#hershey bars

Ace and Ivy enjoying some Hershey’s candy bars here!

Nail Art - Hershey Bars and Reese’s Pieces

Had a great (masked and socially distanced) day with my friend at Hershey’s Chocolate World and Hershey Gardens to celebrate her birthday a little early, and I did Reese’s Pieces and Hershey Bar nail art for the trip.

The Hershey bar, an American classic. First, we will talk about the additives in a Hershey bar. Soy lecithin which is made from soybean oil is added to Hershey's chocolate to keep the cocoa and cocoa butter from separating. Hershey exports from Brazil, Argentina or the U.S. Brazil is the worlds largest soybean exporter but in 2017 soybean prices took a record low forcing soybean workers to hoard their produces in hopes for a price rise in the near future. PGPR, or polyglycerol polyricinoleate, is made from castor bean oil and added to chocolate to keep it thick and soft its used as a cheaper option than using cocoa butter.

Hershey gets its Vanilla bean extract from Madagascar, the largest producer of vanilla beans in the world(followed by Indonesia). Together, Madagascar and Indonesia produce 90 percent of the world’s vanilla. In Madagascar Farmers have been protecting their farms from thieves the crime wave has been going strong for two years(just after the luxury bean shot up to a record $635 per kilo from just $100 two years earlier). For many farmers, this is their only source of income and they have started taking dangerous risks in protecting their crops, making homemade pistols, spears, and traps.

Hershey gets its milk from farmers in Pennsylvania, they pride themselves on only using farmers that work 100 miles away from the Hershey factory in Hershey, PA. The factory consumes 300,000-350,000 gallons of milk per day. The American farmers aren’t dealing with the same problems as their Brazilian and Madagascan counterparts.

Hershey imports their cocoa beans and butter from West Africa(Ghana and the Ivory Coast). As of 2015 Hershey came under controversy due to the plantation like conditions in the West African cocoa bean fields and for child labor allegations. Hershey has refused to realize information on their cocoa sources to labor rights organizations and Hershey has yet to acquire fair-trade certification. The top producer of sugar cane is Brazil with the US as second and Mexico as third. Hershey has moved its sugar plants to Mexico to outsource production prices. Mexican sugarcane sectors employ about two million people.

Basically the only thing “American made” in a Hershey bar is milk and the workers in America fair better than the workers in other countries and with their shady refusal to use a fair trade organization as consumers we can only assume that their cocoa source uses unethical labor.

Barbie dolls, Aqua Net, Maidenform, Pond’s cold cream….

Betty Draper, with her beauty, her pettiness and her frustration at not being taken seriously by the men around her, has some parallels with my mother.

“My mother was very concerned about looks and weight,” Betty tells the psychiatrist she sees. Betty herself does everything she can to pass those same concerns down to her daughter Sally. Still, she refrains from making her most damning comment – “Sally looks fat” – in earshot of her daughter.

My mother wasn’t so discreet. Her nightly advice to my sister was the last thing any young girl wants to hear: “You could be so pretty if only you tried.” She also kept insisting to me that Elizabeth Taylor was the most beautiful woman in the world, to the point where I wanted to say, “Okay – but what do you want me to do about it?”

In other words, the huge emphasis that Betty puts on appearances couldn’t feel more familiar.

As for Don, he’s far more smooth and confident in manner than my father ever was – even if my father, in his thirties, did have his dapper moments. Don also pulls down a bigger salary than my father ever did.

Still, my father and Don reinvented themselves in oddly parallel ways. My father was a Southerner who became a Northerner – quite a feat. Don’s transformation, of course, is a bit more drastic. As flashbacks gradually reveal, his real name is Dick Whitman. He grew up in a brothel in the Midwest, in dire poverty (“My dream was indoor plumbing”). Harshly treated by the adults around him and desperate to escape, he joined the military and was posted to Korea. There, he had a chance to leave “Dick Whitman” behind forever by adopting the name of his dead commanding officer with whom he was almost killed in action. The two names sum up Don perfectly. “Dick” covers the philanderer in him. “Whitman” suggests he’s living by his wits. With “Don Draper,” he dons or drapes himself in a disguise. As more than one person on the show observes, he’s “a handsome cipher.”

“Who’s in there?” Betty asks aloud as she looks at her sleeping husband in bed.

“Who knows who you are?” his colleague Roger Sterling muses after Don once again has proven inconveniently evasive.

The show plays up this mystery both for laughs and to build intrigue.

“I’m from the Midwest,” Don declares. “I was taught that it’s not polite to talk about yourself.”

On the few occasions when he does talk honestly about himself, he winds up sabotaging his own carefully constructed carapace. In one amazing episode – Season Six’s closer, “In Care Of” – his candor results in him being forced to take a leave of absence from the ad agency in which he’s a partner. The circumstances: After presenting his planned ad campaign for Hershey bars, he calls his satisfied clients back into the conference room as they’re about to leave and tells them what Hershey bars really meant to him as a young boy growing up in a whorehouse.

It’s a disastrous professional move – but a liberating flameout for Don. With this disintegration, he launches himself into full flight, either up toward the heavens or down toward the abyss, it’s hard to say which.

Hershey bars, Clearasil, Coca-Cola…

These things were talismans. These things, as preposterous as it may seem, told us who we were and what we wanted.

When I heard about her name... I couldn’t resist..!