Chapter 3

KAKAO

AND

KAKA

CHOCOLATE AND THE EXCRETORYIMAGINATION OFNINETEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE

Alison Moore

f all the food products that entered the European consumer market as a result of colonial trade,chocolate underwent the mostdramatic differentiation from its original form.In Aztec societychocolate was drunk cold,spicy and bitter.

So why in the mid-nineteenthcentury did Europeans turn it into something sweet,sticky,creamy,andsolid? The answer to this question lies in an analysis of the physical andsymbolic resemblance of chocolate to excrement:that other brown sub-stance that was of such great concern and fascination for European societyof the nineteenth century.The contemporaneous emergence of solid eat-ing chocolate as a coveted consumer object alongside the development of sewerage and toilet technology in nineteenth-century Europe was not inci-dental.Both relate to the development of a new identity amongst middle-class Europeans who were keen to enjoy the exotic delights of colonialproduce as much as they were to deny and sanitize the excretory processin response to the crisis of malodorous bodily products produced by indus-trial urbanization.Both the deodorized sewers of mid century urbanizationpolicies (particularly in Paris and London),and the availability of fragrant,sweet and pungent consumables from colonial trade,were pivotal in estab-lishing a European bourgeois identity that counterpoised itself to theexcrement-eating primitives from whom chocolate and its compound

ingredients had been stolen.This article will show that throughout the latemodern era chocolate has been repeatedly associated,both explicitly andsymbolically,with excrement.While excretory and anal repression wereseen as central to the construction of European identity in a range of late-nineteenth-century texts concerned with differentiating primitive fromcivilized Man,chocolate was viewed as a consumer symbol of the gold,wealth,luxury,and new class hierarchies purchased through slavery andcolonial exploitation in Africa and the Americas.Chocolate then was thesymbolic byproduct of the process by which the European consumer classes domesticated the appropriation of wealth from colonial endeavorsand controlled excretory processes in construction of the urban sanitaryorder.This article will discuss how chocolate was mythologized and mar-keted initially as an exotic aphrodisiac,then infantalized during the nine-teenth century,then—from the

fin de siècle

to the present—constructed asthe ultimate and most appropriate gift between lovers.Through this analy-sis I argue that chocolate has consistently appeared as a symbol of the prim-itive within the civilized,as the child-like,the sexual,the fetishized,theexcremental,which European societies have harnessed,channeled,andtransmuted throughout the process of urban sanitization.Oral contact with excrement represents one of the most charged taboosin modern societies.

Coprophagia (the eating of excrement) was mostfamously eroticized by the Marquis de Sade,

and has been documented asa practiced sexual variation by sexologists and psychiatrists consistentlyfrom the late nineteenth century to the present.

In these examples theconsumption of excrement is represented as a distinctly obscure,frequentlyaberrant and most certainly a marginal desire.However,this article willargue that solid eating chocolate has throughout its history been fashionedand marketed in forms visually,sensually and symbolically alike to excre-ment and that it hence represents a

simulacrum

of the waste matter thatEuropeans of the nineteenth century saw as so essential to cast out in thename of a clean,odorless and ordered civilization.

In combining the cacaoonce unique to Aztec culture with the sugar harvested by Europeans in theslave plantations of South America,chocolate is a product of colonial dom-ination par excellence.

As I will show,just as nineteenth-century urbanplanners were formulating the notion that the technologized sewers flush-ing excrement out of sight and out of smell were a true mark of progressand civilization,middle-class Europeans simultaneously developed a com-pulsive taste for a new brown,fragrant substance,and shaped it,of all things,into eggs,bars and logs,or alternatively into kisses,hearts,and coins.Hencechocolate functioned as symbol of the erotic,the infantile and the feminine52

Alison Moore

aspects attributed to primitivity and which were cast out as waste matter inthe masculine,adult work of civilized society and capitalist economicorder.Chocolate marketing still today emphasizes class difference with itsdemarcation as a luxury product even in the face of mass consumer democ-ratization.Packaged in gold and silver foil,in bejeweled boxes,as coins andgold bars,it represents the essential commodity fetishism of high capitalismas identified by Marx.

Its kitsch aesthetic reverses the logic of value,turn-ing excrement into gold,making that which is most valueless into the mostvaluable;that which is most disgusting (because waste matter) into the mostcovetable of delicious consumables.

Chocolate and Coprophagia

Today the physical resemblance of chocolate to excrement is obvious toschoolchildren of many cultures,who often refer to it euphemistically as“chocolate.”In 2001 the chocolate manufacturer Cadbury’s capitalized onthis resemblance in its Australian marketing of the “picnic”bar,using a bar-ren photograph of the unpackaged brown,lumpy log printed on giantunderground-transport posters with the caption “deliciously ugly,”with theimplication that the chocolate bar resembled a giant turd.A similar varietyof humor has been employed continuously since the early modern era in afolk custom of the Auvergne and several other regions of rural France:themarital ritual of the “rôtie,”as documented by the anthropological sociolo-gist Deborah Reed-Danahay.

According to this practice,a newly-marriedcouple are pursued into the marital bed chamber (and ideally surprised inthe act of consummation) by reveling youths who present them with achamber pot in which chocolate and champagne are placed and which the young couple are forced to consume.The

rôtie

is a mockery of bourgeoisnotions of taste in its representation of objects of culinary luxury as excre-mental symbols in a ritual of eroticism and rite of passage.

Here again,asReed-Danahay remarks,the verbal narrative accompanying the metaphor isthat although the

rôtie

looks disgusting (

dégoûtante

;

dégueulasse

),it actuallytastes very good (

délicieuse

The Marquis de Sade fetishized the consumption both of chocolate andexcrement.

It was widely believed at the time to have been chocolatesthat Sade used to conceal the aphrodisiac with which two young womenwere made ill in the scandal that saw the Marquis flee across the Italian bor-der in 1772.

Sade was something of a “chocoholic”(by the standards of today’s jargon)—we find it included in the meals described in

The 120 Daysof Sodom

and in letters he sent from prison to his wife he demandedKakao

and

Kaka53