Campus Conversations

The Sociology of Chocolate

February 14, 2013

Comfort food gets serious

In honor of all the heart-shaped boxes flying off the shelves on this Valentine's Day, we look back at the work of former student Jamal Fahim, who in 2010 wrote his senior comprehensive project in sociology on the marketing of chocolate. Jamal, who won distinction for his project, argues that chocolate marketing exemplifies the way a commodity’s fetish status may be created and intensified through the promise of an object’s capacity to transform the consumer’s deepest aspects of his or her self. 

You can read Jamal's paper "Beyond Cravings: Gender and Class Desires in Chocolate Marketing" on OxyScholar. You might look differently at that last dark chocolate buttercream. 

Photo by Cocreatr.