Who would want to live in a world without sugar? The Sugar Collective chose this deliberately provocative question to headline its 2005 advertising campaign.
In an environment marked by nutritional dictates, an ever-increasing number of diets and the invasion of supermarket shelves with supposedly low-fat products, the Sugar Collective’s campaign takes a humorous tone, stressing that sugar is a source of pleasure that would be very hard to do without. Depriving ourselves of sugar would also mean giving up part of a balanced diet. Eaten in moderation, sugar heightens our sense of taste and contributes to our body’s daily need for carbohydrates, which are necessary, for example, for normal brain functioning.
“Of course, this campaign is tongue-in-cheek, but we shouldn’t underestimate the perverse effects of all the nutritional standards and recommendations being foisted on consumers”, says Claude Risac, managing director of the Sugar Collective. “We wanted to remind people that the joy of eating, associated with our product among other things, is also a basic element of our culinary heritage and has an excellent balancing effect on the French way of dining.”
To illustrate what the world would be like without sugar, the campaign, created by the Publicis Conseil advertising agency, depicts scenes from daily life, such as having a cup of coffee at the bar, a biscuit that seems so much a part of a tearoom, an ice-cream cone on a summer’s day or a traditional pyramid-shaped wedding cake.
In each of these situations, living in a world without sugar requires resorting to substitutes that are both absurd and unappetizing, like an electrical connecting block, a bar of soap, a tennis ball or a garden hose. The photographs by Paul Lepreux present a dehumanized world without human warmth or pleasure.