by Sarah Moss
Much talk of purity and authenticity is also centred around getting closer to the essence of the bean. One expression of this has been quite literal: several manufacturers now offer bars that contain bits of cocoa nib, so that if one tastes carefully, one can taste the unrefined product. This has also meant attempting to revive the once moribund varieties of criollo and trinitario chocolate, particularly in the Americas, but also in Madagascar. The relatively isolated Chuao plantation in Venezuela has become particularly well-known for its historic and apparently ‘pure’ beans. Nowhere is bean lore more obsessive, however, than when dealing with the ‘porcelana’, a rare white criollo found in Venezuela. As Amedei enthuse: ‘Porcelana is a cacao “criollo”. It means genetically pure. It is the “father” of all cocoa.’ Though almost certainly not intended, there are disturbing overtones in the discussions of the ‘genetic purity’ of this ‘white’ criollo – a term itself derived from notions of ‘pure white blood’ in people. Valrhona also wax rhapsodic about the white bean in describing their Porcelana del Pedregal, which is not a bar but a flower-shaped chocolate made from it:
To fully express the flavours ... it was necessary to associate them with a new shape and a new image. A fleeting sensation, but visible for the eye and discernible to the touch, a fragile ephemeral form reminding us that only one in a thousand flowers survives from the mass of blossom springing from the very trunk of the Porcelana trees; its frail petals are offered as a token of its authentic story.
Good chocolate is all about the authentic story. History plays an important role here, too, and like the mass manufacturers, most artisanal producers are keen to tell customers the history of their product. Unlike the histories of chocolate told by the major manufacturers, which are about discovery, innovation and corporate expansion (in short: success), the chocolate histories from connoisseurs are tales of preservation, rescue and redemption. Some of this focuses on the bean and the ‘essence’ of chocolate, which appear as things that were lost through years of mass manufacture and are now being restored to their original essence, flavour and native meaning. Some is to do with the craft of chocolate-making itself. Bonnat points to its artisanal tradition as ‘handed down from father to son’, while Doutre-Roussel points to the revival of older techniques and machinery in a lot of gourmet chocolate-making as essential to finding the essence of the chocolate. She argues that ‘using old machinery, a producer is more likely to treat the beans with the respect they deserve, coaxing as much flavour out of them as possible, allowing them some individuality in their texture.’ For all that they are new products, the message seems to be that they are actually older, more original, than their mass-produced counterparts.
‘Bad’ chocolate, in contrast, is everything that good chocolate is not: sweet, light, impure, placeless, mass-produced, cheap, fattening, addictive. It is a cheap imitation of good chocolate, never mind the fact that ‘bad’ chocolate has been around longer. Whilst stressing the importance of developing one’s own ‘chocolate profile’ derived from an exploration of one’s own tastes, Doutre-Roussel spends most of her book telling readers what they should not like. She is also quite clear about where the blame for the persistence of poor-quality chocolate lies. ‘If customers enjoy and keep on buying chocolate that I would consider to be of inferior quality, then there is little incentive for the melters of couverture to invest in a more expensive chocolate.’ She is also careful, however, to help readers avoid the ultimate bourgeois sin of confusing price with quality. Good chocolate is expensive, but not all expensive chocolate is good. Just like in Brillat-Savarin’s discussions of chocolate from nearly 200 years before, what is necessary on the part of the ‘good’ consumer of chocolate (who is of course ideally the consumer of ‘good’ chocolate) is the mental discipline of amassing the skills and knowledge to appreciate it, as well as the bodily discipline of not overindulging. The ‘good’ consumer of chocolate is passionate: driven by an intellectual and spiritual quest for purity, novelty and innovation. The ‘bad’ consumer is addicted: driven by bodily urges or cravings and, in reacting to these, seduced by manufacturers into accepting something that is not really chocolate.
Current health wisdom has underlined differences between good and bad chocolate. As chemists and nutritionists try to get behind the complex make-up of chocolate, ‘the darker the better’ is the growing consensus: cacao’s nutritious essence, as opposed to chocolate’s thick bulky substance, becomes the key factor in determining what is healthy about it. For several years now, chocolate’s mineral content has been believed to be beneficial to women. In her 1995 book Why Women Need Chocolate, nutritionist Debra Waterhouse argues that women crave chocolate in response to a genuine bodily need for these minerals. At the same time, however, the author also stresses that proper exercise and bodily discipline will also reduce cravings for the bad things in chocolate. The current interest in the health benefits of antioxidants has also fuelled chocolate’s rehabilitation as a healthy food. These substances, which have been highlighted for their ability to help prevent cell damage, are found in green tea, red wine and above all in dark chocolate. Côte d’Or now features a separate section of their website devoted to antioxidants, as well as an 86 percent bar specifically marketed to meet the need. Besides these health benefits, wisdom regarding chocolate’s various ill effects is also changing. In the same breath as they debunk the myth of chocolate’s aphrodisiac qualities, good chocolate proponents are also keen to point out that other deleterious effects of chocolate, such as its fattening and addictive properties, are not really due to the substance itself, but to its various additives. As Doutre-Roussel puts the matter succinctly: ‘sugar is the evil in chocolate’. This ‘evil’ is necessary to keep the chocolate from being inedible, to be sure, and, as we shall see, ‘evil’ seems to be a necessary ingredient in enjoying chocolate for many people as well.
Besides embracing the antioxidants in ‘good’ chocolate, manufacturers are seeking to help combat the effects of ‘bad’ chocolate, while of course still selling it. Firms in Britain, most notably Cadbury Schweppes and Mars, launched in 2006 the ‘Be Treatwise’ campaign (www.betreatwise.org.uk). The campaign involves placing a ‘Be Treatwise’ reminder on the front of packets, and basic nutrition information on the back, including recommended daily amounts and suggesting daily exercise to compensate for treats. It is worth noting that judging from its imagery and layout, the campaign is aimed largely at women, both as primary consumers and as those making nutritional choices for children. They seem to be the ones judged most likely to stray from the path of righteousness when it comes to chocolate. Again, as we shall see, this is also part of what chocolate seems to be about.
Apparently, only women need to worry about overindulging in chocolate: a recent ad campaign in Britain.
Women, Indulgence and Sex:
Beyond Good and Evil?
Friedrich Nietzsche famously pointed to the distinction to be made between the different opposites of ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘evil’. While ‘bad’ is an aesthetic value denoting ugliness or poor quality, ‘evil’ is a moral value. He argues that upon closer inspection, what we call ‘evil’ is often aesthetically good precisely because it is able heroically to break through the bounds that morality places on beauty. Much of the lore surrounding high-end chocolate equates the aesthetic goodness of ‘real’ chocolate with certain notions of moral goodness based around purity and discipline. While it pleases the senses, ‘good’ chocolate does not make you crave sex or get fat or do anything else that would imply losing control of your body. Most popular discussions of chocolate do not compete for this moral high ground, however. Instead, chocolates across the board tend to invoke the ‘evil’ nature of chocolate as its best quality. Perhaps ironically, given Nietzsche’s reputation as a misogynist, this applies particularly to the way chocolate is marketed to women.
Ideas of chocolate as a dark, seductive power are of course long-standing, and have been through a number of transformations. Rowntr
ee’s Black Magic chocolates, which first appeared in 1933, invoked this dark power explicitly. Advertising from the 1930s through the 1950s sold the chocolates as an exquisite treat well-suited for men to use in wooing upper-class women. Such upper-class fantasies generated by a relatively inexpensive product of course also spoke to the class and economic uncertainties of their era. But while some of the ‘dark power’ was clearly class and money, sex was also a key implication and desired outcome. In one advert from 1934, a woman writes of the chocolates she has received from her beau: ‘We silly creatures are always so thrilled when a man thinks us worth the very best. Imagine it, a big box of these new Black Magic chocolates on my dressing table. My dear, each choc’s an orgy!’
In more recent years, chocolate advertising has eliminated the middleman, as it were, and marketed chocolate directly to women for their own pleasure. A recent trade publication argues that specialized addresses to women (alongside fair trading) represent one of the fastest-growing trends in chocolate marketing. Rebranding chocolate as healthy and not incompatible with keeping one’s figure is one element of this. But another side is also clearly visible. Indulgence in chocolate is portrayed as a means of liberation and self-satisfaction. Women who buy chocolate for themselves, it would seem, have moved beyond good and evil. The US firm Seattle Chocolates has recently produced a new line of ‘Chick Chocolates’ aimed at women who pursue their own pleasure. According to the firm, these chocolates ‘satisfy a woman’s intense sweet craving while providing a good giggle. In a stylish box reminiscent of cosmetic packaging, Chick is portable and portion-controlled, with three individually wrapped pieces in each box.’ Presumably this ‘portion control’ is what leaves women free to eat such chocolates ‘not slowly, but all by yourself, selfishly, because you’d be crazy not to’. Chocolate designers Bloomsberry have also embraced feminine self-indulgence as a key sales line. Their packaging designs dress up chocolate bars (all of which are actually the same variety of either milk or dark chocolate) to resemble other women’s products, such as Beauty Bar, which looks like a fancy soap wrapper, or Girth Control (‘Helps you avoid “thinking about it” for 15 minutes’), which resembles a pharmaceutical box. Women’s sense of power is appealed to through bars that label chocolate as Broomstick Fuel (referring to witches, not household chores) or, more traditionally, through the Marital Bliss bar, with a decidedly skewed ‘50–50’ apportion of the chocolate into ‘his’ and ‘hers’.
Fantasies of upper-class romance: Rowntree’s Black Magic chocolates advert from 1937.
After Eight chocolates advertisement.
One of the most common motifs in chocolate advertisement is the woman on the sofa, enjoying the solitary pleasure of chocolate, such as in a recent ad by Côte d’Or. The woman lies supine on the couch, sharing neither couch nor chocolate nor fantasy, her book draped below waist level to suggest which part of her it appeals to, where the shadow of the Côte d’Or elephant also falls. In some ways, these women can be read as direct descendents of the women portrayed in the eighteenth century, languidly sipping chocolate in their boudoirs while consuming similarly questionable fiction. Unlike her counterpart of three centuries ago, for whom chocolate was evidence of a general state of luxury, the present-day woman on the sofa seems to be transforming her domestic surroundings into something luxurious and decadent, and/or escaping from them entirely by eating chocolate. Worryingly, a woman being idle in the domestic sphere still seems vaguely decadent. Over and above this, however, it is notable how ideas of ‘good’ chocolate’s ‘darkness’, luxury and exoticism are still present here. The difference is that here it is a bodily indulgence, something that satisfies a bodily urge rather than an aesthetic quest.
Because chocolate often represents women’s sexuality, it also appears in popular culture as a replacement for sex. Thanks to the wonder of the internet, and friends who forward such messages, most of us are by now probably familiar with at least ten reasons why chocolate is better than men, or better than sex (they seem to amount to roughly the same thing). Most of the reasons have little to do with any quality of chocolate beyond the fact that it tastes good and is inanimate, thus lacking any will or desire of its own. Essentially, such lists trot out a series of clichés about the relative amounts of pleasure men and women experience in heterosexual sex. Chocolate rates in particular as a superior oral pleasure. In seeming confirmation of these pieces of folk wisdom, a 2007 study – sponsored by food manufacturers and using a new brand of dark chocolate as test object – found that chocolate was more physically stimulating than kissing one’s partner passionately. Without dismissing the scientific value of the results (though it is questionable which science is their main beneficiary), the fact that the study was conducted at all says much about the place of chocolate in our lives and how we relate it to sex and bodily pleasure.
Return of the Catholic connection? Chocolat, 2000.
Popular portrayals of chocolate consumption are not merely about liberation and women taking charge of their own pleasure, but also quite clearly about transgressive, sinful pleasures. Writing and adverts for chocolate are filled with words such as ‘sin’, ‘temptation’ and ‘wickedness’. In this regard, it seems that chocolate’s associations with Catholicism have returned in full force, but with new meaning, as in the French Suchard ad that stated simply: ‘It is a test sent to us by the Lord.’ The recent film Chocolat, based on the novel of the same name by Joanne Harris, also brings chocolate and Catholicism into the same frame, but as polar opposites rather than the close associates they had been in past times. In the film, chocolate does not appear as part of the cycle of sin, confession and reconciliation (and renewed sinning), but instead the church attempts to stamp out chocolate altogether as a sensual pleasure – an attitude largely associated in our world with Protestantism. Most blatant is ice cream manufacturer Wall’s ‘7 Deadly Sins’ line of Magnum ice cream bars, which are, again, marketed entirely to women. Besides ‘lust’, which is made up of pink ‘strawberry flavoured chocolate’, the fold also includes a dark chocolate ‘gluttony’ and a predictably green (pistachio) ‘jealousy’. But in the adverts for the Magnum bars, as in much chocolate advertising, the idea is not so much that sex is sin, but more generally that sinning is sexy. The ‘sin’, to the extent it is identified at all, is indulging in a sensual pleasure that might make one fat – though one would never know it from the women in the adverts. In this light, the ‘Be Treatwise’ campaign’s suggested 30 minutes of exercise per treat also smacks distinctly of doing penance.
It must be said that for all they talk about sex, sin and exoticism, adverts for chocolate are ultimately tame in their suggestions. Quite apart from the fact that they sell a ‘forbidden fruit’ that is available cheaply anywhere, they are generally ‘vanilla’ in their sexual flavourings, and if anything seem to be struggling to keep up with even the mainstream values and experiences of chocolate consumers. Given the generally widespread visibility of gay characters in popular culture, for example, they do not seem to register on the chocolate horizon (an exception is the Magic Fairy bar –‘one poof and it’s all gone’– by Bloomsberry). Chocolate instead appears as a way of practicing safe sin. Especially with their emphasis on chocolate as an escapist pleasure, the message of a number of chocolate adverts seems to be that in every woman beats the heart of Emma Bovary, but that Rodolphe Lindt’s creation is a safer (and profitable) stand-in for any would-be Rodolphe.
Marketing chocolate to men: Nestlé’s (formerly Rowntree’s) Yorkie bar.
While chocolate is increasingly marketed to women as satisfying sensual or sexual appetites, to men it is still marketed mainly as it was in adverts for cocoa in the nineteenth century, satisfying a simple bodily appetite: a ‘manly’ hunger for food. Rowntree’s (and now Nestlé’s) Yorkie bar is the iconic case in point. Since its appearance in 1976, the bar has always been marketed to men, until recently drawing on US Marlboro-man type images of rugged and independent masculinity, such as truck drivers.
Real men do not eat chocolate on sofas (and we darkly suspect that men who nibble it whilst writing cultural history books at their computers are barred from the club as well). In the 1990s, this acquired a more tongue-in-cheek aspect in adverts about an escaped convict, who was considered especially resourceful and dangerous because he had a Yorkie bar. Eating a Yorkie bar had become a manly act in itself. In 2001 Yorkie adverts finally cut to the chase with the slogan ‘It’s not for girls.’ Besides the humour in Yorkie’s embrace of the schoolyard-style claim – which Nestlé’s web-site assures us ‘resonates with today’s British male’ – the campaign claims to address men’s sense of marginalization. ‘In today’s society, there aren’t many things that a man can look at and say that’s for him.’ Those watching adverts during sporting events, of which Yorkie sponsors a number, might be baffled at this claim, but the main thrust of the adverts is the bar’s power as a ‘hunger buster’. Ironically, it is in selling chocolate to men, not to women, that size matters: ‘With five solid chunks of chocolate, it’s a man-sized eat!’ In the land of chocolate, only women get fat: men just get hungry.