by Sarah Moss
Chocolate’s association with milk of course strengthened its maternal connection with the nation. The best-known case in point is the association with Alpine landscapes and cows that came with the rise of Swiss chocolate manufacturing late in the nineteenth century. Though the expansion of Swiss chocolate was based on modern, technological processes, the images of unspoiled Alpine meadows embedded these products in supposedly ancient Swiss tradition. Such natural ‘homeland’ landscapes have long had feminine associations, but these were made explicit by the presence of milkmaids and placid cows. Similarly, a chocolate bar by the Belgian firm Callebaut from around the same time featured a ‘typical’ Low Countries milkmaid foregrounded on a scene of windmills and cows. These inward-turning visions of national landscapes nevertheless quickly became stereotypical marketing symbols. Peter’s (the inventors of milk chocolate) marketed their product in America as ‘high as the Alps in quality’, with an advertisement showing an Alpine hiker. The ad praised the chocolate’s ‘absolute cleanliness’ and also offered the illustrated booklet ‘An Ascent of the Matterhorn’ free with purchase. Eventually, any actual connection to Switzerland became superfluous. This can be seen most clearly in Swiss Miss, a brand of hot chocolate developed in America by a Sicilian family, which has been using the Alps and milkmaid theme to promote its ‘European-style’ chocolate since the 1950s.
The images of purity and health attached to chocolate were diminished somewhat by the rampant practices of adulteration that were common in the nineteenth-century food industry. Particularly after cocoa butter came into its own, this more expensive product was skimmed off and sold elsewhere, to be replaced in the final product by animal fats, oils or egg yolks, resulting in chocolate that went rancid quickly. Furthermore, a wider range of substances were added to create bulk and substance. Relatively harmless ingredients like potato starch, rice and pea flour and the husks of the cocoa beans were added, but less edible and downright toxic ingredients such as brick dust, red lead and vermilion also found their way into chocolate. In 1850 the British medical journal The Lancet began to test the purity of a range of newly industrialized products. Among the alarming discoveries was that just over half of their sample of chocolate contained red ochre from ground bricks.
The results of such revelations were, fortunately, laws outlawing such activities, most notably in Britain the Food and Drugs Act of 1860 and the Adulteration of Food Act in 1872. Over and above this, however, came an increased emphasis on ‘purity’ in chocolate. This was yet another way in which the focus on the manufacturer obscured the origin of the beans as the source of authenticity. While sources from early in the century emphasized the quality of ‘pure’ Caracas criollo, by the end of the century domestic manufacturers like Cadbury put themselves forward as symbols to vouch for the pure chocolateness of their products.
‘Blackening’ Chocolate –
Race, Exoticism and Slavery
Chocolate’s ‘whitening’ through associations with milk, childhood, national families and landscapes did not fully erase its ‘colouring’ as a colonial product: quite the contrary. Chocolate’s spread and transformation in the North Atlantic world in the nineteenth century was accompanied by profound transformations in the economics of cacao cultivation. As cacao began to spread throughout the tropical colonial world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, chocolate’s image, particularly in Europe, was also ‘blackened’ in a number of ways.
Particularly with the upheavals that were occurring in Latin American chocolate production, speculators looked for new places to grow cacao. Via imperial routes, cacao planting travelled to European holdings in Africa and particularly Dutch colonies in Indonesia. Almost from the very start of European exploration, plants began to circulate in what would become the colonial world (Mexican cacao seedlings were apparently brought to Indonesia as early as 1515), but in the nineteenth century it began to happen systematically. The pioneers were the Portuguese, who, just before their colony of Brazil gained independence, took forastero cuttings to their colony on the island of São Tomé, off the coast of West Africa, in 1819. Over the course of the intervening decades, cacao spread first through the other Portuguese holdings, including the neighbouring island of Príncipe and the Spanish Fernando Pó (now Bioko), and then onto the mainland and thence into the British, French and German holdings beyond. The late nineteenth-century boom in European chocolate consumption and the European nations’s ‘scramble for Africa’ were closely intertwined. In 1910, its peak year of production, tiny São Tomé was the largest single exporter of cacao in the world, to be decisively supplanted three years later by the booming British colony of the Gold Coast (now Ghana). These were literally the seeds for the present state of cacao production: particularly after disease destroyed vast numbers of cacao trees in Brazil in 1986. Top producer Côte d’Ivoire (which had no exports at all until 1904) and Ghana now account for 70 per cent of the world’s cacao.
There is a long history of child labour in cacao production. Youthful toilers on a lime and cocoa estate, Dominica.
This shift in chocolate economics did not go unnoticed among chocolate consumers. As one aspect of its absorption into national fantasies, chocolate became a lens through which Europeans could view their empires. Late colonial powers Germany and Belgium in particular emphasized the blackness of chocolate. Chocolate-covered cream confections became known as Negerküsse (‘negro kisses’) (a term borrowed, incidentally, from the French) and Mohrenkopfe (‘moor’s heads’), names which they carried until quite recently in both Germany and the Netherlands. The German brand Sarotti is symbolized by the ‘Sarotti Moor’, which remains to this day one of the most widely recognized brands in Germany. The figure, introduced in 1918 – not accidentally around the same time Germany lost its colonies – shows a black-skinned servant in Moorish robes. In earlier times the figure was also racially exaggerated with bulging eyes and large red lips. While the image made reference to the firm’s first residence in Berlin’s Mohrenstrasse (Moor street), its popularity had far more to do with Germany’s colonial longings and fantasies. As an interesting footnote, the ‘Moor’ was transformed in 2004 into Sarotti’s ‘magician of the senses’– given lighter skin and had his serving tray replaced by ‘magic’ stars – replacing racial fantasies about servile Africans with equally racialized fantasies about the sensual and magic East. Similarly, the Belgian chocolate manufacturer Charles Neuhaus lent the name Côte d’Or to his new chocolate firm after returning from a trip to the African territory (Gold Coast) in 1883 to source cacao for it. The resulting label for Côte d’Or chocolate featured a mishmash of exotic symbols of Africa: an elephant, a pyramid and a palm tree, only the last of which in any likelihood was actually to be found in West Africa. The company (now a division of Kraft Foods) still proudly displays these symbols, particularly the elephant, now as evidence of the ‘exotic experience’ and, paradoxically, the enduring tradition of their chocolate.
Map of the chocolate world, 1903. Ten years later, the bulk of production had moved to West Africa.
The Sarotti Moor.
While chocolate wrappers and advertisements associated the product to European consumers with fantasies of the exotic realms where cacao was cultivated, on occasions when the finished products arrived back in Africa (which is to this day relatively rare), they did so as the essence of metropolitan refinement and the civilizing influence of empire. A popular image from the German colonial adventure shows colonists making themselves ‘at home’ in Africa with well-known German products, notably Mumm sparkling wine and Stollwerck’s chocolates. In a less optimistic mood, an advert for Fry’s from around the turn of the twentieth century shows a crate of chocolate washed ashore on an African coast from a wrecked British ship (an ambiguous image at best, given Fry’s association with the Royal Navy), surrounded by dark-skinned natives marvelling at the new product. At ‘home’ as well, chocolate showed Europeans the benevolence of empire. The popular chocolate-banana drink Banani
a in France is advertised with a smiling Senegalese soldier exclaiming ‘Y’a bon’ (‘that good’) who at once embodies the ‘black power’ of chocolate and the benevolent, civilizing influence of empire.
‘Christmas in Cameroon’: Chocolate returns to Africa as a luxury treat for German colonists, alongside German sparkling wine.
Colonial fantasy was also repeatedly pierced by bitter reality. Slave labour, especially performed by Africans enslaved and transported across the Atlantic, had become a fundamental part of cacao cultivation over the course of the eighteenth century, particularly in the Caribbean and eastern side of South America. Opponents of the slave trade had long noted its connections with the chocolate industry, and Quaker industrialists such as Cadbury had long worked to eliminate it. Abolition was a long, slow, complicated process that continued throughout the century. While the slave trade was outlawed relatively early in the century, either dejure or de facto through British blockades and revolutionary strife, actual slavery was allowed to continue. Colombia ended slavery officially in 1851 and Venezuela (where, it will be recalled, landowners had rebelled in part to keep their slaves) in 1854. The Portuguese did not outlaw it until 1875. In any event, as we shall see, the official abolition of slavery did not necessarily mean an end. Laws were often ignored or new, legalized systems of labour coercion were devised. As it was, enslaved labour continued to produce most of the cacao in Brazil into the 1880s, and it continued even later in West Africa. In many ways, slavery was not so much removed from the cacao trade but multiply re-placed. In one way, this is literally the case. As the transatlantic slave trade slowly dried up over the course of the century, territories in West Africa looked to find a replacement ‘commodity’ to export, and in-demand cacao was a more than likely candidate.
Chocolate goes back to Africa. A Fry s poster.
Along with cacao, the Portuguese had moved their system of forced labour plantations from Brazil to their colonies in West Africa. Once the slave trade had been officially abolished, it was no longer viable across the Atlantic, but at its source in West Africa it was still functional because it was internationally invisible. Scandal rocked the chocolate industry in Britain in the early 1900s after British journalist Henry Woodd Nevinson travelled in 1905 to Portuguese colonies in São Tomé and Angola to investigate rumours that practices of slavery still existed. Cadbury, who had long been buying cacao from São Tomé, had been investigating the rumours but when Nevinson’s report – and photographs – were published first in Harper’s Monthly Magazine and then in his book A Modern Slavery, the firm was openly accused of knowingly participating in slavery. Following a 1908 editorial in the London Standard that accused Cadbury’s of hypocrisy for continuing to buy São Tomé cocoa, Cadbury Bros. sued for libel. In the ensuing trial, Cadbury argued that while it had been aware of labour abuses, its position as a purchaser of cocoa is what gave it any power at all to help improve conditions (lines of argument that would become familiar in arguments over divestment from South Africa much later in the century). The jury found in favour of Cadbury, but the publicity was far from all good, and the award of one farthing (a quarter of a penny) in damages hardly showed confidence in the firm’s altruism.
Banania poster,
What might be called a last, schizoid gasp of chocolate’s long nineteenth century is visible in a Dutch ad campaign from 1958. The advert begins with the standard admonition to mothers to feed their children ‘pure’ and ‘nutritious’ chocolate: ‘MOTHER, give them more than something tasty. Give them something nutritious at the same time ... Venz chocolate sprinkles. Then they get pure chocolate – full of easily digestible fats, proteins and calcium.’ Opposite the image of the product–complete with its picture of the happy child on the label – there is an image of Indonesian natives, gently and generously offering up their harvest of cacao pods. As usual, this advert covered up a more complex relationship. This vision of maternal/colonial benevolence came ironically – but probably not coincidentally – in the same year that the Indonesian government nationalized Dutch businesses and the Dutch were formally ejected from their former colony. As in so many other circumstances, chocolate was called in – symbolically at least – to smooth over and ‘sweeten’ bitter feelings.
4
The Chocolate Box
By the end of the Second World War, chocolate had acquired its familiar forms and most of its familiar associations. In the second half of the twentieth century chocolate has become ubiquitous in the Western world, an everyday purchase for millions of people. Particularly as firms try to come up with new ways of marketing this familiar product, the meanings and associations of chocolate have continued to twist and turn. While chocolate manufacture and consumption has spread globally, national styles and patterns of consumption have remained strong. The origins of chocolate, particularly its Latin American roots, which were first exoticized and then mostly erased over the course of the long nineteenth century, have returned on the tides of artisanal authenticity and concern over fair trading. To the extent it had ever disappeared, chocolate’s image as a decadent indulgence has resurfaced – with both positive and negative connotations – particularly in its associations with women.
Economically speaking, the main development since the end of the war has been increased globalization and consolidation of the chocolate industry. Because of the climate conditions it favours, cacao is still restricted to the parts of the tropical zone to which it had spread in the nineteenth century. The interruption of chocolate supply and demand caused by the Second World War was followed by the emergence of a larger global marketplace and increasingly powerful multinational firms that came to penetrate national markets. Four firms, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Barry Callebaut and Nestlé, now handle over half of the world’s cacao beans. Most of these cater to industry, and supply a large amount of chocolate couverture, which is melted and used as a component in making a wide range of chocolate confections. Furthermore, via mergers and acquisitions, most of the familiar firms that defined chocolate production and marketing 100 years ago are now brands or subsidiaries in major multinational corporations. US-based giant Kraft Foods, for example, now owns Suchard, Côte d’Or and Baker’s, among many others. Beyond these major industrial suppliers who go largely unnoticed by consumers, certain individual chocolate products like Mars bars are recognized the world over (even though they actually vary in form from country to country). Ironically, what most Americans recognize as one of their most quintessential national products, the chocolate chip, is most commonly associated with the Swiss giant Nestlé.
Confectionery on display in a shop.
The ‘globalization’ of chocolate is not always what it appears. Hershey’s chocolate, which many Americans still view as standard, has a slightly sour flavour that has never caught on in most places outside the US. When Britain joined what was then the European Community in 1973, its chocolate with high milk and vegetable fat content did not meet the criteria to be sold as chocolate, and names such as ‘household milk chocolate’ (stressing, as ever, connections with milk and domesticity) or even ‘vegelate’ were mooted. The controversy over British chocolate was only resolved in 2003, when the EU ruled that other countries were not allowed to label British chocolate as ‘chocolate substitute’ due to its vegetable fat content. Beyond these regional differences, there are also large portions of the world where chocolate is not the ubiquitous flavour or form it is in the European and anglophone world. In Trinidad, once home to some of Cadbury’s most important plantations, some natives still drink what they call ‘cocoa tea’: a drink made from chocolate press cake much like what was consumed throughout much of the nineteenth century. In Africa, where the majority of the 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 consumpti
on 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.