Consuming Lives, Consuming Landscapes:Interpreting Advertisements For Cafédirect Coffees

This paper explores the marketing strategies of Cafédirect, a company that pays a guaranteed price for coffee to Latin American and African producers and sells it to UK consumers. Based on a visual and textual analysis of newspaper advertising, the concern here is with representatins used to hail potential consumers. These might be understood as a challenge to commodity fetishism, the concern being to reveal the (unequal) social relations underlying conventional coffee production and to present the consumer with the opportunity to transform such relations through the purchase of fairly traded coffee. In case the moral imperative proves insufficient, even greater emphasis is placed on the quality and superiority of the product, such that its consumption becomes a matter of selfworth and social distinction. Notwithstanding the viability of effecting social justice through consumption, the adverts can also be read as symbolically re-inscribing relations of power between majority world and minority world. For example, while they routinely render aspects of producers’ lives ‘knowable’ to potential consumers, their faces displayed, stories told about their poverty and about the difference access to fair trade markets has made, producers have little control over these meanings and no opportunity of a reverse gaze. Moreover, I argue that the commodity does in fact remain fetishized, in order that the pleasures of the consumer can be privileged. Thus consumers are invited to savour the coffee-growing landscape along with their coffee, presented as natural, authentic, uninhabited, a salve to the superficiality and artificiality of late capitalism. I argue that these problematic representations of lives and landscapes are by no means accidental or arbitrary but intrinsic to the consumption of difference on which the advertising relies. However, effective redistribution may be reliant on such misrecognition.