Peace Through Chocolate

Support my writing by buying a t-shirt

This shirt is a companion piece.

It began, as these things do, with an essay. I have long maintained that the KitKat is a socialist confection — a chocolate bar literally designed to be broken apart and shared — and that idle observation somehow grew into an ongoing investigation involving missing candy, rogue field agents, Japanese chocolatiers, West African cacao, an imaginary intelligence brigade, and an uncomfortable amount of real research into what chocolate has to say about commerce, colonialism, and the possibility of a more generous world.

Peace Through Chocolate is the wearable version of that argument. It carries the spirit of the KitKat Liberation Brigade’s field dispatches out of the essay and onto the street — a quiet manifesto for anyone who suspects that something built to be broken and shared might teach us how to do the same with everything else.

It is not a joke, exactly, though it is not entirely serious either. That is rather the point. The best satire smuggles something true inside it, and the truth here is simple: the things we make to share — chocolate, stories, a decent afternoon — are the things worth protecting. The cacao behind real chocolate carries a real history, one of labor and extraction and people who rarely taste the sweetness they produce. Wearing this is a small way of keeping that history in the conversation while still believing the conversation can be a hopeful one.

Every purchase supports the Blacknuss Network and the independent writing, film, and cultural work behind it — the essays, the dispatches, and the ongoing insistence that culture made outside the centralized distribution nodes is worth funding directly.

Read the essay here: https://floydwebb.substack.com/p/kit-kat-liberation-brigade?r=c40a

Then wear the argument. And break off a piece.

— Floyd Webb, Blacknuss Network