What do politics and chocolate have in common? And how can we better understand the former with a little help from the latter? Ben Blount and Bryan Kett developed the idea for Unfair Share: The Gerrymandered Chocolate Bar, which they describe as, "a delicious, tactile representation of political inequity."
Evan Kleiman: Since our audience is only listening to us talk about this chocolate bar and not looking at it, why don't one of you explain what the Unfair Share chocolate bar looks like and how it breaks apart.
Ben Blount: It's packaged like a regular chocolate bar — comes in a nice, fancy box and lovely silver foil. But when you open it, you see faint lines that show rectangles.You can see how traditional bars are typically broken, but ours are broken up like real gerrymandered congressional districts. There are these squiggly, strange, odd shapes from gerrymandered districts in Texas [and] Georgia. There's the famous duck from Ohio. There's one from Alabama, Louisiana, and then a little funky one from North Carolina. Immediately, when you open the bar, it smells and looks like chocolate. But there's something different.
While a regular bar of chocolate breaks into rectangles, the Gerrymandered Chocolate Bar is divided into strange shapes of congressional districts. Photo courtesy of Unfair Share.
How did you come up with the idea? Do either of you have a background in politics or making chocolate?
Bryan Kett: Ben and I have worked on projects before Ben's. So what Ben didn't say is, he designed the letterpress packaging. It's beautiful packaging. It's really embossed, like you can see that it's very tactile. You can see, what would you call that, Ben? It's not embossed. It's…
Ben Blount: …you can feel the impression, yeah.
Bryan Kett: We were in Ben's studio in Evanston, Illinois, this was a few summers ago, and Ben just said to me, "I met a chocolatier. Can we do anything with that?" That got us thinking about it and talking. This idea was kicking around for a long time. We just kind of came together.
Gerrymandering was kind of in this public spotlight. When the writers strike happened out here, it was finally time for us to do something about it and divert our efforts towards this. So we launched a Kickstarter. We didn't end up working with the original chocolatier that Ben had met. We started working with an organization called Birmingham Chocolate in Birmingham, Michigan, just outside of Detroit. They're amazing, and the chocolate is fantastic. We got an email a few days ago from this guy, Gary, who just ended his note by saying, "No B.S., best chocolate I've tasted in some time. Don't change that recipe."
What do you hope to achieve with the Unfair Share chocolate bar?
Ben Blount: I think it's a great vehicle to tell the story about not only gerrymandering, but just getting people involved and active in politics. Obviously, this is a big election year, and we had a big election four years ago. The bar is just something you can hold in your hand and can immediately tell the story about gerrymandering, and people immediately get how ridiculous and absurd this is. The bar should be broken this way, but it's broken in a strange way. And our districts in our country should be broken fairly and equally, but they're not. People can make the immediate connection, and hopefully it gives them a chance to have a conversation, but more importantly, maybe act and do something about it.
Bryan Kett: All of my friends who have kids who have gotten this and they've broken it apart, it immediately starts to fight every single time amongst their children as to who got more, who got less. That's a real lesson in our current political climate. And a portion of proceeds from each bar benefit fair redistricting. We wanted to really do something with it, too, other than just raise awareness.
Bryan Kett (left) and Ben Blount crowdfunded their politically-minded chocolate bar. Photo courtesy of Unfair Share.
I'm really curious when you crowdfund, like you did with the Kickstarter campaign, you get a lot of information about the people that have given you money. Did people donate from all over the country?
Bryan Kett: We have really interesting traffic from all over the country right now, everywhere from Illinois, California, New York, Ohio, Alabama, Oregon, North Carolina. This isn't the last 30 days, Kentucky, Connecticut. So our orders were from all over the country, and that's kind of trending the same way.
That's fantastic. What made both of you so passionate about this particular issue, gerrymandering?
Ben Blount: I think we're both storytellers at heart, in our passion projects and the work that we do, and it just seems such an egregious thing, the idea that this is legal and that both parties can just gerrymander and rig things to support their candidates. It's just so patently unfair, we thought it was a good area to tackle. And again, it's so simple, like,"This is right, this is wrong." How could we tell that story?