From the mother's breast: chocolate ads gone awry

Know who that is? It's Heidi Klum, Victoria's Secret supermodel, television star, wife of Seal, mother of four children, charity supporter. I want to take at least one sentence to represent Heidi in all her varied selves, because the this post is going to quickly forget the fact that this woman spends at least part of her day changing diapers and running a million dollar industry, and become instead more interested in the social mechanisms by which she has created an entire industry of images around her body. The most recent of which stars chocolate.

Please don't think that I don't love Heidi Klum. Who doesn't? I haven't owned a television for like ten years, but most Thursday nights see me driving far across town to my friends' place on Capitol Hill to watch Project Runway. We enforce strict rules of silence during this hour of programming, so that we may all focus properly as the drama unfolds. We pay Heidi respect. But these photos of her make me think very seriously about what it means when we are asked to consume, along with images of people working hard at a craft (making clothes, modeling clothes, hosting television shows), images that utterly blur the distinction between subject and object, seller and thing, woman and chocolate.

On Thursday, I gave my annual guest lecture to an Intro to Women's Studies class at UW. In this lecture, I have students consider the fact that chocolate, as a tradable commodity, has both an economic and a social "life" - that is, it has a monetary value but also a social value - it means something to us that cannot be captured by a price.

To illustrate one way that this social value is created, I showed students a series of chocolate advertisements. All I did was google "chocolate ads", and what came up was a litany of images that not only featured women, but in effect made women into chocolate. Images whose message was, consume them, eat them - they are the same.

I want you to keep two things in mind when you are looking at these images. One, that in contemporary Western culture, chocolate is marketed mainly to women, thus raising the question of why use sexually charged images of women to sell something back to them? In a culture where we also assume, for the most part, that everyone is heterosexual, this seems counter-intuitive. And two, what the heck would happen if it was a man in these images instead? Would they be as attractive, sexually? Aesthetically? As effective as advertisements for a food?

I used a lot of images in my lecture; here I'll just give you the best of the sample.




Images from AdPunch.org

These two are contemporary ads from Brazil, made by a marketing firm to advertise dark and white chocolate. Even for an industry that commonly conflates the object being sold with the one selling it, these are incredibly explicit. There is NO distinction at all here between the chocolate and the woman. She is chocolate. She is made of chocolate. The boundary between who we are as persons with lives and loves and goals and talents, and this food that gives us momentary satisfaction - that has been erased, eroded, it no longer exists. We are literally what we eat.

Lest we think that chocolate is unimportant here, that this is just another feminist analysis of the use of the female form, let us remember that it would be very difficult to do the same thing with broccoli.

No, chocolate is also central. It is central because of its social value. It means something to us, beyond its function as a food. Love, romance, indulgence. Reward and comfort. It is our friend and companion and caretaker when we are in need.

This is not a new idea. This Cadbury ad, taken from a 1928 postcard, does the same thing, only in a more sexually muted fashion:


Image from Flickr

I love this ad. I love it because it is freaking hilarious. LOOK AT WHERE THE MILK IS COMING FROM. Directly from this woman's breasts! It is practically pouring out of her nipples.

On first glance, students on Thursday said that they saw a mom in a kitchen, preparing chocolate for her family, whom she loves. It gave them, they said, the sense that Mom made chocolate, although they knew this not to be really true.

When we looked more carefully, we could see that in fact the ad went further: that this woman was pouring out her own breast milk into the nice Cadbury bar, which she will then serve to her family - all of them: husband, kids, sisters, aunties, grandmama. No matter how old they are, everyone can partake of the lovely, milky bar of the breast. Talk about a comfort food.

When I sat down to write this morning, I thought I might do a post about Halloween. I read the morning chocolate news and the first thing that came up was a warning about keeping the dog away from Halloween candy. But then there were these pictures of Heidi Klum, and I could not take my eyes off them.

For they are the same kind of image, even though they are not advertisements per se. They are selling something - maybe Heidi's own image-dependent career/industry? Maybe the dream of women who want to be models or fashion designers or married to a humble rock star? Frankly, I don't know what was going through her mind when she made these pictures.


Heidi Klum images from TheHollywoodGossip.com

Except that in a culture that finds it so easy to conflate women and chocolate, these images seem as if they make sense. Women love chocolate. Men often admit to loving it too. We all love Heidi Klum. Put them all together - yum!

Only not yum. To me, all the images here have a certain creepiness about them, even though they are aesthetically also pleasing. The ads that show women made of melting chocolate recall a Dalian sense of impermanence and chaos, the 1920s ad the straight jacket of suburban housewifery.

The photos of Heidi Klum covered in chocolate are also nerve-wracking. It just looks so goddamn uncomfortable. I think, write, love, and eat chocolate every day of my life, and yet I never want to be as covered in chocolate as Heidi Klum is in these pictures. Chocolate in my hair, getting all over my contacts, running down my back, glommed up in my armpits and bellybutton? No thanks.

Because what on god's good earth can Heidi Klum do in such a state? Nothing at all, except be looked at, desired, available to be literally eaten. It is the ultimate in passivity and, to my mind, forces together two things that really ought to stay quite separate: chocolate, which we eat, and a woman, who can actually go out and do a whole lot else with her waking hours.

I personally would rather eat a piece of chocolate and not have to think about it running down someone else's body. Isn't chocolate good enough to stand on its own? Do we really need Heidi Klum to colonize chocolate for us to enjoy it? No, I think we do not. There is enough room in the world for both to be as nature meant them.

Chocolate Ethics 101

So, these days, everybody professes the desire to be an ethical consumer (well, everybody I know, but I live in Seattle). The way to put this into action, they believe, is to buy fair trade. And while I am not opposed to fair trade, it seems to me that in the case of chocolate, we have forgotten that it is only the most recent attempt in a long history of industrial ethics. For chocolate makers - the big ones, anyway - have always been concerned with making life good for people, beyond selling them a candy bar.

The big news this week is that US food giant Kraft made a bid to take over Cadbury company in Britain. Kraft’s $16.7 billion offer was rejected by Cadbury’s board; now it seems that US-based Hershey has the money to bid for its British rival as well.

Now, frankly, if I were the British consuming public, my biggest fear at this potential takeover would be of a dystopic future world in which all Cadbury chocolate tasted like a Hershey bar. (Look, I don’t hate Hershey. But, as everybody knows, all non-Americans think it tastes like puke.) So far, however, no one has expressed this fear.

Rather, the most compelling story I have seen is a video about what will happen to Bournville, the model town built by Cadbury’s Quaker founders, when scary, unethical foreigners come to take over. For the Cadbury family were an ethically minded, god-fearing lot who wanted to spread the love of not only chocolate, but of a healthier, happier, moral life.

This is the part of industry history that has been forgotten. The Cadburys were no doubt in business to make money; the profit motive was there, and this meant the usual ethical degradation when it came to certain safety and sourcing standards.

But there was also the explicit intention to bring the good life to people when most lived in squalor. In the 19th century, when the big chocolate makers were getting started, the industrial revolution was at its height. The British factory world was not an especially nice place: sickness and disease were rampant, streets were lined with raw sewage, air choked with the smoke of industrial stacks. Plumbing, lights, and running water were not the norm, for anybody.

In the middle of all this, Cadbury established Bournville Village, a place where its factory workers could live in tidy homes, surrounded by green grass and clean air. The town had sports fields, a school, parks, a lake, and swimming pools in an era when everyone else lived in filth. Today, Bournville remains a vibrant community, where residents live quiet, suburban lives, there is no public house to buy alcohol, and there is not a single take-out restaurant.

Cadbury did other ethical things, too. While it resisted for many years, the company eventually became the most significant chocolate maker to boycott cocoa produced in São Tomé, at the time the world’s biggest supplier, when it became clear that its plantations were run by slave labor. More recently, when I was in Ghana doing my PhD fieldwork, I saw signs dotting the rural areas, announcing water wells and pumps and other development projects to benefit cocoa farmers, all supported by Cadbury.

Today, the residents of Bournville are worried that if a foreign company takes over, particularly Kraft, the ethics of their beloved company and town will erode. Perhaps this is not unfounded. But should it be Hershey who makes the successful bid, however, I think they might have less to fear.

For Hershey built a model town, too. It’s called Hershey, and it’s in Pennsylvania, and the founding mission was much the same as for Bournville: build a place where factory workers could live in comfort and health, enjoying modern amenities and a community that adhered to strict rules of moral self-governance. Milton Hershey himself used to stroll through town, checking that there weren’t any riff-raff disturbing the tranquility with bad behavior, like public drunkenness.

When Hershey died, he left the majority shares of his company to Hershey Trust, guardian of the Milton Hershey School for orphans and under-privileged boys (today girls attend too). This means that the huge, billion-dollar Hershey company exists primarily to serve the interests of poor children; and indeed, their school lavishes more resources on each child than any other in the country.

All this is not to say that these ego-maniacal efforts to control worker morality is the ideal route to a better world for us all. My point is not that Cadbury and Hershey got it right in their attempts at making life good; far from it. I mean, I personally would not want to live in either Bourneville or Hershey. If I’m going to live in a place where I can never drink or order in, I want at the very least an unlimited supply of chocolate delivered to my doorstep every day. And I don’t think that’s part of the program.

Rather, my goal is to make it clear that the chocolate industry has had a significant history of ethical practice. Its giants did what they believed right at the time: in the squalor of industrialization, a clean and healthy home mattered. Beyond that, they tried to extend good self-governance and an ethics of care into their communities, farmer regions, and beyond.

Today’s attempts at ethical consumerism are not the trailblazing revolution that we like to believe. Rather, they are the most recent articulation of what should count as good practice, in what is at heart an exploitative industry. There is no black-and-white when it comes to ethics in chocolate. Even the big baddies have tried - and succeeded - to do some good.