The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

1.

I became interested in biscuits and one day found myself heading out to the west of London, past burnt-out shops and roped-off demolition sites, to the town of Hayes, the corporate home of United Biscuits, the number-one player in the British biscuit market and its second-largest producer of bagged nuts.

Through effort and subterfuge, I had secured an appointment with the Design Director at United Biscuits, a man named Laurence (rather than Lawrence, a distinction he repeatedly emphasised). To prepare for my encounter, I had immersed myself in the distinctive literature of biscuits and learnt a range of intriguing facts. I had discovered that the British spend £1.8 billion a year on biscuits, and that the market is technically divided into five categories: Everyday Biscuits, Everyday Treats, Seasonal Biscuits, Savoury Biscuits and Crackers & Crispbreads.

Everyday Biscuits, despite their lacklustre name, account for nearly a third of all sales and include Digestives, Rich Tea, Ginger Nuts and Hob Nobs. The Digestive, often dipped in tea for added moisture, is alone worth £34 million a year. For their part, Everyday Treats, evenly poised between the ordinary and the indulgent, are typically bought on Thursdays and Fridays by women between thirty-five and forty-four and number among their rank Jaffa Cakes, Cadbury’s Fingers and Fox’s Chocolate Viennese. As for Seasonal Biscuits, they are marketed only between the start of October and the end of December and come in highly decorated tins that comprise combinations of Cottage Crunch, Shortcake, Shortbread Finger and Chocolate Chip biscuits.

Much to the frustration of experts in both fields, Crackers & Crispbreads and Savoury Biscuits are routinely confused. To be clear, Crackers & Crispbreads are non-sweet biscuits intended to be eaten either as part of a diet or as an accompaniment to cheese or a spread, while Savoury Biscuits are to be enjoyed on their own and offer greater interest than standard crackers, usually thanks to the addition of a cheese or barbecue flavour. Activity in this final category has tended in recent years to be focused on the introduction of diminutive products such as the Mini Cream Cheese and Chive, the Baked Mini Cheddar and the Snack-A-Jack Mini Barbecue.

2.

Hayes itself was surprisingly devoid of charm. There were few restaurants, only one bowling alley and no cinemas. Such were the limitations of the place, a young woman I met in the course of my research told me that she would only ever accept a date with someone in nearby Hillingdon – a town which did not for that matter, at least on a cursory drive through it, strike me as having any notable advantages over its neighbour.

The biscuit company occupied a three-storey beige-brick building on a business park. It had for the previous five years been owned by a pair of private equity firms, one of which, the Blackstone Group, was headed by a financier legendary for buying the most expensive duplex in the history of Manhattan. Among the company’s most popular brands were McVitie’s, go ahead!, Twiglets, Hula Hoops, McCoy’s and KP Nuts. It also produced the prawn-flavoured cocktail snack Skips, known for its uniquely fizzy reaction with human saliva. A brochure in the lobby explained that United Biscuits took its social responsibilities seriously and that it had, through its Jaffa Cake Division, donated a number of shirts with logos on them to an under-seven football team in the town of Ruislip.

Laurence met me by the lifts, under the shadow of a giant bag of crisps. He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest’s eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor. One might have supposed that our mutual premature baldness would have led to a rapprochement, but the shared disability only generated an unwanted point of identification.

Laurence led me to the boardroom, where a table had been scattered with boxes of Moments, a six-centimetre-wide biscuit made of chocolate and shortcake, launched in the spring of 2006 at a ceremony (during which Laurence had made a speech in French) in a manufacturing plant in Belgium, following a two-year-long, £3 million development programme. Laurence was the biscuit’s author.

3.

This was not to say that Laurence knew how to bake, though he grew swiftly defensive in response to my expression of surprise at his inability. Biscuits are nowadays a branch of psychology, not cooking, he advised sternly.

Laurence had formulated his biscuit by gathering some interviewees in a hotel in Slough and, over a week, questioning them about their lives, in an attempt to tease out of them certain emotional longings that could subsequently be elaborated into the organising principles behind a new product. In a conference room in the Thames Riviera hotel, a number of low-income mothers had spoken of their yearning for sympathy, affection and what Laurence termed simply, with aphoristic brevity, ‘me-time’. The Moment set out to suggest itself as the plausible solution to their predicament.

While the idea of answering psychological yearnings with dough might seem daunting, Laurence explained that in the hands of an experienced branding expert, decisions about width, shape, coating, packaging and name can furnish a biscuit with a personality as subtly and appropriately nuanced as that of a protagonist in a great novel.

Early on, it became evident to Laurence that his biscuit would need to be round rather than square, given the associations drawn in almost all cultures between the circle and feminity and wholeness. It was similarly imperative that it contain small pieces of raisin and whole chocolate chips to convey an impression of kindly indulgence – though because it was not outright decadence which was being evoked, no cream would be involved.

Laurence spent a further half a year working with colleagues on dilemmas of packaging, eventually resolving that a mere nine biscuits should be settled into a black plastic tray encased in a glossy twenty-four-centimetre-long cardboard box. Laurence now initiated a debate about what to call the biscuits. Extensive consideration was given to Reflections, Retreats, Delights and, in a direct allusion to the biscuit’s founding concept, My Times – before the right name came to Laurence in what could kindly be described as a flash of inspiration.

It was time for attention to be paid to the choice of fonts. The designers’ initial layout had had the word Moments running in a romantic Edwardian script across the box, but there were concerns among some executives that this belied the product’s projected function as a pleasant supplement to real life rather than a means of escape from it – an issue addressed by a last-minute change in the m and s to a more vertical orientation, as befitted a snack which respected the realities of life even as it offered temporary relief from them.

4.

It is perhaps because many of us know what it is to spend an afternoon baking biscuits that there is something striking about encountering a company which relies on the labour of five thousand fulltime employees to execute the task.

Manoeuvres which one might briefly have carried out on one’s own in the kitchen (readying an oven, mixing dough, writing a label) had at United Biscuits been isolated, codified and expanded to occupy entire working lives. Although all employment at the company was ultimately predicated on the sale of confectionery and salted snacks, a high percentage of the staff were, professionally speaking, many times removed from contact with anything one might eat. They were managing the forklift truck fleet in the warehouse or poring over the eighty or so words written along the sides of a typical packet of salted nuts. Some had attained extraordinary expertise in the collection and analysis of sales data from supermarkets, while others daily investigated how to ensure a minimum of friction between wafers during transit.

Along with such specialisation came a raft of esoteric job titles: Packaging Technologist, Branding Executive, Learning Centre Manager, Strategic Projects Evaluator. Careers ploughed along deep and dedicated furrows: a start at Hula Hoops might be followed by promotion to Ridged Tortillas, a sideways shift to Baked Mini Cheddars, a management role at McVitie’s Fruitsters and a swan-song post at Ginger Nuts.

The unremitting division of labour resulted in admirable levels of productivity. The company’s success appeared to bear out the principles of efficiency laid down at the turn of the twentieth century by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who theorised that a society would grow wealthy to the extent that its members forfeited general knowledge in favour of fostering individual ability in narrowly constricted fields. In an ideal Paretan economy, jobs would be ever more finely subdivided to allow for the accumulation of complex skills, which would then be traded among workers. It would be in everyone’s best interest that doctors not waste time learning how to fix boilers, that train drivers not sew clothes for their children and that Biscuit Packaging Technologists leave questions of warehousing to graduates in supply-chain management, the better to concentrate their own energies on the improvement of roll-wrap mechanisms. In a perfect society, so specialised would all jobs be, that no one would any longer understand what anyone else was doing.

During a series of often bewildering conversations with members of staff, I came to realise that a Paretan utopia was now a realistic prospect at United Biscuits. But however great the economic advantages of segmenting the elements of an afternoon’s work into a range of forty-year-long careers, there was reason to wonder about the unintended side effects of doing so. In particular, one felt tempted to ask – especially on sombre days when the eastward-bound clouds hung low over the head office in Hayes – how meaningful the lives might feel as a result.

5.

When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning-focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to rural Malawi or might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing, aware that when it comes to improving the human condition a well-controlled defibrillator has the edge over even the finest biscuit.

But we should be wary of restricting the idea of meaningful work too tightly, of focusing only on the doctors, the nuns of Kolkata or the Old Masters. There can be less exalted ways to contribute to the furtherance of the collective good and it seems that making a perfectly formed stripey chocolate circle which helps to fill an impatient stomach in the long morning hours between nine o’clock and noon may deserve its own secure, if microscopic, place in the pantheon of innovations designed to alleviate the burdens of existence.

The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives and half a dozen different manufacturing sites. An endeavour endowed with meaning may appear meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted number of actors and therefore where particular workers can make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others.

It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children’s books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers. They are shopkeepers, builders, cooks or farmers – people whose labour can easily be linked to the visible betterment of human life. As creatures innately aware of balance and proportion, we cannot help but sense that something is awry in a job title like ‘Brand Supervision Coordinator, Sweet Biscuits’ and that whatever the logic and perspicacity of Vilfredo Pareto’s arguments, another principle to which no one has yet given a convincing name has here been ignored and subtler human laws violated.

6.

Matters were compounded because, whatever the modesty of the ends at United Biscuits, the means to produce the Moments and their siblings nevertheless required the dedication and self-discipline that might otherwise have been called upon to run a hospital or become a ballerina. A question of motivation appeared: whether the company could succeed in providing its staff with a sufficiently elevated set of ideals in whose name they were to exhaust themselves and surrender the greatest share of their lives.

Many of the proceedings at United Biscuits had to them an air of gravity akin to that which might obtain in an airport control tower. This was because, for all their questionable taste and negligible nutritional value, biscuits made money – and in the sort of quantities which would have overwhelmed the exchequers of the greatest monarchs of history. To look at the biscuit profit figures in the light of graphs by the modern historian of the Tudors, Sir Geoffrey Elton, the company was pulling in more money in profits every year than Henry VIII and Elizabeth I had succeeded in doing in their entire reigns combined – all this from a beige-brick office block in the north-eastern corner of Hayes, only twenty minutes by car from the gilded state rooms of Hampton Court.

Accordingly, even the head of the Blackstone private equity group (a man whose personal fortune outstripped the wealth of all the kingdoms of sub-Saharan Africa since the discovery of fire), had on occasion left behind his penthouse in order to genuflect before pastry. The company headquarters might have borrowed its aesthetic from a roadside motel, but only because, unlike the inhabitants of Versailles and the Escorial palace (distracted as they had been by thoughts of God, power and beauty), the leaders of the biscuit company harboured no doubt as to which divinity they were worshipping.

Perhaps for this reason, I was to encounter no jokes at any biscuit’s expense. The minders of the Ginger Nut and the Rich Tea, of the Jaffa Cake and the Moment, resembled a flock of patient, grave-faced courtiers ministering to the needs of a nursery of wilful infant emperors.

7.

Late one afternoon, after darkness had fallen across the business park in Hayes, rendering particularly visible the lights of aircraft (many of them wide-bodied jets coming in from Asia) as they descended towards Heathrow, I passed by a corner office in which an employee was typing up a document relating to the brand performance of the Moments range. It had been almost a year since the biscuit’s launch. Renae’s expression was thoughtful and absorbed, and though I could not immediately have said why, something about her brought to mind a painting by Edward Hopper which I had seen several years before at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

In New York Movie (1939), an usherette stands by the stairwell of an ornate pre-war theatre. Whereas the audience is sunk in semidarkness, she is bathed in a rich pool of yellow light. As often in Hopper’s work, her expression suggests that her thoughts have carried her elsewhere. She is beautiful and young, with carefully curled blond hair, and there are a touching fragility and an anxiety about her which elicit both care and desire. Despite her lowly job, she is the painting’s guardian of integrity and intelligence, the Cinderella of the cinema. Hopper seems to be delivering a subtle commentary on, and indictment of, the medium itself, implying that a technological invention associated with communal excitement has paradoxically succeeded in curtailing our concern for others. The painting’s power hangs on the juxtaposition of two ideas: first, that the woman is more interesting than the film, and second, that she is being ignored because of the film. In their haste to take their seats, the members of the audience have omitted to notice that they have in their midst a heroine more sympathetic and compelling than any character Hollywood could offer up. It is left to the painter, working in a quieter, more observant idiom, to rescue what the film has encouraged its viewers not to see.

A comparable dynamic seemed in play in the head office at Hayes, where there was a marked imbalance between the importance accorded to the supposed centres of interest – the biscuits – and the neglected value of humans like Renae who laboured to meet their demands. I wondered whether the biscuits might not be part of the very problem that they had been designed to address, whether their production and marketing was not indeed contributing to precisely the feelings of emptiness and nervous tension which they claimed to alleviate.

I wondered out loud to Renae why in our society the greatest sums of money so often tended to accrue from the sale of the least meaningful things, and why the dramatic improvements in efficiency and productivity at the heart of the Industrial Revolution so seldom extended beyond the provision of commonplace material goods like shampoo or condoms, oven-gloves or lingerie. I told Renae that our robots and engines were delivering the lion’s share of their benefits at the base of our pyramid of needs, that we were evident experts at swiftly assembling confectionery and yet we were still searching for reliable means of generating emotional stability or marital harmony. Renae had little to add to this analysis. A terrified expression spread across her features and she asked if I might excuse her.

Later, caught in a traffic jam on my way out of Hayes, in a landscape of discount-furniture warehouses and chemical storage tanks, I lost my temper and wished a biblical plague on the house of biscuits, so that its directors might learn to tremble before the right gods. I remembered a passage from John Ruskin’s The Crown of Wild Olive, written in 1866, eighty-one years before the invention of the Jaffa Cake: ‘Of all wastes, the greatest waste that you can commit is the waste of labour. If you went down in the morning into your dairy, and you found that your youngest child and the cat were at play together, and that the boy had poured out all the cream on the floor for the cat to lap up, you would scold the child, and be sorry the milk was wasted. But if, instead of wooden bowls with milk in them, there are golden bowls with human life in them, and instead of leaving that golden bowl to be broken by God at the fountain, you break it in the dust yourself, and pour the human blood out on the ground for the fiend to lick up – that is no waste! What! you perhaps think, “to waste the labour of men is not to kill them.” Is it not? I should like to know how you could kill them more utterly’.

Well-meaning friends advised me that I appeared to be slipping into an unfamiliar and somewhat hysterical mood, and might benefit from an interval of less stressful ‘me-time’.

8.

A week later, I received notice that the senior management of United Biscuits had approved my request to visit the factory where the Moments were manufactured, at a site in eastern Belgium, in hilly farming country between Verviers and the German border.

I chose to spend a few days driving there and so took a ferry to Ostend, then meandered along minor roads, stopping off at the occasional zoo or heraldic museum, afraid that I might otherwise leave Belgium sooner than I had planned. However, when it came to meals, I ran scared of the forced intimacy that provincial family restaurants so often involve and chose instead to eat in the anonymity of motorway service stations. At one of these, on the E40, I met a Turk who was driving a consignment of dates from Izmir to Copenhagen. We started chatting after I parked my car next to his articulated lorry, beside which he was shaving with a high-end Braun machine that cast a haunting green light across his face. Because I admired his chrome-plated cherry-coloured juggernaut, he invited me to have a look inside its cab, which had a small bunk-room at the rear fitted out with brightly coloured kilims, carved teak panelling and a window that looked out onto an incongruously flat northern European landscape on which a herd of Friesian cows was grazing.

In Liège, I booked in to the Holiday Inn, a concrete block which hovered on the outskirts of the town, seemingly fearful of entering its medieval centre and keenly nostalgic for the architecture of Detroit or Atlanta. In the evening, I ordered a breaded chicken escalope from room service, and ate it whilst sitting on my bed, reading a book on the history of art in the Low Countries. Some time past midnight, I began watching a television programme made up of a rolling succession of illustrated personal ads submitted by members of the public, including a baker from Charleroi who was on the look out for ‘l’amour et un peu plus’, a programme which continued for several hours deep into an insomniac night and revealed levels of longing that I had not until then suspected from my brief exchanges in this small and fractured nation.

The next morning, I woke up, still tired, to the sounds of a vacuum cleaner outside. Dressed in a towel, I opened the door and saw a trolley and an abandoned room-service tray on which sat the strangely appetising remnants of a hamburger and fries. The door opposite was ajar and I glimpsed two cleaners inside laughing animatedly while they worked. Seeing them strip the bed, I remembered the book I had read the previous night, which had detailed the way in which the seventeenth-century artists of the region had sought to celebrate the skills involved in domestic service, honouring in particular the scrubbing of kitchens and courtyards, privileging such activities over more conventionally prestigious biblical subjects.

By the time I was ready to go down to breakfast, the neighbouring room had been transformed. It had been turned into an immaculate history-less space awaiting its next occupant, motionless except for particles of dust whirling on the back of invisible eddies of air in a shaft of morning sunlight.

As often happens before an important appointment, I arrived far too early at the biscuit factory in the village of Lambermont – and so drove to a nearby archaeological museum, where I learnt about flint and axe manufacture in Neolithic Belgium. There were records of nasty disagreements and, in one display cabinet, the remains of a man whose head had been broken open with an axe, and who had been found by archaeologists curled up in a defensive position, hugging himself from the blows of his opponent. The agony of death long ago became so vivid that the importance and solidity of the present were for a time thrown into doubt.

Because my appointment to tour the factory had been scheduled to start at the ambiguous hour of twelve-thirty, I had earlier that morning given thought to whether I might be offered lunch or should eat beforehand, eventually deciding to make some cheese sandwiches at the breakfast buffet, a snack I now ate in the car while listening to a radio interview with the Belgian finance minister.

When I pulled up at the gates of the plant, Michel Pottier, the manager, was waiting for me in person, carrying with him a spare white gown, a pair of rubber shoes and a hairnet, an outfit forced upon all visitors which, by giving one a sense of adhering to an extreme millenarian movement, was apt to lend a peculiar tone to conversations.

A warm-hearted and garrulous figure, Pottier had prepared a second lunch for me in a corner of his office, and expected a hearty appetite, so I consumed three additional sandwiches and several Moments which had come off the line only that morning. As we ate, Pottier took me through some of the challenges attendant on the making of biscuits, placing special emphasis on the need to cool the dough rapidly enough to prevent it from melting the chocolate with which it would subsequently be coated. Years of working around noisy machinery had left my host mildly deaf in one ear and given him a concomitant habit of leaning in uncomfortably close during discussions, so close that I began to dread his enunciation of a word with a p or a g in it. Pottier’s disquisitions on topics such as the plant’s annual biscuit tonnage and the ideal viscosity of chocolate did not always accurately gauge the levels of interest of his interlocutor, but they communicated clearly enough a surprisingly intense pride in the plant and its workers.

Alongside the Moment, the factory also supplied a number of leading brands for the European market, including Delichoc, Gateau and Teatime. Pottier informed me that this last, a chocolate-covered digit, had recently been marketed in a limited-edition tin bearing an image of two minor members of the Belgian royal family cradling their newborn baby.

When we entered the main production hall, I was reminded of the peculiar feeling I had experienced in other factories upon seeing modestly sized domestic objects emerge from the jaws of colossal machines housed in hangars large enough for airships. Biscuits which I had until then seen only in packets of nine were here rolling down the conveyor belt at a rate of eleven hundred a minute. A polydimensional sprinkler was enrobing the Moments in chocolate whilst another porcupined them with small shards of nuts. The technology behind this machinery had been borrowed from applications as disparate as the machine gun, the stapler, the space shuttle’s robotic arm and the loom. A mixer was kneading six thousand tonnes of dough as an adjacent contraption assembled thirty-five thousand brightly coloured biscuit cartons per hour.

This mechanisation had been introduced not so much because human beings were unable to perform the tasks in hand, but because labour had grown prohibitively expensive. Economics dictated the superior logic of hiring a few engineers to develop three-armed hydraulic machines, then firing two-thirds of the staff and paying them unemployment benefits so that they could stay at home watching television, subsidised by revenues from corporation taxes paid by the likes of United Biscuits.

One felt in the presence of so much that consumers who slit open their packets of Moments would be unlikely to imagine. For example, the windowless hall, filled with a gentle aroma of sugar and chocolate, where two middle-aged women in hairnets sat facing each other over a moving rubber carpet, looking out for the smallest fault in the texture of dough, and occasionally reaching over to pick out an offending biscuit, their concentrated stares suggesting that they were engaged in a tense game of drafts. Their work nevertheless left them with enough energy for conversation: one was telling the other that her son was, in spite of his family’s advice to the contrary, still going out with a slut obsessed by clothes and the tanning salon (she didn’t sound uninteresting), as serried ranks of biscuits passed by, to unsung fates in boardrooms in Dundee or nursing homes in Poole.

Then there was Hassan, whose job it was to keep watch on a mixer as high as a house, adding vegetable fat to flour as necessary, and who had arrived in Belgium from a village in western Algeria three months before. There was also the forlorn bus stop outside the factory, from where workers departed to neighbouring villages and towns, and the remarkable presence of nature all around the factory, with a horse in an adjoining field gazing lazily up to the corporate flag of United Biscuits, which flapped like a flannel in an icy breeze.

The factory was an economic entity, no doubt, but it was also a product of architecture, psychology and ethnography. One wondered whether its owners at the Blackstone Group were aware of the full implications of owning a tract of the earth and the largest share of the lives of two hundred people in eastern Belgium, and whether an imaginative recognition of these facts ever crossed their minds when they glanced at the profit-and-loss figures in their offices in Manhattan and whether they might even, at the close of their careers, derive a particular pleasure and a sense of responsibility from their investment unconnected to any financial considerations.

Most of Pottier’s efforts focused on keeping the factory line rolling at all times. The previous summer, when temperatures had reached forty degrees centigrade indoors, he had had to borrow a row of air-conditioning units from the Belgian air force to protect his chocolate. Stray hairs were a constant concern and necessitated weekly lectures to staff on the correct use of their cotton hats. Nevertheless, there had been three expensive interruptions to the line in the run-up to Christmas, caused by false alarms when black hair-like bristles fixed to the ends of certain machines had come loose, incidents which had prompted Pottier to install a set of new brushes, finished in a vivid orange colour seldom seen on the human head.

The care and skill which Pottier brought to his occupation reinforced the point made in the book I had been reading the previous evening, with its analysis of two contrasting approaches to work found in the histories of Protestant and Catholic thought. In Catholic dogma, the definition of noble work had mostly been limited to that done by priests in the service of God, with practical and commercial labour relegated to an entirely base category unconnected to the display of any specifically Christian virtues. By contrast, the Protestant worldview as it had developed over the sixteenth century attempted to redeem the value of everyday tasks, proposing that many apparently unimportant activities could in fact enable those who undertook them to convey the qualities of their souls. In this schema, humility, wisdom, respect and kindness could be practised in a shop no less sincerely than in a monastery. Salvation could be worked out at the level of ordinary existence, not only in the grand, sacramental moments which Catholicism had privileged. Sweeping the yard and arranging the laundry cupboard were intimately related to the most significant themes of existence.

Pottier animated the Protestant ideal. His manner drew attention away from what he was doing in favour of how he was doing it. His approach suggested that there might be a continuity, rather than an insurmountable barrier, between work at the top and bottom of the ladder of meaning – and that many of the talents exercised in the most exalted tasks were no less likely to be found inside a steel hangar reverberating with the sound of dough-mixers and chocolate-coating machines.

9.

Partially undermining the manufacturer’s ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?

Yet before ridiculing the Branding Director of Savoury Biscuits, or for that matter the Special Events Manager who had signed off on the tinned assortment featuring Prince Philippe and Princess Mathilde of Belgium on its lid, it was wise to remember that at the heart of biscuit salesmanship lay an imperative which was undoubtedly both urgent and simple enough to qualify as meaningful – namely, survival. Workers were occupied with the ancient task of trying to stay alive, which simply happened to require, in a consumer economy overwhelmingly based on the satisfaction of peripheral desires, a series of activities all too easily confused with clownishness.

Despite a few years of healthy profits, United Biscuits’ balance sheet was perennially vulnerable. Following the closures of all local steel, textile and coal industries, the area around the factory had some of the worst unemployment figures in the European Union, and accompanyingly high rates of crime and suicide. Any miscalculation in branding or manufacturing techniques, or a sudden increase in the price of wheat, or an irregularity in the supply of cocoa, could at a stroke wipe out a section of the workforce, who would be unlikely ever to find adequate labour locally again. Pottier knew what responsibility he shouldered for his people. He expressed particular concern at the predatory behaviour of his main competitor, the misleadingly cosy-sounding LU brand, owned by the gigantic French Danone Group. The two enterprises regularly locked horns like stags fighting to the death over a limited habitat, in this case, the ten or so metres of the typical biscuit-aisle in the supermarkets of Northern Europe. Their respective sales teams waged sly campaigns to steal each other’s market share. Every product which United Biscuits made in Belgium was imitated by LU: its Delichoc, a butter biscuit coated in chocolate, faced off against LU’s Le Petit Écolier; its plain butter biscuit Gateau went head to head with LU’s Le Petit Beurre; and its chocolate-and-orange Colombine was countered by LU’s Pim’s Orange, even as its Domino, a wafer cookie with a chocolate cream filling, contended for its existence with LU’s Le Fondant.

The manufacture and promotion of all of these was no game, but rather an attempt to subsist which was no less grave, and therefore no less worthy of respect and dignity, than a boar hunt on whose successful conclusion the fate of an entire primitive community might once have hung. For if a new wrapping machine did not operate as efficiently as anticipated, or if a slogan failed to capture the imagination of shoppers, there would be no escape from shuttered houses and despair in the suburbs of nearby Verviers. The biscuits carried lives on their backs.

Modern commercial endeavours may not be of the kind that we have been taught to associate with heroism. They involve battles fought with the most bathetic of instruments, with two-for-the-price-of-one specials and sticker-based bribes, but they are battles nonetheless, comparable in their intensity and demands to the tracking of furtive animals through the deadly forests of prehistoric Belgium.

10.

I travelled back to England along the route used weekly by a fleet of articulated lorries transporting shipments of Moments from their plant to the United Biscuits distribution centre at Ashby de la Zouch. Near Ostend, I stopped off at a service station whose forecourt was lined with trucks heading for the cross-Channel ferries.

I lapsed into thoughts of factories across the continent involved in making breadsticks and candles, rubber bands and butter, lasagne and batteries, pillow cases and toy boats – and in turn, I imagined trucks that would at that moment be crossing Europe, travelling north with fondue sets, west with hi-fi parts, underneath the Alps with cellophane and around the Bay of Biscay with puff cereal.

At the end of a field opposite the service station ran the high-speed Thalys rail line, on which bullet trains sped at 250 kilo metres an hour between the Netherlands and France, each machine costing some 28 million euros. Inside, passengers might have been reading papers and having a drink (maybe a Pepsi Light, a Tropicana Mixed Fruit Vitalité, a Fanta Lemon or a Schweppes Dry Orange), while outside, the shadows of trees flickered in the dusk like the projected images of early films. What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn and unable sensibly to adjudicate between the worthwhile ends to which money might be put and the often morally trivial and destructive mechanisms of its generation.

It was in the eighteenth century that economists and political theorists first became aware of the paradoxes and triumphs of commercial societies, which place trade, luxury and private fortunes at their centre whilst paying only lip service to the pursuit of higher goals. From the beginning, observers of these societies have been transfixed by two of their most prominent features: their wealth and their spiritual decadence. Venice in her heyday was one such society, Holland another, eighteenth-century Britain a third. Most of the world now follows their example.

Their self-indulgence has consistently appalled a share of their most high-minded and morally ambitious members, who have railed against consumerism and instead honoured beauty and nature, art and fellowship. But the premises of a biscuit company are a fruitful place to recall that there has always been an insurmountable problem facing those countries that ignore the efficient production of chocolate biscuits and sternly dissuade their ablest citizens from spending their lives on the development of innovative marketing promotions: they have been poor, so poor as to be unable to guarantee political stability or take care of their most vulnerable citizens, whom they have lost to famines and epidemics. It is the high-minded countries that have let their members starve, whereas the self-centred and the childish ones have, off the back of their doughnuts and six thousand varieties of ice cream, had the resources to invest in maternity wards and cranial scanning machines.

Amsterdam was founded on the sale of raisins and flowers. The palaces of Venice were assembled from the profits of the carpet and spice trades. Sugar built Bristol. And yet despite their frequently amoral policies, their neglect of ideals and their selfish liberalism, commercial societies have been graced with well-laden shops and treasuries swollen enough to provide for the construction of temples and foundling hospitals.

At my window seat in the motorway service station outside Ostend, observing the departure of a lorry carrying toilet rolls to Denmark, I opened a box of Moments that Pottier had presented to me as a farewell gift and thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to our sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends, and where we are hence prone to fall into crises of meaning at our computer terminals and our warehouses, contemplating with low-level despair the banality of our labour while at the same time honouring the material fecundity that flows from it – knowing that what may look like a childish game is in fact never far from a struggle for our very survival. All of these ideas seemed embedded in an unexpectedly comforting set of glutinous, chocolate-coated Moments.