Feeding our desire for chocolate
From girly Flakes to the more manly Yorkie we can’t help...
AUTHOR and academic Sarah Moss, 41, was pregnant with her first son fifteen years ago when she first developed a fascination with chocolate.
No, she wasn’t having cravings — though apparently chocolate is the number one food item expectant women fancy (ahead of pickles and eggs in second and third place respectively).
Instead it was the gratingly patronising advice — unasked for, a lot of the time — which pregnant women are bombarded with morning, noon and night.
‘My interest in food and literature came after being pregnant and having babies and experiencing that incredible bossiness around what you should and shouldn’t eat: “You must eat this, you must not eat that. And if you eat that your baby will come out with four heads and hate you forever,”’ complains the English mother of two sons aged 14 and 10, when we catch up ahead of her gigs at the West Cork Literary Festival next week.
‘I felt I had never been the focus of attention in that sort of way before and I began to understand how food causes enormous cultural anxiety for women. Then I became interested in the history of dietary advice for women, which was quite sobering. I found that the science changes, but the tone of voice never does. There is always this assumption that women can’t control their appetites and this greed of ours is dangerous and to be controlled.’
Perhaps nowhere is this attitude more prevalent than when it comes to chocolate — but Sarah opened a whole other can of worms when she began researching her book Chocolate: A Global History, with fellow academic Alexander Badenoch.
The pair traced the intoxicating hold chocolate has had on humanity since the cacao trees of Central America were first harvested by the Mayans to make bitter drinks in 1900BC. Before serving the drink, women would pour it from vase to vase until a foamed formed on top — and many of these vases have been found in graves, to presumably fortify people for the afterlife.
SPANISH conquistadors brought cacao beans back to Europe in the sixteenth century, along with the myth — still peddled by advertisers today — that women who consume chocolate are somehow naughty or out of control.
For instance, in late 17th-century Guatemala a man called Juan de Feuntes alleged to the Inquisition that his wife Cecilia had used ‘spells and curses’ against him, brainwashing him into making her hot chocolate every morning while she enjoyed a lie-in until ‘very late’.
So the association of self-indulgent women with chocolate began long before that famous TV advert with the actress’s bath overflowing while she enjoyed her Cadbury’s Flake.
But how did that association come about in the first place?
‘The model you often find is of the great while male off to subjugate the native people, who are often women. That’s the politics of imperialism,’ explains Moss, a professor of creative writing in Warwick University. ‘There is this sense from the explorers that the natives were unbridled, uncivilised and savage in some way. From what we know, their use of chocolate was akin to how alcohol is to us now. It’s not seen as sacred, but it’s important.’
‘What works politically is when something inspires unbridled savagery, unbridled lust -— because of course lots of people are going to want it then. If something is said to be terribly naughty, people are going to queue up for the stuff,’ says Moss. ‘These days women are constantly being told chocolate is naughty which makes it more desireable.’
Chocolate reached England in the 17th century via Spain and Italy. ‘I don’t know much about the history of chocolate in Ireland,’ says Moss. ‘It might have arrived around the same time. Or it could have got there earlier through the monks if they had a more direct route from the Spanish and Italian courts.’ We do know that in the 19th century, cacao shells were ground and roasted to be made into a drink in the Low Countries and Ireland, known, rather offputtingly, as ‘miserables’.
‘Like reusing tea bags or picking things from hedgerows, it’s about having substitutes for the real thing. I’m not sure if anyone knows exactly what was contained in miserables. It’s all about colonialism and empire,’ says Moss, of our inferior version.
‘Originally, chocolate was just a drink — like coffee or tea — in the coffee houses of Europe, which were mainly masculine spaces. It was only in the 19th century in Belgium and Switzerland that it began to be identified with women. When it became a bar of chocolate — a sweet, milky solid — it began to be identified with women and to a lesser extent with children.’ In these so-called obesogenic times, we all know the dangers of eating too much, but there was a point in history where chocolate was lauded for its health benefits. ‘It was marketed as a way of getting calories into children because in the 19th century people wanted their children to be chubby and resilient.’ These days chocolate is increasingly marketed at women as satisfying sensual or sexual appetites. Meanwhile, it’s still marketed to men in much the same way as for cocoa in the 19th century — to satisfy a ‘manly’ hunger for food.The Yorkie bar is the perfect example, with recent advertising campaigns featuring the tagline: ‘It’s NOT for girls!’
On the other end of the spectrum, KitKat Senses ran a billboard campaign screaming: ‘Goodwill to all women — 165 calories.’
‘With men they’ll be ripping off a wrapper and bashing things on a building site. Women will be lying on a couch groaning,’ says Moss, of the stereotypical advertising. Of course, chocolate is also marketed to men to use as a love-offering, most memorably with the hunky — if stalkerly — Milk Tray man.
‘I think that comes down to packaging, with the chocolate presented like jewellery,’ muses Moss. ‘Opening a box of chocolate is not unlike opening a necklace box. It has the performance of jewellery without the cost.’
‘Almost every possible benefit and disadvantage has been alleged to chocolate. Women have been told it will make them prettier and help them conceive. Men have been told it will make them more masculine and virile. That if you’re weak and sick, it will help build you up.Certainly now I don’t think anybody should eat it for health reasons, though it does fuel me when I’m running.’
Moss has a penchant for darker chocolate, which she thinks has come with age. But she’s no purist. ‘The snobbery around chocolate is ridiculous. You can see chocolate makers borrowing the vocabulary of wines, describing the aromas of beans. You get really bad writing on some wrappers, terrible pile-ups of adjectives,’ she says. ‘Posh chocolate can be described as hand-dusted, for example. Thanks, but I’d rather they used a machine.’
AS for women being made to feel guilty for consuming a tempting bar of chocolate, or heaven forbid, a chocolate muffin, Moss makes a thoughtprovoking point. ‘The moral issues are in the production, not the consumption,’ she says. ‘The moral value is in how it’s made, rather than how it’s eaten. There is no innate moral capacity in cocoa beans, in a spoon of milk or sugar — it’s just food. We should think more about the naughtiness of making it, not eating it.’
Because chocolate-making has a dark history. ‘Its history is colonial violence and slavery and that’s pretty much the case from the beginning to the present day. Efforts have been made to clean it up, but for anything that popular with production chain that long, it’s going to be very difficult.
‘One of the problems is that chocolate contains large quantities of sugar, which is notoriously difficult to produce ethically, again as the food chains are so long. The price would have to go up. You would pay more for guarantees that it was ethically produced,’ she explains, adding: ‘I very much doubt that’s going to happen.’
Her own favourite treat is from Hotel Chocolat, the only company in Britain to grow cocoa on its own plantation. I say it’s interesting that an English company should choose a French name for its brand.
‘Isn’t it?’ she agrees. ‘But chocolate has always been exotic.’