The politics of Nutella

By Elisabetta Povoledo, International Herald Tribune

BRA, Italy -- Is Nutella, the chocolate hazelnut spread, left- or
right-wing?

"Only Italians could turn something like this into an ideological
question," said Gigi Padovani, who put the question to a group of
students at the Velso Mucci Institute, a technical school for chefs and
waiters in this small town in northern Italy.

As the dark creamy treat turns 40, intellectuals throughout the country
have been debating what Padovani calls the "cultural, social, artistic
and gastronomic phenomenon" that is Nutella.

"It's only here that people say that a shower is 'left' while a bath is
'right,' jeans are 'left,' a jacket is 'right,' or that Nutella is
'left' and Swiss Chocolate is 'right,"' said Padovani, setting off
titters among the students.

He was teasing, but he had a point to make: "All generations have
appropriated Nutella - they all feel as though it belongs to them. It
transcends generations. It is national-popular," he said, referring to a
concept coined by the founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio
Gramsci. "Today we would call it bipartisan."

Padovani, who writes for the Turin daily La Stampa, is the author of
"Nutella, un mito italiano," (Nutella, an Italian myth).

As Italy's foremost "Nutellologist," he has had a busy year, traveling
around the country, and Europe, lecturing on the pervasive popularity of
his gooey specialty.

Eulogized in print, in song and on screen, Nutella is one of those rare
products that have transcended their nature as food to enter the
collective consciousness.

Over time, it has come to resemble Proust's madeleines, the small cakes
that evoked for the French writer the serenity and pleasures of
childhood.

Want to see Italians get misty-eyed? Just ask them for an early
childhood Nutella memory.

Equally wistful remembrances are common in other European countries,
where the chocolate spread has been on the shelves for nearly as long.

Luxembourg, where Ferrero, the spread's maker, has its headquarters, has
the world's highest per capita consumption of Nutella, at more than a
kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, per year - 10 large jars - for a family of
four. France and Italy follow, with 800 grams.

Unlike other products, like pizza and parmesan cheese, Nutella is not
seen as identifiably Italian.

Yet the spread was invented in a confectionary shop in Alba, a town in
the Piedmont region where Ferrero still has its oldest factory.

"For us, the association of Ferrero and Alba is a given, but in other
countries Nutella is lived as a global brand," said Cinzia Scaffidi of
Slow Food, an Italian arbiter of taste.

Scaffidi told the students that Nutella was "glocal," or rooted in the
territory but widely distributed, and speculated that this was the key
to its popularity.

Padovani said that Nutella had never been contested by antiglobalization
activists "because it belongs to the people." Eaten by princesses and
proletarians alike, Nutella is also a social equalizer, he said, "like
pasta."

Nutella is on sale in more than 100 countries, netting Ferrero about
EUR 640 million, or $850 million, a year.

Affection for the chocolate spread is such that even the diet-conscious
overlook Nutella's caloric punch and Ferrero can blithely ignore the
growing demand for "lite" foods.

A spokesman for the company said that there were no plans for a
Nutella-lite.

The spread's initial success coincided with Italy's postwar economic
boom, providing a low-cost product that could satisfy a country emerging
from years of hunger.

It built up brand loyalty with clever marketing tools, introducing
single servings and selling the cream out of reusable glasses, which are
now collectors' items.

Strong brand identification is also the result of clever marketing. Just
a decade after Ferrero put Nutella on the market, ads were already
evoking the spread as a product trusted by mothers of past generations.

"It was immediately positioned as a historic product," said Sandro
Castaldo, who teaches marketing at Milan's Bocconi University. "And it
has managed to continuously reposition itself without losing its sense
of history."

Then there are the spread's "political tendencies," to which Padovani
devotes a section of his book.

Inspired by a celebrated scene in ''Bianca," a 1984 movie by the leftist
filmmaker Nanni Moretti in which the actor/director relieves his
post-coital anxieties by eating from a gigantic jar of chocolate spread,
Italian leftists appropriated Nutella as their own.

But Padovani points out that when Italians started holding "Nutella
parties" in the mid-1990s, the first were organized by Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi's rightist Forza Italia party.

Padovani posits that Nutella has transcended generations to become an
ideology in itself. It represents, he says, the general sense of getting
along well together and "goodism," the Italian tendency "to envelop
everything in something sweet, which also hides any difficulties. This
is the essence of Italianness: goodness that spreads."