Haley Broder: 

Frans Van Mieris Il Vecchio painted “An Elderly Couple at a Table” circa 1650-1655, on oil. Cossimo III de’ Medici often supported the artist, and this particular painting was moved to the Uffizi in 1773. Mieris presents a rather traditional scene of a presumed husband and wife in the countryside from the perspective of outside the home looking in. This creates an omniscient view where the audience feels they are observing a peaceful, familial scene from their outer window. The couple drinks from a glass of water and uses a utensil to smear bread; carrots and garlic rest on the windowsill and the pair appears content, not suffering. While expressing daily life, Mieris does not glorify the fish, bread, water, or vegetables present, nor does he ignore them; rather, he paints them as modest displays of life.

Haley Broder: Reading Response

When I studied in Costa Rica, I lived with the KeköLdi indigenous community in their rainforest for a few weeks doing a climate change study on poisonous tree frogs. There, we lived from the natural farm and picked what we needed for daily meals. There were giant cacao plants right near our main trail, which we picked one day to make chocolate. We peeled back the yellow casings and chopped the white backing, ground beans, and labored extensively chopping, grinding, pressing, cooking it down, until it produced a thick, bitter liquid hours later.

We talk a lot about our guilt of coffee drinking while human rights are violated en masse, but with chocolate, more seem to be ignored? Particularly in the month of October, as United States Halloween candy sales explode, chocolate is not questioned except on what type: Hershey’s Bar or Kit-Kat. We no longer see it through the extensive process, labor intensive extraction, production, distribution, nor its historical pass. This erases its history and fetishizes chocolate into a supermarket purchase rather than a process that can take an immense amount of time, labor, resources, and historical knowledge. When we made chocolate with KeköLdi, it did not taste like the Nestle Halloween bars, nor did it taste like the bitter chocolate we tasted in class. It was immensely bitter and we drank it, sugarless, proud of the long process it took to get there. While we were gathering the cacao itself, we struggled to find ones that had not been infected by a virus that had been introduced by banana companies in the 1960’s, seeking to destroy the chocolate crops in order to take over indigenous land for banana production. While some of the virus has been eliminated, that history still lingers on some of the crop and influences the economic value of the farm and their way of life. Much of the history of chocolate is wrapped inside imperialism, domination, trade, advances, and conquest. As the KeköLdi land demonstrates, chocolate production is historical, but historically changed and silenced by imperial powers.

Coe and Coe trace chocolate from its drinkable form to solid (12), and discuss the cocoa plant’s form (13), which we were also able to see at the Botanical Gardens with Professor Rufini. As Chapter 9 points out, the ethical problems with chocolate are immense. I do not see much chocolate around Firenze, but I do see Nutella everywhere. On a weekend trip to Bologna, I drank warm chocolate out of a mug instead of coffee and felt that same conflict creep up: how do you address human rights and continue to consume the drink that would “conquer Europe” (Coe 162)? When we consider chocolate’s extensive past, from introduction and early years to its appropriation, spread, travel, trade, and value, everyone considers it in different, unique, and personal ways. In class, as we sampled different more “traditional” chocolate, the responses to tastes were not solely about flavor, texture, or smell, but rather of the nostalgia chocolate brought up. Many of us have intrinsically deep relationships with food, which serve as symbols of culture, self, and identity.  

Haley Broder