cow chocolate’. Especially when it first came out, it was a rare treat. As was true of most aspects of the economies of scarcity in these countries, periodic shortages plagued chocolate production, and supply varied greatly. While during some periods in the post-war era, annual per capita chocolate consumption in the Soviet Union was around eight kilograms, immediately after the collapse, it had sunk to below one kilo. In the face of one such shortage, the East German government in 1974 lowered standards for cacao percentage in milk chocolate from 25 percent to a mere seven percent (and one will recall that Cadbury’s twenty percent already disqualified it from being labelled chocolate), falling back on tried and true fillers such as cheap fats and pea flour to compensate for more expensive ingredients. The more successful experiment was the Schlagersüsstafel, a bar that contained no chocolate whatsoever.

Advert featuring nostalgic chocolate boxes from Russia’s famed Red October factory.

These products have not all disappeared. Quite the contrary; many former Communist countries have seen strong waves of nostalgia for the Communist era, or at least its consumer goods. Particularly given the very sudden flood of Western goods which quickly came to replace many the familiar products of everyday life, such consumer longings are understandable. These feelings, known in Germany as Ostalgie (‘East-algia’), have revived the fortunes of many companies, which in many cases, now privatized, continue or have begun anew to produce the familiar tastes. In East Germany in particular, they form a sort of privileged knowledge and access to a world that West Germans do not share. Beyond that, the chocolates’ association with childhood has allowed the familiar, and now more widely available, products to stand in as innocent memories of life in the authoritarian system. They offer a way of not dismissing outright what for many were important and formative years of their lives.

Lands of Chocolate:

Roaming Fantasies and Bitter Realities

In a 1991 episode of The Simpsons entitled ‘Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk’ (sic), a German consortium takes over the nuclear power plant in Springfield and the new managers call Homer in to account for his (in)activity as the plant’s safety superintendent. When Homer proposes improvements to the company snack machines rather than nuclear safety, the managers express their sympathy for Homer’s concerns with a polite chuckle, telling him ‘we are from ze land of chocolate’. Instead of moving him on to more important topics, however, this phrase instead sends Homer into a reverie about the land of chocolate. In fairytale town where everything is made out of chocolate, he imagines himself frolicking with hopping Easter bunnies and taking monster bites out of a lamppost, fire hydrant and even a passing chocolate dog. As the pinnacle of happiness in this paradise where all chocolate is free, Homer’s unimaginative consumer imagination finally leads him to: a chocolate shop where everything is half-price.

As they regularly do, the Simpsons provide some of the more astute insights on contemporary society, and perhaps even more so than was intended. The cartoon Germans’ identification of their native land as the ‘land of chocolate’ is a case in point. Few three-dimensional Germans would make the same claim – which is not to say that they would not find their native chocolate superior to most US brands. While Germany does indeed have a long-established native chocolate industry, Americans’ associations of chocolate with Germany are mostly a case of mistaken identity. ‘German chocolate’ is actually a reference to ‘German’s Sweet Chocolate’, a sweetened bulk chocolate invented by the Englishman Samuel German in 1852 and still produced by the us firm Baker’s. Theconfusion arose when a recipe for a cake based around this chocolate and iced with coconut