The Chocolate Battle: Media Representation of Product Quality in the British Press

Abstract

In the implementation of given EU directives, forms of resistance may originate, in particular, when given directives try to uniform the production of given goods. This was particularly the case of chocolate production, which has sparked over time furious reactions by EU member states, since the directives linked to its production clearly defined what should be considered ‘pure’ chocolate and, conversely, what should be defined as a poor imitation. Indeed, the controversial 1973 Directive 73/241/EEC, which expressly prohibited the use of any fat other than cocoa butter, created a double standard for those countries that used alternative fats or, as in the case of the UK, traditionally used higher quantities of milk in the production of chocolate and a cocoa content lower than the minimum authorised by the EEC directive. Thus, these countries were forced to market their products outside of their national borders as ‘chocolate-flavoured’, thus, subtly acknowledging the lower quality of their products when compared to ‘pure’ chocolate. Thus, the aim of this contribution is to analyse the animated debate surrounding chocolate quality standards in the British press thanks to the analysis of a corpus of newspapers articles in a time-span that goes from 1994 to 2000, that is, the period during which the EU re-opened the debate over chocolate production standards and which brought to the Directive 2000/36/EC that introduced more flexibility in the manufacture of chocolate. The analysis will be carried out by using corpus linguistic methodologies (Baker, 2006, 2013; Baker et al., 2013) and, in particular, we will focus on the legitimation strategies (van Leeuwen, 2007, 2008) used to define product quality in the news stories under investigation