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The Sweet Shop and the Toy Shop: Consumption, Sign and Play in the Confectionery Industry

2022; Wiley; Volume: 64; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/criq.12634

1467-8705

Elena Violaris,

Culinary Culture and Tourism

The confectionery industry is the epitome of processed food: the point at which physically consumable entities most clearly overlap with synthetic objects. This is reinforced by the fact that confectionery is consumed for pleasure rather than nutrition; low on the scale of necessity, it exemplifies the commercially constructed needs that characterise consumer society. Confectionery represents the peak of alimentary superfluity just as it exists at the peak of the dietician’s food pyramid, and according to these principles, I explore the mechanisms and dynamics that condition its consumption. After a brief history of processed food and the confectionery industry, I outline how synthetic food is inherently a commodity according to Marx’s definition, before drawing upon the writings of Jean Baudrillard to delineate the complex relationship between consumption, sign and play in the confectionery industry. Food processing has been around for millennia, and Chris Otter remarks that it is ‘misleading to regard the industrialisation of food as a purely “modern” phenomenon’.11 Chris Otter, ‘Industrialising Diet, Industrialising Ourselves: Technology, Food, and the Body, since 1750’, in The Routledge History of Food, ed. Carol Helstosky (London: Routledge, 2015), 221–22 (p. 221). Methods of food preservation such as salting and smoking date from primitive societies, and heating food is already a modification of it. An article in the Scientific American traces a timeline of food processing from roasted meat (1.8 million years ago) to bread (30,000 years ago), chocolate (1900 BC), sugar (500 BC), coffee (mid-1400s), carbonated water (1767), corn flakes (1894), MSG (1908), spam (1926), chicken nuggets (1950s), high-fructose corn syrup (1957) and lab-grown meat (2013).22 Evelyn Kim, ‘The Amazing Multimillion-Year History of Processed Food’, Scientific American, 309:3 (2013), 50–55. While food processing is a spectrum, this spectrum demonstrates certain thresholds of change, and the examples from corn flakes onwards indicate more chemically complex ingredients as well as advanced and mechanised methods of food manufacture. It is evident that food is becoming ‘increasingly synthetic’, a shift which Otter situates in the context of industrialisation and the transition from an organic to a mineral economy.33 Otter, Industrialising Diet, p. 222. Whether this is a primarily positive development in reducing global food scarcity, or whether there are negative implications for health, is a vast and separate topic of discussion. I wish to focus on the semiotic implications: the synthetic nature of many modern foods, combined with advances in packaging materials and presentation, has led to food progressively resembling non-consumable objects, causing a shift in the ways in which individuals relate to it. The specific domain of the confectionery industry has undergone similar transitions. Laura Mason discusses how the origins of sugar consumption, derived from the skill of refining cane juice, can be traced to India over two thousand years ago.44 Laura Mason, Sweets and Candy: A Global History (London: Reaktion, 2018), p. 7. Further references are cited within the text, using the reference Sweets if the context is unclear. This was denoted by the Sanskrit words sakkar and khanda, which form the basis of ‘sugar’ and ‘candy’; both the words and the skill of refining sugar were transmitted westward across Persia and the Middle East, reaching the eastern Mediterranean by the tenth century through the Muslim conquests (p. 9). Mason describes the historical association between sugar and decoration, citing the Renaissance Italian collazione. These were banquets of sweetmeats arranged during celebrations, ‘part food, part entertainment’ (p. 10), including pastries, sugar-preserved fruit, jellies and marzipan. Mason goes on to describe how ‘[t]ogether with silver, gold, fine glass and linen, sugar paste was a precious decorative material’ in post-medieval Europe (pp. 91-2). Here, sugar is categorised with other inedible materials used for ornamentation, where its primary purpose is not ingestion but spectacle. In Italy it was used to make trionfi di tavola, ‘elaborate and highly accomplished sculptures designed to entertain and flatter the nobility’ (p. 93). Confectionery was a luxury item. However, through industrialisation and mass production, this aesthetic potential has been reconfigured from art to play. Contemporary confectionery is cheap and widely available, and so its decorative capacity is motivated by a logic of persuasion rather than impression, corresponding with invitations to interact rather than observe. Instead of an artistic spectacle of wealth, confectionery is now framed as a game which aims to encourage participation and consumption. The transitional overlap between confectionery as art and confectionery as game is evident in the traditional nineteenth-century sweet shop. Here, the shiny surfaces of sparkling and patterned boiled sweets displayed in their transparent jars were simultaneously spectacle and advertisement. The abstraction of signification increased further when transparent jars were replaced by opaque, individual plastic packaging covered with images and brands. An increasing semiotic complexity manifests itself in ingredients as well as presentation. Mason describes how boiled sweets were produced through boiling syrup to ‘hard crack’ (a stage in the codification of sugar-heating processes) and then letting it cool quickly, which created a ‘sparkling transparency’ (p. 39). The process was aided by agents: ‘[l]emon juice or honey were used in a pre-industrial age; glucose or tartaric acid in mass production, further inhibiting crystallization’ (p. 40). The transition from lemon and honey, whose organic derivation is still visible, to the more specific chemical distillations of glucose and tartaric acid, is testament to the increasing complexity and synthetic nature of confectionery. This is further emphasised by the parallel etymologies of ‘confectionery’ and ‘synthetic’. ‘Confectionery’ comes from the Latin cōnficere which means ‘to put together, make up, prepare, complete’ (OED). Synthetic has a similar root, from the Latin syntheticus which stems from the Greek συνθετικός. This is a combination of syn, a Greek prefix meaning together, and thesis, a Greek word meaning ‘putting, placing’ (OED). The Latin cōnficere and the Greek-derived synthetic are equivalent, composed of the elements ‘putting’ and ‘together’, indicating the inherently manufactured and mediated composition of confectionery. These principles can be applied to a variety of processed food. There is clearly a ludic element to the advertisement and consumption of fast food such as McDonald’s, which is corroborated by the inclusion of plastic toys in children’s meals, evoking another parallel between food and toys as simultaneous objects of consumption. Nevertheless, I have chosen confectionery as a case study because it epitomises processed food as the smallest and highest (therefore, least nutritionally necessary) triangle of the food pyramid and because of the historical association between confectionery and decoration. The latter has transitioned from elite spectacle to mass-produced gamification, encouraging interactivity in the service of consumption. In addition, the signification of packaging and advertisements is particularly relevant in confectionery compared to other industries; a study by Charlton et al. (2015) has identified that, particularly in Western countries, the marketing of ‘discretionary’ foods (confectionery, snacks, soft drinks) is higher than that of ‘core’ foods (fruit, vegetables, grains).55 Emma L. Charlton et al., ‘Supermarkets and Unhealthy Food Marketing: An International Comparison of the Content of Supermarket Catalogues/ Circulars’, Preventive Medicine, 81 (2015), 168–73. Consequently, while the interrelation of play, consumption, simulation and semiotics in food consumption might be relevant to several industries, its pyramidal superfluity and inherently decorative, gamic qualities make confectionery a particularly pertinent case study. In Grundrisse, Marx outlines the mutual influence that production and consumption exert over each other. On one hand, ‘consumption produces production’ because a product is only fully realised when consumed.66 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 91. In turn, consumption stimulates the need for further production as replenishment. Nevertheless, production also creates a specific manner of consumption, and Marx aptly illustrates this through food: ‘Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth’.77 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 92. Marx’s comment expresses the complication of primal ‘need’ through an economic market which prescribes certain social contexts and cues. The means through which a need is resolved rebounds and alters the nature of the need itself. Here Marx identifies the opposition between ‘cooked’ and ‘raw’ meat, recalling cooking as the first form of food processing; this primary manipulation of food, compounded by the addition of implements, introduces a sophistication into the need that it gratifies. In the logical extrapolation of Marx’s remark, even cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork appears primitive in relation to the fantastic flavourings and syntheses of today’s food industry. The more complex the gratification, the more complex the need becomes. While everybody needs protein to live, an individual does not necessarily need the specific form of a steak, and even less the more specific form of an Oreo Cookie Ice Cream. Alongside this increasing sophistication of needs, we can trace the increasing semiotic complexity in food. Existing on the boundary between organic consumable object and inorganic, non-consumable object (a condition embodied in the ambiguous edibility of icing figures on children’s birthday cakes), confectionery traces a particular relationship to use-value and exchange-value. According to Capital, use-value is the literal function of an object produced by labour. Marx uses the example of a table; as an object, ‘the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing’.88 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. i (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 163. However, when it becomes a commodity, participating in the system of exchange where values are made quantitative and equivalent, the object acquires a mystificatory character. Yet even in this semiotically altered form, a table is still recognisable as wood. The natural materials that constitute a Haribo Tangfastic (as with many other non-alimentary synthetic objects) are more complex. In a Tangfastic, one can no longer see the collagen, the citric acid and the spirulina cyanobacteria, but rather a treated, ingestible synthesis of these ingredients. Where Marx distinguishes the ‘ordinary’ object from the fetishised ‘commodity’, confectionery is already geared towards persuasion and advertisement in its very constitution. This is before it is branded as a commodity, which entails being stamped with packaging, plastered over billboards and entering the system of monetary exchange. In the very status of becoming an object (and becoming an object precedes becoming a commodity), synthetic food is participating in the system of desire and gratification that characterises consumer society. Confectionery is always already a commodity, and its very ingredients exemplify the constructed and sophisticated needs of today’s food industry. In this, it has a particular relationship to consumption, which has a double meaning. In the OED, the definition of the verb ‘consume’ is divided into three parts: ‘senses relating to physical destruction’, ‘senses relating to the use or exploitation of resources’, and ‘extended uses’. The first part contains five definitions, all of which recall the Latin roots of consume in ‘consumer’. Consumere meant to destroy, wear away, waste and squander, from con as ‘together’ and sumere as ‘to take up’ (OED). Section II contains definitions six to nine, and number six is divided into three subsections: (a) ‘to eat or drink; to ingest’, (b) ‘to use up (esp. a commodity or resource), exhaust’ and (c) ‘to purchase or use (goods or services)’. Number six, then, includes both the physical consumption of food and the economic sense of consumption. Yet these senses are only distinguished several stages down the definitional tree. The two branches are connected at the root: ‘to eat’ and ‘to purchase’ are combined under ‘use or exploitation of resources’. The increasing semiotic abstraction of food is encapsulated by the transition from raw meat to cooked meat to meat-flavoured crisps. The more elaborate the levels of signification, the smaller the substantial distinctions: organically distinct foods (meat, vegetables) become signs or varnishes for substantially homogeneous foods (meat- or vegetable-flavoured crisps). In terms of confectionery, the distinction between a lemon and a blackcurrant becomes abstracted to that between sweets labelled ‘lemon’ and ‘blackcurrant’. Distinction operates at a surface level, illustrating Jean Baudrillard’s thesis that contemporary culture is constantly ‘substituting the signs of the real for the real’.99 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 2. Here, continues Baudrillard, the oppositions between true and false, real and imaginary, become subsumed into the ‘orbital recurrence of models and […] simulated generation of differences’.1010 Baudrillard, Simulacra, p. 3. Glucose Syrup, Sugar, Lactic Acid, Concentrated Fruit Juices (orange 0.07%, lime 0.06%, raspberry 0.06%, strawberry 0.1%, lemon 0.05%, blackcurrant 0.1%), Acidity Regulator sodium lactate, Natural Flavourings, Natural Colours (anthocyanin, carotene, chlorophyllin, curcumin).1111 ‘Fox’s Glacier Fruits’, Treasure Island Sweets, 2021, www.treasureislandsweets.co.uk/traditional-boiled-sweets/foxs-glacier-fruits.html. Accessed 8 April 2021. A recent Internet controversy questioned whether all the flavours of the popular confectionery ‘Skittles’, often marketed as ‘Taste the Rainbow’, actually taste the same. An article in the Independent complained that ‘[b]ecause it’s cheaper to make sweets with different colours and scents than actual flavours, we might be being mugged off’.1212 Rachel Hosie, ‘Do Skittles Actually All Taste the Same? We Did a Blind Taste Test to Find Out’, Independent, 18 December 2020, www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/skittles-taste-do-same-blind-flavour-colours-truth-sweets-a8166571.html. Accessed 8 April 2021. In the article writer’s own blind taste test, she did identify taste variation between the colours, but these were mainly down to ‘scent and colour’ rather than flavour. More formally, Wu et al. conducted a study testing the relationship between colour and flavour perception, performing a blind taste test using Skittles on Chinese graduate and undergraduate students who would likely have been unfamiliar with the sweet.1313 Xu Jun Wu et al., ‘What Influences Human’s Flavor Perception to Skittles?’, J Pharm Pharmaceutics, 4:2 (2017), 1–5 (p. 3). They chose Skittles because of their bright and distinct colours. The study found that the proportions of correct identifications of flavour decreased significantly when participants could not see the colours compared to when they could, ‘suggesting that colour, as visual information, contributes to taste perception, a conclusion consistent with other studies’.1414 Ibid. Indeed, the ‘Taste the Rainbow’ slogan of Skittles capitalises on the idea of synesthetic consumption: tasting colours, a mingling of visual and gustatory experience. At the same time, it reveals the truth of the semiotics of confectionery, which is that the means of differentiation is on the surface. One tastes colour, not substance; appearance, not ingredient. This is a concrete instantiation of Baudrillard’s ‘simulated generation of difference’: the rainbow will rub off with water, revealing identical material beneath. Visual consumption is a crucial aspect of consuming confectionery, particularly in an image-oriented economy. Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra was preceded and partly inspired by Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967), which identifies how the transition to a consumer economy is conditioned by images. Debord discusses the time spent ‘consuming images’, remarking that ‘modern society’s obsession with saving time, whether by means of faster transport or by means of powdered soup, has the positive result that the average American spends three to six hours daily watching television’.1515 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), p. 112. The example of food here is illustrative; in temporal terms, the consumption of food (cooking soup) is replaced by the consumption of images (watching television). Yet the two are also intermingled. The images on the television screen correspond with the images on the packaging of the powdered soup: the brand that is attempting to visually persuade the consumer to select it from among other brands through a ludic game of choice. This game of choice is exemplified by Baudrillard’s remark in Seduction that ‘[t]he ludic is everywhere, even in the “choice” of a brand of laundry detergent in the supermarket’.1616 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (Montréal: New World Perspectives, 1990), p. 159. Moreover, Debord’s television screen could conceivably be advertising the packaged soup. In such a scenario, the subject is consuming images on the screen at the same time as they consume those same images on food packaging at the same time as they consume the food itself. Images are being consumed in all directions, both in terms of consuming synthetic food and in the way that these visually conditioned, already ‘confected’ (i.e., already ‘put together’, pre-packaged) foods free up time for further visual consumption through the spectacle of screens. But what does it actually mean to ‘consume’ these images? Consumption here is applied in the senses of ‘use’ and ‘ingest’: to absorb and take something in. Images are taken in and become part of the subject’s mental repository, their imaginative set of ideas. This is how images seep into the experience of the food. A sweet in the shape and colour of an apple implies the idea of an apple; when consumed, a phantom apple is consumed alongside it as the sign stimulates imaginative consumption. This might be preceded by a packaging that illustrates a bright and fantastical apple, which further conditions the perception of taste. Physiologically, images can also act as cues that stimulate sensory mechanisms such as increasing hormone levels related to hunger, producing a simulation of physical consumption.1717 Petra Schüssler et al., ‘Ghrelin Levels Increase After Pictures Showing Food’, Obesity, 20:6 (2012), 1,212–17. Here, nothing is actually physically taken in; the mechanisms of physical consumption are enacted without their object. However, the activation of neural circuits and reward pathways in the brain is where the effect of the consumption of images (something mental) meets an effect of the consumption of food (something physical), just as food and shopping can both trigger the release of dopamine in the brain. This dichotomy of physical and imaginative consumption is identified by Tim Dant, who describes how commodity fetishism leads to an ‘overdetermination of the social value of the object in that it is not merely consumed (exchanged and used) but in addition the object or class of objects can be enjoyed at the level of imagination (fantasy and desire)’.1818 Tim Dant, ‘Fetishism and the Social Value of Objects’, Sociological Review, 44 (1996), 495–516 (p. 511). I would argue that this imaginative engagement is not distinct from consumption, but part of it, involved in the very ‘use’ of the object. ‘Consuming’ the object converges with ‘imaginatively enjoying’ it, because gaining pleasure from the object means using it. While imaginative use does not physically ‘consume’ resources, the process can be considered psychologically; an object whose purpose is entertainment is made redundant if it is no longer entertaining. It is worn out, as in Debord’s example of the ‘sheer fad item’.1919 Debord, Spectacle, p. 44. Like the commodity in general, Debord discusses how the fad item interrupts the ‘organic development of social needs’.2020 Ibid. It also interrupts the organic form of consumption, because a fad item is psychologically consumed. Its use-value is novelty and interest, and so its destruction or exhaustion is defined as a loss of interest rather than a physical depletion. Consumption is still working according to Marx’s definition, where ‘consumption accomplishes the act of production only in completing the product as product by dissolving it’.2121 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 93. The same process is at work, except that the fad item is not dissolved physically but psychologically. The next variable to be added to this identification of confectionery as an inherent commodity, soliciting specific forms of physical, economic and visual consumption, is play. Play is a means of describing the forces at work in the consumption of confectionery, both physical and economic. Recently, this dynamic has been identified and formalised under the title ‘gamification’. Gamification describes the strategies involved in framing a situation or object as a game in order to increase a subject’s engagement with it, whether this engagement is towards a pedagogical or economic purpose. Gamification involves the use of ‘game mechanics’, which refers to the ‘basic elements that make up games’, including ‘points, badges (achievements), levels, leaderboards, and rewards’. 2222 Gabe Zichermann and Joselin Linder, The Gamification Revolution: How Leaders Leverage Game Mechanics to Crush the Competition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013), pp. 18–19. Examples include customer loyalty programs which involve ladders and rewards. These work by ‘cultivating a sense of mastery – and progression towards it at all times’, aiming to ‘maximize engagement’.2323 Zichermann and Linder, Gamification, pp. 15, 18. Robson et al. (2015) set gamification in a psychological context, commenting that ‘[g]amification can produce desired behaviour change through the formation of habits by reinforcing the reward and emotional response of the individuals participating in the experience’.2424 Karen Robson et al., ‘Is it all a game? Understanding the principles of gamification’, Business Horizons, 58 (2015), 411–420 (p. 413). As implied by the idea of a ‘reward’ response, there is a neurological mechanism behind these strategies, concerning the stimulation of dopamine. This corresponds with the neurological mechanisms that facilitate sugar addiction: both drugs and food can stimulate ‘abrupt dopamine increases in the brain reward system’, and excessive activation of this system has also been hypothesised to contribute to a lack of impulse control in activities such as gambling, sex and shopping/buying.2525 Miguel Alonso-Alonso et al., ‘Food Reward System: Current Perspectives and Future Research Needs’, Nutrition Reviews, 73:5 (2015), 296–307 (p. 296); Nir Giladi et al., ‘New onset heightened interest or drive for gambling, shopping, eating or sexual activity in patients with Parkinson’s disease: the role of dopamine agonist treatment and age at motor symptoms onset’, Journal of Psychopharmacology, 21:5 (2007), 501–506 (p. 504). The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function playgrounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.2626 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), p. 10. In Seduction, Baudrillard distinguishes the ‘modern meaning of play’ as the mode of the ‘ludic’ – a mode which has been dominant since at least 1970, where Baudrillard first discussed the ludic in The Consumer Society.2929 Baudrillard, Seduction, p. 163. In the latter text, Baudrillard defines the ludic as a ‘play with combinations, a combinatorial modulation: a play on the technical variants or potentialities of the object’.3030 Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, trans. Chris Turner (London: SAGE, 1998), p. 114. Here, he continues, domestic gadgets link up with ‘slot machines, tirlipots and the other cultural radio games, the quiz machine in the drugstore, the car dashboard’.3131 Ibid. What these mechanical applications have in common is a logic of selection: they offer choices between elements that are materially equivalent, distinguished only by symbols. This stimulates a ‘vague or passionate curiosity for the “play” of mechanisms, the play of colours, the play of variants’.3232 Ibid. Later, in Seduction, Baudrillard remarks that this form of play has ‘nothing to do with play as a dual or agonistic relation’.3333 Baudrillard, Seduction, p. 163. Opposing, frictional and contradictory forces are replaced by frictionless surfaces, and the play of substance is replaced by a play of pattern. Participating in this play of pattern, the confectionery industry poses a game of choices within choices. The first choice is between brands of confectionery: Jelly Belly is a choice of brand among other brands, such as Skittles or Fox’s Glacier Fruits. If Jelly Belly is selected, the choices then open up to the jelly bean collections under this brand, making the second set consist of the themed collections of Jelly Belly flavours. These include ‘Fruit Bowl Mix’, ‘Tropical Mix’, ‘Smoothie Blend’ and ‘Beanboozled – Yum and Yeuch!’.3434 See ‘Flavours’, Jelly Belly, https://www.jellybelly.co.uk/flavours. Accessed 8 April 2021. Within each of these collections, there are multiple flavours in keeping with the theme of the category. For instance, ‘Smoothie Blend’ contains ‘Cherry Passion Fruit’, ‘Mandarin Orange Mango’, ‘Mixed Berry Smoothie’, ‘Pineapple Pear Smoothie’, ‘Strawberry Banana Smoothie’. These sets of choices constitute the game of consumption, as each selection leads to another selection. The game of choice is reinforced by the fact that a version of ‘Beanboozled – Yum and Yeuch!’ can come packaged as a board game, complete with a spinner and ten possible options on which the player can land. As the most outlandish collection of Jelly Belly’s beans, ‘Beanboozled’ consists of conventional jelly beans intermingled with flavours of inedible substances including ‘Dead Fish’, ‘Mouldy Cheese’, ‘Booger’, ‘Lawn Clippings’, ‘Canned Dog Food’, ‘Toothpaste’, ‘Baby Wipes’ and ‘Stinky Socks’. The appearance of each of these flavours is identical to the appearance of a pleasant flavour; for instance, ‘Booger’ is the same appearance as ‘Juicy pear’. Players spin the spinner until it lands on one of these appearances which they then try, taking the risk that the flavour will be one of the odd ones. This is a game of semiotics, dependent on making the same sign point to two different things. In this, it participates in Caillois’ category of alea: games of chance. ‘Beanboozled’ takes the analogy between consuming confectionery and consuming artificial objects to another level, as this confectionery is flavoured as objects. Non-consumable entities such as ‘Baby Wipes’ and ‘Stinky Socks’ are made into signifiers of flavour; playful ‘consumption’ is taken to its logical extreme. Yet what are the actual ingredients of these bizarre sweets? While there are no actual ‘baby wipes’ or ‘stinky socks’ being consumed, the physical objects do play a role in the composition. Erin McCarthy describes how Jelly Belly’s first step is analysing the real thing in a gas chromatograph, which converts the object into vapours and then analyses the chemical makeup of these vapours to convert them into flavour markers.3535 Erin McCarthy, ‘How Does Jelly Belly Create Its Weird Flavors?’, Mental Floss, 28 March 2018, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/62593/how-does-jelly-belly-create-its-weird-flavors. Accessed 8 April 2021. These flavour markers become the starting poin