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

and pecan was mistakenly printed in a Dallas, Texas newspaper in 1957 as ‘German chocolate cake’. The confection has had Teutonic associations in the us ever since, and ‘German chocolate’ now suggests a higher or richer quality of chocolate in common us parlance. The Alps-and-lederhosen imagery surrounding much Swiss chocolate, combined with Americans’ stereotypically vague sense of geography, has done the rest.

Homer’s fantasy land also does not come completely out of the blue. In keeping with his childlike character, it resembles candy land realms of children’s literature, though without the darker edges that one finds in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or in ‘Hansel and Gretel’. But as manufacturers try to find new ways of marketing chocolate to adults, they also find increasing recourse to exotic, mythical utopias. When Nestlé produced its first white chocolate bar for the American market in the 1980s, its adverts invoked the pastel paradises of Maxfield Parrish, filled with mountains, pools and marble, all in delicate pale shades. Like Sarotti’s new ‘magician of the senses’ described in the last chapter, many of these exotic utopias build on the images of the tropical landscapes that have long been used to advertise chocolate. US viewers of Saturday morning TV cartoons might remember the Tusk, the chocolate elephant that advertised Kellogg’s Cocoa Krispies cereal in the 1970s and ’80s, or any of a number of jungle-themed mascots for the cereal before or since (ironically, another elephant advertised the chocolatey cereal in Latin America later on). Côte d’Or’s website currently features a television advert in which one zooms, as if in a helicopter, through a fantasy African landscape made entirely of chocolate. Elephants, dancing natives and long rivers of chocolate cross this chocolate savannah as ‘native’ drums beat in the background.

Still from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 2005.

Chocolate origins as tourist fantasy: Trinidad on a booklet cover issued by Cadbury’s in 1927.

These frequent visions of exotic or mythical realms go strangely hand-in-hand with a greater awareness of the actual origins and history of chocolate. The websites of most chocolate manufacturers contain a short piece on ‘the story of chocolate’ which outlines basics about where chocolate was found as well as how it is manufactured. At the Côte d’Or factory in Halle, Belgium, for example, there opened in 1996 a ‘chocolate temple’ where visitors are led on a tour of a mock-up of a Toltec temple and Spanish galleon, as well as a chocolate factory from the early 1900s – oddly without ‘stopping’ in Africa, from where the bulk of the imagery, as well as the cacao, of the brand comes. While many of these stories speak of the exotic lands and ancient cultures of cacao production, they normally have very little to say about the lives and cultures of the people who produce cacao in the present. The New Zealand-based ‘chocolate designers’ Bloomsberry embrace this view of globalized geography in typically hip (and ultimately cynical) terms. They announce cheerily that ‘[L]ucky for us, the cacao tree only grows in very hot tropical climates where it is consistently warm and very humid (and with great beaches)’ but describe harvesting as ‘very hot, dusty physical work that unfortunately we were unable to assist with as we were urgently summoned back to our air-conditioned head office for an importantmeeting’. It is thus perhaps no surprise that their ‘100% Guilt-free’ brand chocolate bar cites everything from its recycled paper wrapper to a lack of animal testing, but has nothing to say about conditions of cacao workers.

This renewed emphasis on the cacao source, however partial, has by no means eliminated national associations of chocolate. The global expansion of chocolate trade has made certain national associations, most notably Switzerland, Belgium and France, into important parts of chocolate’s branding. Now more than ever, food products including chocolate need to be identifiably from somewhere – whether that somewhere is fact or fiction. Thus the US foods giant ConAgra Foods has recently intensified the ‘Swiss-ness’ in the packaging of its Swiss Miss brand (which, it will be recalled, was a brand started by an Italian-American in the US) with deeper colours and an emphasized Alpine landscape on its packaging.

Chocolate as fantasy world: ‘Chocolate temple’ from a German treatise in practical (!) confectionery-making.

Patrick Roger, Harold, sculpture in chocolate of a black planter.

As chocolatiers make their way through global commerce channels, ‘local’ products also begin to enter new hybrid contexts. Again, geographical fantasies play an important part. Recently, a Dutch franchise has begun marketing ice-cream and chocolates under the improbable sounding name of Australian. While the firm has no actual connection with Australia whatsoever, their chocolates are stencilled with vaguely ‘Aboriginal’ designs. In 2003 this drew sharp protest from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, who felt that the company’s use of such symbolism amounted to cultural theft of their sacred symbols. The Australian company argued that the designs were not Aboriginal symbols, but rather made by a Dutch artist ‘inspired by’ Aboriginal art. Nevertheless, the firm agreed in the end to help support the Aboriginal communities, and thus, at last, a link with the place was formed in retrospect. Ironically, this was around the same time that northern Australia actually was developing its own local cacao cultivation and chocolate production.

The lands associated with cacao growing have also come further into popular consciousness of chocolate with the increasing scrutiny on global trade inequality. Fairly traded chocolate is one of the fastest-growing segments of the current chocolate market. The move towards fairly-traded chocolate has long been associated with the more expensive, though not highest, end of chocolate. Fair trading’s emphasis on transparent sourcing and direct dealings with local growers certainly go hand-in-hand with the notions of purity and authenticity of origin that accompany most high-status foods. Such associations have proven a very effective means of establishing a solid and growing market niche for fairly traded chocolate among aficionados of high grade chocolate. The expansion of this niche has contributed to