Chocolate Temptation

“- Why is there no organization such as Chocolate Anonymous?

  - Because no one wants to quit.”

I had difficult time to choose what to write about. I tend to be too serious in my previous blogs, too heavy and almost revolutionary. Too much strain on me (and maybe on you too)! So I thought, I need something light to write about, something pleasurable. And than I heard this commercial on TV “…it is sooo light and fluffy with just the right amount of chocolate…” I knew right away – I am writing about chocolate. I love chocolate and I had a serious craving in the moment.

First thought was – I don’t even need to write anything, I can just display chocolate advertising pictures and videos, put some extracts from books about chocolate and it would be self-explanatory (tempting thought of an overtired and exhausted college nontraditional student). But my inner voice told me it would be almost cheating. And here I am, researching everything and anything possible about chocolate (and as always I generate so much information, that I don’t know what to choose and where to start).

Some say it’s a staple food. Others say if chocolate is not in heaven they don’t want to go. Some call it a healing herb and for others it is linked to the power and status. A closer look reveals that chocolate is not just a food (there is even debate on that – is chocolate a food or drug) but a whole empire with accompanying social characteristics – there is stratification, inequality, power relations, gendered roles and gendered media marketing, oppression and slave labor (good luck on escaping serious topics!). There are books and movies about chocolate, blogs, articles and scientific research, dedicated fans and even chocoholics. I even found an annual West Coast Chocolate Festival. There is a whole world of chocolate out there. Chocolateland! Do you know that they’re building the first chocolate theme park in Amsterdam?

It would be too ambitious to even try to tackle with all the social problems of this magic land, so I decided to look at how chocolate is presented as the symbol of sexuality (am I trying to merge two of my classes here – gender studies and sociology of food? Maybe! J )

In the book entitled Better Than Sex: Chocolate Principles to Live By, British author Theresa Cheung states that it was her long-standing “love affair with chocolate” that prompted her to write this little pocket-size guide to better living through chocolate —“without feeling guilty.” According to her “a massive 60 percent of women would rather have a one-to-one with a chocolate bar than have sex!” The intimate connection between women and chocolate has long been recognized.  Richard Barber’s book Chocolate Sex: A Naughty Little Book begins by stating: Women lust after chocolate.  Their desire for it is overpowering; no matter how hard a woman tries to restrain herself with visions of tight black dresses or tiny bikinis, she knows in her heart she will ultimately succumb to chocolate’s seductive call.

There is a category of food labeled as comfort food, and chocolate is identified as being the most craved for. The term “comfort food” first was used in 1977 in Webster’s dictionary and refers to food consumed to reach some level of enhanced emotional state. According to the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America comfort food consumption has been seen as a reaction to emotional stress, and therefore, as a key contributor to the epidemic of obesity in the United States. Laurette Dube’s research showed that consumption of comfort food is triggered in men by positive emotions, and by negative ones in women. (How interesting – men eat chocolate when they are happy and we eat when we feel bad? If we follow this line of thought than if women eat more chocolate than men, it means that women are generally in a negative mood all the time. And if men eat chocolate when they have positive emotions, and they don’t crave chocolate as much as women, does it mean that men are in negative mood too? Oh, my – I am really confused here J )

In the book “Chocolate: a healthy passion", Shara Aaton and Monica Bearden compare men’s and women’s chocolate cravings. They say,  both men and women enjoy chocolate, though women tend to be more vocal in their “needing” chocolate (p.165). Eighty-five percent of men and 86% of women claimed to give in to their craving whereas only 57%  of women reported a positive affect after their indulgence. Interesting, why do women feel guilty after eating chocolate? See, we eat chocolate to feel better and instead we feel guilty about it?

A modern feminist philosopher, Susan Bordo in her article, “Hunger as Ideology,” talks about dessert advertisements. In the Victorian era, the portrayal of women eating and demonstrating sensuous surrender to rich, exciting food was considered a taboo. Victorians had conduct manuals that educated elite women on how to eat in a feminine way. Display of any desire for food or participating indulgence and overeating was forbidden. According to Bordo modern women violate this taboo by seeking emotional satisfaction, intensity, love, and excitement from the food they consume (Fahim).

The consumption of a sweet food high in fat is naturally taboo for women and presumably the idea of  “sinfulness” comes from here. To overcome women’s hesitation, marketers and advertisers had to be creative. Susan Bordo believes that advertisers have replaced this food taboo with a sexual one. They have turned chocolate into a sexual, self-indulgent, private experience that invokes a taboo similar to that of masturbation. (I hesitated for a moment here – I guess I have taboo on using proper sexual terminology). The consequence is that now when a woman feels the urge to eat chocolate, which she knows will damage her figure, she is already equipped with an inner-response to reason with her moment of self-restraint: she believes that chocolate consumption represents and enhances her femininity via satisfying her sexuality. This precisely contradicts her knowledge that chocolate will harm her feminine appeal (Fahim).

Bordo argued that “advertisers are aware of women’s insecurity about their bodies; therefore, many advertisements aimed at women portray the ideal female body. The women who advertise for chocolate are generally slender, confident, upbeat and sexy individuals who appear as though they do not eat that is high in fat.” As a rule, chocolate commercials are narrated by a woman with a smooth sensual voice and ends with a beautiful woman eating a piece of chocolate very sensually. These advertisements are manipulations of reality all in order to sell a product.

Oh, I really should stop writing and get some chocolate. As a good consumer, trained and manipulated properly, I believe that I will feel (not necessarily look) more feminine and desirable. It’s too much temptation to handle. It will be a sweet surrender.

But before I go, here is some more dessert for you - enjoy!

CHOCOLATE TONGUE TWISTER: A CHEEKY CHIMP CHUCKED CHEAP CHOCOLATE CHIPS IN THE CHEAP CHOCOLATE CHIP SHOP.

References:

Aaron, S., Bearden, M. (2008). Chocolate: A Healthy Passion. NY Prometheus Books.

Barber, R. (1994) Chocolate Sex: naughty little book.Warner Books.
Cheung, T. (2005). Better than sex: Chocolate pronciples to live by. Conari Press

Fahim Jamal (2010). Beyond Cravings: Gender and Class desires in chocolate marketing. Sociology at Occidental College Scholar.

Nutter Katleen. Chick Chocolates?
http://www.londonfoodfilmfiesta.co.uk/Artmai~1/Chic.htm

Photoes and Videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzOchsY4RhQ

http://hubpages.com/hub/amsterdam-sex-drugs-and-chocolate

http://whatscookingamerica.net/Cake/MoltenChocolate.htm

http://humanbodyart.blogspot.com/2008/11/chocolate-body-art-paintings-in-sexy.html


 

Eating is a political act

“We’ve got to live in the real world. If we don’t like the world we’re living in, change it. And if we can’t change it, we change ourselves. We can do something” – Nikki Giovanni

I love to eat. I love to cook. I love to entertain my friends around a table full of delicious food. But I never thought that it could be a political act. I never thought that “each trip to buy food is really a visit to the polling place, and everyday we each have dozens of votes to cast for the foods we buy and dozens of the polling places where we can vote, from grocery stores to farmers’ markets” (Hamilton, p.22). Who knew that by the simple act of eating we become involved in not only local, but also in global politics.

Looking back I am wondering – is ignorance really bliss? Is it right that “what you don’t know cannot hurt you”? I now know that I will never be able to look at food in same way as I did before. Now I know that by supporting the existing food industry, I am “helping to create a homogenized international culture that sociologist Benjamin R. Barber has labeled “McWorld” (Schlosser, p.229). I don’t want to be part of the world’s McDonaldization.

The Indian philosopher, environmental activist, eco feminist, and author of several books Vandana Shiva writes, “What we are seeing is the emergence of food totalitarianism, in which a handful of corporations control the entire food chain and destroy alternatives so that people do not have access to diverse, safe foods produced ecologically.” Pretty scary word – totalitarianism. For most of us this word refers to images of a dictatorship, but according to Robert Conquest, a well-known writer and researcher of the Soviet Union, totalitarianism is a political system where the state, usually under the control of a single political person, faction, or class, recognizes no limits to its authority and attempts to regulate every aspect of public life wherever possible.

For Vandana Shiva, food totalitarianism is “an authoritarian system that takes away my freedom to grow quality food.” Totalitarianism is the way in which international corporations and trade organizations reinforce their treaties on to countries. In her interview to CorpWatch (the organization which investigates and exposes corporate violations of human rights, environmental crimes, fraud and corruption around the world),  she describes how the agricultural agreement, crafted by Vargill and a US delegation, was “sold” to the world with the promise that it would remove subsidies. “But the subsidies for corporations like Cargill have doubled in the US since the closure of the Uruguay round in the last 5 years. Rich countries are subsidizing agribusiness by up to $343 billion a year. While in a country like India, agriculture is negatively subsidized up to minus 23 million dollars a year. This is not about competition. This is about monopolies.”

                         

Isn’t it hypocrisy on the part of these institutions (WTO, IMF, World Bank) to announce that their sole mission is to promote democracy, eliminate hunger and poverty, support industrialization and development of nations? “In India we are being forced to import meat and waste from slaughter houses. We are being forced to import wheat, sorghum and milk, which we produce in abundant quantities. And those imports are destroying our markets, pushing our farmers into suicide. It is a system that is worse than any dictatorship that we are familiar with.” (Shiva).

The 11^th principle of The Earth Charter states “Require multinational corporations and international financial organizations to act transparently in the public good, and hold them accountable for the consequences of their activities.” In her interview with CorpWatch  Vandana Shiva explains why its taken so long for citizens of the United States to recognize how the food industry is manipulating their rights - “The regulatory agencies that should have been controlling Monsanto, that should have been holding Cargill to account, were actually held captive by these corporations. And on behalf of these corporations, the regulatory agencies in the United States have lied to the American public.”

I have to confess – I never thought about these issues before. It is not a topic I would research and read about. Maybe this is one reason that I feel so embarrassed now for my ignorance and I would say even arrogance. People and nations are exploited in our name, and we don’t even think about it. Why in the world we don’t think about this? Maybe because it didn’t happen overnight. Mostly it was and is unnoticeable by the general public.

They say that if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will leap out right away to escape the danger. But, if you put a frog in a kettle that is filled with water that is cool and pleasant,
and then you gradually heat the kettle until it starts boiling, the frog will not become aware of the threat until it is too late.

German philosopher, Karl Jaspers once said,  “It is not easy to see through totalitarianism. It is like machinery that starts itself while its very operations often fail to grasp what they are already putting into effect… To speak in mythical terms, it seems like a soullness, daemonic something which seizes everybody – those who drift into it blindly as well as those who half-knowingly bring it about” (Jaspers).  And maybe we don’t see it because we don’t want to. Or maybe we don’t see it because we are masterfully manipulated. Any totalitarianism is built on propaganda and food totalitarianism is no exception. We just call it advertising and consider it an organic and necessary part of the capitalist economic system. In reality we are methodically deprived of our rights.

There was a story in Time magazine about a man who had been pulled over by the state police in Michigan, accused of using his pickup truck for the transporting illegal cargo. Do you want to guess what was in his truck? “This was the culmination of a string operation that resulted in seizure of the cargo. But this was no ordinary drug bust; the driver of the mud-splattered pickup truck was a dairy farmer dealing in raw milk” (Wright & Middeldorf, p. 1). Raw milk!!! Are you kidding me? My first thoughts – why is it illegal to sell raw milk? Why can’t I buy it? Who decided? Hm… and who is benefiting from this policy? 

It’s pretty obvious that the beneficiaries of this policy are not diary farmers or we – the costumers. Beneficiaries are big corporations who have monopolized food production and distribution. But look how they camouflage their interests and convince us that it’s “in our own interest” to delegate all of our rights to them. In regard to raw milk, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) states that unpasteurized milk contains E.coli, salmonella, and listeria – dangerous to our health. See, it’s not about corporations, it’s about us. They have our best interests at heart.

When I was first introduced to the western democratic model (on international training for non-profit organizations) I was told that the only healthy model is the collaboration and cooperation of three sectors – governmental, business and civic, or the so called third sector. To function productively and for everybody’s benefit, these sectors should be interdependent but not interchangeable. What I see now is that government and business sectors are totally merged and power is not distributed equally among all players. We delegated all our rights and responsibilities to them. The only way to gain power back is to admit that we don’t really have a democracy, (even though we like to believe that we do) but that we have, according to Kevin Phillips, a plutocracy in which there is a “fusion of money and government.”

Go to any supermarket and you will see about 30,000 different items. The first impression is that we have abundant choices, but in reality there are only a handful of companies who are branding almost identical products and creating an illusion of variety. In the book Hope’s Edge Frances Moore Lappe and her daughter Anna Lappe, make the point that only 138 people – 117 men and 21 women – are in charge of the decision making boards of these companies. “Rather than coming to us from thousands of different farmers producing different local varieties, these products have been globally standardized and selected for maximum profit by just a few powerful executives” writes Brian Halweil in his essay Food Democracy.

Going back to the frog fable, I can see that our ignorance on where food comes from, and how it’s produced and distributed, allows us to feel comfortable. We don’t notice how the water is getting hotter and hotter. Because we see only a little piece of the big picture, it’s easier to manipulate us. We need to step back, connect the dots, and start acting. In the Stolen Harvest Shiva talks about the importance of the development of food democracy; when concerned citizens, such as environmental activists, social activists, consumer activists, farmers, public interest scientists, educators and consumers will unite to fight back.

In the mid-1990s a professor of food policies, Tim Lang, developed the term “food democracy” as a response to growing corporate control and the lack of consumer involvement in the food system. At the core of food democracy is the idea that people can and should be actively participating in shaping the food system, rather than remaining passive spectators on the sidelines. In other words, food democracy is about citizens having the power to determine agro-food policies and practices locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. (Hassanein, p.79).

I started reflection on this topic with the notion that we can “vote with our fork”. According to this position a person who has more money to spend on food of his choice has more votes. But this alone is not enough to change food totalitarianism and achieve food democracy. What about those who have little income and few choices? Can they vote with their forks? Real food democracy means – one person- one vote. The idea of food democracy is to decentralize power, remove it from corporate control, and bring it to people.  

Reference:

Hamilton, N.D., (2004). Essay – Food democracy and the future of American values. Journal of Agricultural law. www.NationalAgLawCenter.org

Hassanein, N. (2003). Practicing food democracy: a pragmatic politics of transformation. Journal of rural studies. 19; 77-86.

Jaspers, Karl. The Fight Against the Totalitarianism. 

            http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/jaspers02.htm

Lappe, F. M., Lappe, A. (2002). Hope’s edge: the next diet for small planet. Tarcher.

Schlosser, E. (2001). Fast Food Nation. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Shiva Vandana – Interview to CorpWatch http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=573

The Earth Charter - http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/pages/Read-the-Charter.html

Wright, W., Middendorf, G. (2008). The fight over food: producers, consumers, and activists challenge the global food system. Pennsylvania State University Press.