#commodityfetishism

A tomato sits and looks at a bottle of ketchup, ketchup looks back at the tomato, the tomato sees a potential future. the ketchup sees its forgotten past. are they not the same? yet at the same time are they not different? there is a dialectic at play here, a negation of identity through an interpretation of the transition of one thing to its opposite.

at the same this challenges the mediation of our perception through the capitalist production process, through the medium of the process of the mechanical creation and commercial distribution of the ketchup, the history of its creation is hidden away, as we associate it with the bottle, the shelf, the market, but through the defiant act of thinking through the movements of its history one unmasks the hidden transformation and the relations involved to show us the truth within the falsity. what is the true essence of ketchup? And what is the subjective factor that has created this new object from its previous forms? When we answer these questions we now are exposed to the event of the ketchups creation, the real origin, history, and reality of the ketchup itself and in that process we are exposed to our own alienation from our labor/being/history/essence.

This is a prime example of the alienation and anomie created by capitalism. These men work all day harvesting a plant for a purpose they do not know of. The main interlocutor works with cocoa and knows it is used by wealthy foreign others to make "a good food" that he has never tasted: the others believe it is used to make wine. Their alienation from the product of their labor results in awe when the commodity-fetish object of the chocolate bar is produced almost magically from the reporter's pocket.

The cocoa workers ask the reporter questions like "Is your skin whiter because of the chocolate?" as an attempt to re-frame the interview and negotiate the cultural gulf between them by understanding the reporter's approach, and the connection between their labor and the finished, transformed, standardized and pristine foil-wrapped chocolate bar. 

Like them, we must question the intent behind such a pseudo-ethnographic stunt. The report is obviously meant to show a privileged Western audience the deprivation experienced outside their daily milieu. Yet the reporter himself also belies an ethically questionable stance of casual privilege when the reporter, who places himself firmly on the side of "us Westerners" (those who can afford to eat chocolate regularly) in the introduction, demonstrates his privilege by simply pulling out another bar from his pocket after the first bar is gone. By doing so the first bar, shared between many and treated as a unique treat, which it is "a privilege" to taste, is revealed to be interchangeable with all the others, showing the workers the tip of the iceberg of processes by which the unique fruits of each plant, gathered by the labor of unique people, are bought, sold, homogenized, the depth of life and human experience flattened to produce standardized products for consumption by well-fed, wealthy others who never experience the commodity's production or the labor used to produce it. 

That is why the workers ask if eating chocolate is why white people are so healthy.