by Sarah Moss
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. The confusion arose when a recipe for a cake based around this chocolate and iced with coconut 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 important meeting’. 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 caca
o 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 improving the situation and well-being of growers. At the same time, however, there is no natural relation between fair trading and fancy chocolate. One could just as easily use fairly-traded cacao to make Kit Kats or Tootsie Rolls as single-source grand cru, though the fact that the former are not high-status foods means that people would be unlikely to pay the additional amount of money that using fairly-traded cacao would demand. On the higher end, the increased concerns with origins are a double-edged sword for improving conditions in the industry. While they increase consciousness of where chocolate is grown, and several high-end manufacturers such as Amadei have made important efforts towards fair trading, the labelling and discussion surrounding the origins of ‘good chocolate’ often obscure rather than highlight the trade and labour conditions of production.
The black and white worlds of chocolate: dark, single-origin chocolates next to white chocolates with national scenes.
Besides fair trading, more serious issues with chocolate’s origins have begun to surface. Like their predecessors of 100 years before, recent journalistic investigations have revealed that slave and child labour is still alive in the cacao industry, particularly in West Africa. In 2001 two US congressmen sought to address this issue by working with chocolate firms to establish a ‘slave-free’ certification for chocolate. The Harkin-Engel Protocol, as it is called, set a target date of 1 July 2005 for industry to ‘develop and implement credible, mutually-acceptable, voluntary industry-wide standards of public certification ... that cocoa beans and their derivative product have been grown and/or processed without any of the worst forms of child labour.’ Shortly after the protocol was introduced, Dutch TV journalist Teun van de Keuken began researching the sourcing of chocolate for a consumer investigative programme, and attempting to find out from various major chocolate firms if they could guarantee that their chocolate was not produced by forced labour. This proved impossible. Noting that according to Dutch law, any form of participation in the slave trade, including purchasing its products, is punishable, van de Keuken bought a candy bar and walked to the next police station to turn himself in. What followed was a lengthy effort to gather evidence and witnesses to have himself prosecuted, so that Dutch authorities would be forced to take action more generally on the issue, and at that point, he began to raise awareness worldwide. In July 2005 the chocolate industry failed to meet the goals of the Harkin-Engel Protocol (and at the time of writing has still not done so), and three major firms, Cargill, Nestlé and Archer Daniels Midland, were sued by the International Labour Rights Forum. In a more personal response to the failure, Van de Keuken founded his own brand of chocolate, Tony’s Chocolonely, which proudly bears a ‘slave-free’ emblem on the label. While it is the only chocolate bar aimed specifically at raising awareness of coerced labour, Tony’s is not the only slave-free chocolate. According to most sources, the ‘fair trade’ certification on a bar of chocolate is a good indication of humane labour practices in addition to the prices that growers receive from manufacturers. In addition, cacao not from West Africa, while it may not be fairly traded, will probably not have involved coerced labour.
‘Good Chocolate’ vs ‘Bad Chocolate’
Besides providing insights into the (mistaken) mental geographies of chocolate, Homer Simpson’s romp through the ‘land of chocolate’ also portrays quite astutely the enduring polarity of chocolate as most of us encounter it in daily life: as a ubiquitous flavour that makes up an uneventful part of our food landscape, and as an expensive, exotic commodity sold in specialty shops. If anything, this polarity has become more entrenched in recent years, as manufacturers at a range of scales attempt to diversify and sell to more and more specialized consumers. However, as in Homer’s fantasy, the meanings surrounding these two different versions of chocolate intermingle more often than most stories about chocolate would have one believe.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, a number of high-end chocolatiers, with French firms Valrhona and Bonnat at the forefront, set out to re-work chocolate as a gourmet food for the luxury market. Since then, new forms of chocolate lore have entered into popular knowledge and new criteria for determining the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ chocolate have been established. Consciously modelled on the culture of wine-growing and tasting, chocolate joined a number of other foods, including coffee, olive oil, bourbon and beer, all of which have undergone similar revolutions in recent years. The new wisdom emphasizes a wide range of different flavours discernable in chocolate, knowledge of the unique characteristics of a number of species and growing regions for cacao, and above all a devotion to the chocolate in its purest form (along specific definitions of purity, which are central). This lore is laid out in relatively compact form in Chloé Doutre-Roussel’s 2005 book The Chocolate Connoisseur. In it, she provides readers with a wide range of knowledge (including the ‘taste map’ of the tongue, which was debunked by physiologists 30 years ago) to guide them through this ‘chocolate revolution .
In exploring the lore, one learns that ‘good chocolate’ is dark, serious, rooted, pure, authentic, rare, artisanal, expensive, generally Catholic European (French and Italian), and healthy. In the realm of fine chocolate, the emphasis on chocolate’s origins is driven by ideas of terroir adopted from viniculture. This is a trend that began in the mid-1980s with Bonnat’s single-estate bars and came into its own in the mid-1990s with bars like Lindt’s single country-of-origin chocolates and single plantation bars by a number of French firms. Much as chocolate connoisseurs in the 1700s insisted on high-quality Caracas criollo, connoisseurs of fine chocolate now distinguish between the flavours of cacao from Venezuela and Ecuador, but also Madagascar and Java, and individual plantations, such as Venezuela’s fabled Chuao plantation. These bars are known as grand cru (a term that not only embraces places, but also vintage year). As the Italian gourmet chocolatiers Amedei (who now own exclusive right to the Chuao plantation) describe their line:
Amedei’s single-estate grand cru bar from Venezuela’s famed Chuao estate.
The Cru originate from individual production areas and, just as the grapes that flourish under a particular sun and from a specific soil, they have a marked personality and a decisive flavour. They are the most immediate and ‘savage’ expression of cacao. The individual plantations of origin interpret the genetic diversity of the cacaos existing today, from the beans which best highlight the characteristics of each plant type, selected, cultivated and processed in accordance with strict discipline in the countries of origin.
These ideas of genetic and local particularity spill over into more romantic and touristic visions of chocolate as the essence of ‘savage’ realms. Elsewhere Alessio Tessieri of Amedei writes: ‘I feel the greatest, most beautiful sensations when I discover a virgin plantation, never visited by any westerner: I immediately think of how to transform it into a taste or an emotion to bring the perfume, and the atmosphere of that land to whomever tastes the chocolate.’
Producers of organic chocolates like the pioneering firm Green & Black’s have also long sought to label the origins of their chocolate as a means of transparency as well as to capture such ideas of terroir and tradition. Even the US giant Hershey has recently joined the new fashion for organic, si
ngle-source chocolate with its ‘Cacao reserve’ line. Following the labelling conventions of high-end chocolate, labels for new line, laid out in ‘portrait’ not ‘landscape’ format, list prominently the location and cocoa percentage (although among true connoisseurs, this latter knowledge is now peripheral). In contrast to these various single-source chocolates, the products of West Africa are generally considered poorer quality. Apart from its abundance in the global market, which seldom boosts the status of any food, the fact that West African cacao is more or less exclusively of the forastero variety is the main reason why some experts consider the region a black hole of taste. With that said, however, Bonnat features a Grand Cru from Ivory Coast, and Amedei offers a Grand Cru (albeit from Ecuador) that offers ‘a very rare example of “forester” of great aromatic impact and power’.
