Politicising Pasta

Love and pasta for all. (x)

A couple of weeks ago, the chairman of Italian pasta company, Barilla, caused controversy by saying that his company would never create an advert featuring gay people, because “I don't think like them and I think that the family we try to address is anyway a classic family." Guido Barilla, the chairman, later apologised, saying that he was merely trying to point out that women play a central role in the family.

His apology, however, did nothing to mollify the many LGBT people and allies who vowed to boycott the brand, and there were countless other pasta brands stepping forward to announce their support for gay people and gay rights. Bertolli was one such brand with came out as pro-gay. They created an advert featuring gay pasta, and the slogan ‘love and pasta for all’, designed to entice in the people that Barilla had angered. Other pasta brands also joined in this industry political civil war, but the question is, why was it even necessary in the first place?
There are various anti-gay companies (and products) that have been boycotted over the years: Chick-fil-A, Domino’s Pizza, ExxonMobil, Russian vodka and so on, but the question is, why do companies feel the need wade in with an opinion on political and social justice issues? These are products that everyone needs and uses; these companies have a presence in the lives of millions of people, and surely they would want to include as many people of different demographics as possible within their client base?

Pasta is not, in my view at least, a political thing, and it should not be. There is no doubt that food, and its availability on a global scale, is a political issue, but one brand of pasta versus another should never need to be politicised.

If Guido Barilla had never made a statement about the adverts, and his personal views about gay people and gay relationships, then everyone would still be eating the company’s pasta. There would be no controversy; no loss of customers or revenue. There is such an erasure of any ‘non-classical’ families within television, advertising and culture generally anyway, that surely no one would have even noticed. Of course, this is not a good thing. We shouldn’t settle for a lack of representation in any aspect of daily life, be it the families and individuals we see on TV, the characters we read about in books, the figures within the government and other important institutions, and so on. But in my view, a deliberate exclusion is less tolerable than general oversight.

I suppose the nature of any society is that everything has some sort of involvement in the political, but it just doesn’t need to, and the fact that it is the president of a company’s view point in this case that is politicising the product that they make seems just a little ridiculous to me.

The fact is, I don’t care about the political views of the people who make things that I buy. I don’t care if the CEO of Cadbury’s votes Conservative, or if the person in charge of Twining’s Tea is for or against equal marriage, or whether the head of a company that makes batteries is a feminist or not. These people are all just that, people, who are no more or less entitled to their opinions and political leanings than the rest of us.

 What I do care about is when those views get in the way of the normal relationship between a product and the people who use it. Guido Barilla was obviously not just talking about his own political views, when he made the statement about why the company’s advertisement excluded gay people; he was speaking on behalf of a brand, and he was shutting out a group of potential customers. He was adding an unnecessary political spin to a very apolitical product.

Everyone eats pasta. Gay people eat pasta, straight people eat pasta, religious people of all different faiths and denominations eat pasta, people of colour; poor people, rich people, disabled people; people who are liberal or conservative in their political views. It doesn’t matter.

We live in a diverse world, and when you limit your view of that world, and limit the pool of people who you think should be buying your product (when it has such a global appeal as pasta, in particular), you just show a narrowness and naïveté, and you fail to grasp the fact that people everywhere want to buy your product. But not if you’re going to shut them out and exclude them.

The pasta scandal was unnecessary, and hopefully others will learn from it. Personal political views have no place in marketing, and if that is forgotten, then the LGBT community and our allies are getting really good at boycotts.