Where chocolate Easter bunnies come from: in advertising. Two 2015 films advertising the Lindt Gold Bunny as a character with no back-story beyond its chocolate-maker or factory. Lindt tells the story here.
Where chocolate Easter bunnies come from: in activism. A 2013 campaign by Erklärung von Bern where a chocolate bunny discovers who picked the cocoa that made him. Campaign details here.
Tag: Join the dots
TACTIC: sweatshops, environmental catastrophes, over-consumption, extremes of wealth & poverty, etc. are well known but disconnected issues. Trade justice activism connects them, & that’s powerful.
“Fazerin Sininen -suklaan Suklaakoulu-kampanja“ Fazer-yhtiön hyväntekeväisyyskeräyskampanja. Yllä oleva vaalikampanjamainos Helsingin Sanomissa.
Suomen suosituin suklaavalmistaja Fazer julkaisee koko etusivun ilmoituksen johtavassa päivälehdessä. Yritys lupaa lahjoittaa 5 senttiä jokaisesta myydystä Fazer Blue -suklaalevystä koulurakennushankkeeseen Norsunluurannikolla. Juuri siellä yrityksen kaakaopavut viljellään lapsiorjien voimin. Tarvitsevatko nämä lapset koulun vai jotain muuta Fazerilta?
Sivun viite: Eeva Kemppainen (2026) Fazerin Sininen -suklaan Suklaakoulu-kampanja. followthethings.com/fazer-blue-chocolate-cocoa-school-campaign.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
“Help Me Please PMP Staff Are Evil“ An anonymous note found in a make-up advent calendar ordered from amazon.co.uk, posted on facebook and reported in the Daily Mirror, Sun and other UK newspaper websites. Photograph of note reproduced above.
It’s the beginning of December. Christmas is coming. A British dad has ordered an Advent Calendar for his 13 year-old daughter from Amazon. It was supposed to come with a ‘love, dad’ note from him. But it came with a note from someone else too. Written by hand on the gift invoice, it said ‘Help me please PMP staff are evil’. PMP is an employment agency that Amazon uses to source temporary warehouse staff, especially at peak times of year like the lead-up to Christmas. April, the daughter, found it and showed it to her Mum, Kim. They had no idea who PMP were. But Kim posted it on facebook, tagging amazon, asking for an explanation. Amazon replied quite quickly, but so did her facebook friends. Then the story of the note reached the newspapers, it became a festive news feature. The Daily Mirror story was linked to a recent exposé by its journalists of appalling pay and working conditions at Amazon warehouses. This note linked what might otherwise be a distant story to the lives of consumers on the receiving end of the company’s cheap and conveniently-delivered goods. While there was some discussion on twitter, it was the comments section on the Daily Mail story where the discussion rapidly took shape. Was this a fake story? 15 minutes of fame for April and/or Kim? Made up by the journalists for some festive clicks? Should she have posted it online when the information on that invoice could easily have identified the writer? Could they have been sacked? Was Amazon warehouse work really that bad? Yes, according to the Daily Mirror exposé, and according to the commenters who seemed to have some experience of working in these places too. What impacts did this story have? If any? ‘Help Me Please PMP Staff Are Evil’ is one of many real and fake messages sent – accidentally and deliberately – by workers to consumers, showing them what work and life has gone into making their things, and sometimes asking for help. Click ‘message from worker‘ above to see the collection. Each one works out differently, so what happens as a result of this one being sent, received and made public? Keep reading!
Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2025) Help Me Please PMP Staff Are Evil (under construction). followthethings.com/help-me-please-pmp-staff-are-evil.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
“Xmas Unwrapped“ A short film edited by Toby Smith and Unknown FieldsDivision with Tim Maughan. Posted in YouTube, embedded above in full.
This short ‘Jingle Bells’ Chinese Christmas factory film comes from a larger initiative to rethink architecture. According to Unknown Fields Division co-founder Liam Young, ‘an architect’s skills are completely wasted on making buildings’. They should be turning their attention to the outsides that are inside them: i.e. the hidden geographies of infrastructure, logistics, commodities and connected landscapes. For ‘follow the thingers’ familiar with Geographer Doreen Massey’s concept of a ‘global sense of place’ [seethis example], this extroverted sense of place may seem familiar. But there’s so much to learn from Unknown Fields’ architectural experiments. First, from the thoroughly collaborative and interdisciplinary studio practice of Unknown Fields Division. Second, from the long-running postgraduate course at the Architectural Association in London where Liam Young has taken students on infrastructural ‘expeditions’ for many years. Third, from the writers, filmmakers, data-visualisers and programmers who have accompanied these expeditions and produced its highly-professional and publicly eye-catching work. Xmas Unwrapped is one such output – a ‘Christmas card’ – from a 2014-15 expedition called AWorld Adrift. We’ve asked our ‘Geographies of material culture’ students to watch it before writing their coursework over the Christmas break. It doesn’t have a explicit message, but it’s catchy and thought-provoking. There’s observational footage of people working in a basic factory space in China making Christmas decorations and Santa hats by hand. Other people box these up, load them into a container, and the film finishes with a view from bridge of a container ship sailing out to sea, taking them to their consumer destinations. If you watch it with the sound down and the film footage is undramatic. People just work. Their tasks are repetitive. Their heads are down. They say nothing. The footage does not aim – it seems – to evoke any emotion in its audience. But turn up the volume and it’s accompanied by a choir of children singing ‘Jingle Bells’ in Cantonese. And it’s this combination of film footage and music that provokes a reaction. It’s catchy. This film is a gentle form of trade justice activism. You could call it an appetiser. It’s trying to ‘pop the bubble’ of Western consumption by ‘joining the dots’ to Chinese factory production. It does not explicitly address trade injustice, exploitation, labour rights or any consumer or producer activism relating to this. The factory and logistics workers it features don’t have a voice in their representation. Unknown Fields Division isn’t making this work because they want audiences to do anything. Just to know and to reflect on the fact that its audience member’s things are made by people elsewhere in the world. This filmcan be used as a brief and gently provocative spark for discussions of trade (in)justice in any classroom [like another example on our site, Handprint] but also – especially – around a Christmas dinner table. Because Unknown Field Division‘s expeditions have so many people on them, this film is the tip of an iceberg. The most noticeable impacts it has are not on its audiences [as far we can see] but on the expedition’s students and collaborators. They produce other work that brings attention to this Christmas story, and to the wider project on architecture’s dependence on supply chain logistics. Follow the arguments below.
Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2025) Xmas Unwrapped. followthethings.com/xmas-unwrapped.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
“Who made my stuff?” | example⏵ Gillete Razor Blades A ‘follow it yourself’ detective work task suitable for activists, journalists, filmmakers, artists, researchers, teachers and students CEO Ian’s ‘Traces of labour’ YouTube playlist embedded above. Can be used as a task / lesson taster. The jeans paper mentioned is Hauser (2004)
Behind the followthethings.com website lies a university undergraduate module called ‘Geographies of material culture’ taught be CEO Ian from 2000 to 2025. The first version of the module (2000-2008) encouraged students to do some online detective work to see if they could find out who had made a commodity that mattered to them. He wanted his students to appreciate if and how their everyday lives were made possible – in part – by the work done by supply chain workers elsewhere in the world. He wanted to them to find out, and think, about the responsibilities that they and others had for any trade injustices they found in the process. The results were always surprising, and Ian started to share some of their writing (with permission) with geography school teachers which led Ian and his students being invited to publish some in teacher-facing journals (see Angus et al 2001, Cook et al 2006, 2007a&b). Because this detective work always began in their personal worlds of consumption, Ian was invited to bring this ‘follow it yourself’ approach into a Geographical Association and Royal Geographical Society project called the ‘Action Plan for Geography’ (see Martin 2008, Griffiths 2009). This, in turn, helped the ‘follow the thing’ approach to gain a wider audience after it the GA and RGS wanted it to be included in the 2013 UK National Curriculum for Geography as a means to teach students about trade (see Parkinson & Cook 2013, University of Exeter 2014). Ian taught this approach to trainee geography teachers at the University of Nottingham who tried this out on their placements and wrote #followtheteachers posts for the followthethings.com blog (see Whipp 2013). It was also fleshed out in the ‘Who made my clothes?” online course that Ian co-authored and presented for the Fashion Revolution movement (Cook et al 2017-2018: see here). There’s one main principle in this ‘follow it yourself’ work: if you know how and where to look, you can find a connection between your life and the lives of others who have made anything that matters to you, anything that’s part of your life. There’s been an explosion of journalism, NGO activism, academic research and corporate social responsibility initiatives relating to trade justice since the 1990s that means that there are secondary data sources that you can find, sift and create a story about anything that comes from anywhere – or so it seems. Doing this detective work in groups can encourage diverse learners to share their expertise (e.g. by drawing on their experiences of living in different parts of the world, and being able to research in different languages: see Bowstead 2014). Doing it for younger learners can motivate them to write (e.g. by asking them what they would say to the person who picked the cocoa in their Milky Bar buttons, for example – see Lambert 2015). And doing his kind of thing as an academic researcher can help you to produce ‘follow the thing’ publications (see Taffell 2022). We have updated the advice we gave in the 2000s and set it out below as a three stage process: A – reading the results of other ‘follow it yourself’ research; B – choosing the thing you want to follow; and C – doing the ‘follow it yourself’ detective work to find out who made it for you and the trade justice issues that come with this. To illustrate what this research is like to do, what sources you can find where, and how to find and follow a productive trail, we have researched a new example from start to finish: who made Ian’s pack of Gillette razor blades? Just click ⏵ example to find out.
Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2025) Who made my stuff? followthethings.com/who-made-my-stuff.shtml (last accessed <add date here>)
Estimated reading time (including example detective work): 80 minutes
“Following the white phosphorus trail” A series of four TV news stories broadcast on Al Jazeera English. Embedded in the YouTube playlist above.
‘Follow the things’ trade justice activism tends to connect unknowing consumers to the exploited supply chain workers who make the things they buy. But not when it comes to the arms trade. Here, the direction of travel is reversed: it’s this industry’s ultimate ‘consumers’ – the people who are killed and maimed by these commodities – that activists are worried about, especially when their use can be considered a war crime. Since Hamas’ October 7th 2023 attack on Israel and the Israeli government’s military response (described by many, and denied by Israel, as a genocide), arms trade activists around the world have set out to make public the geographies of the arms trade supplying the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and to disrupt this via non-violent direct action. They have also sought to hold arms manufacturers, shipping companies, Israeli and other goverments, and the IDF accountable for their actions under international law. But who are the people who make these weapons, where in the world? What do they know about the devastating impacts of their work? How do they feel about this? How do they rationalise it? Who’s responsible for this death and destruction? Soon after Hamas’ October 7th attack, news reports emerged that accused the IDF of using white phosphorus shells to bomb civilians in Gaza and Lebanon. These shells are designed to light up the sky, and/or to provide a smokecreen, for ground troops to more safely move into an area. That’s their permitted use. But if they’re used to bomb people, that’s a war crime. White phosphorus burns when it comes into contact with oxygen, and it keeps burning for weeks. It’s fat soluble so, if it lands on people’s skin, it burns and burns. Journalists and arms trade activists could identify where these white phosphorus shells were made from production codes they found on fragments of the shells found in burning ruins. An arsenal in the small town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, USA, was the source. And not for the first time. In 2008-9, white phosphorus shells from the Pine Bluff Arsenal had been dropped on Palestinian civilians during the IDF’s ‘Operation Cast Lead’. The Quatari news station Al Jazeera sent a reporter there and broadcast at least four news stories that followed the trail of white phosphorus munitions there from Gaza. Reporter Mike Kirsch talked to locals, showed them images of Palestinian people burned by munitions made in their town, asked them what they felt about this, asked their mayor what he felt about this. There was a detailed Amnesty International report that he could show them. Were people in this town at least partially responsible for this death and destruction? Was the Arsenal responsible? Was the US government responsible? The IDF? Hamas? Here’s what we have been able to find.
Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2025) Following the white phosphorus trail. followthethings.com/following-the-white-phosphorus-trail.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
“Jaffa, The Orange’s Clockwork“ A documentary film dirercted by Eyal Sivan for Trabelsi Productions. Trailer embedded above, search online for streaming options here.
Imagine visiting your local supermarket and popping a bag of Jaffa branded oranges in your basket. Then imagine browsing your favourite news site on your phone in the checkout queue and reading the latest story about deaths in Gaza, war in the Middle East. Maybe you’ve read a lot about this conflict, or have some first hand experience. But news stories don’t tend to explain its background, how and why it began. That bag of oranges – and this documentary film – can help to do this. Jaffa is an ancient Palestinian city. It’s also where Jaffa-branded oranges have been grown by Arab and Jewish people since the 1800s. Once picked, they would wrap each individual fruit in tissue paper, pack them into wooden boxes, load them onto boats and ship them wordwide. A year after the birth of ‘practical photography’ in 1839, Palestinian photographer Khalil Khaed visited Jaffa to document everyday life and work, including in its orange groves. Photographers, filmmakers, artists and advertisiers have documented the connection between Jaffa and oranges ever since. But, as the Israeli state began to take shape in the 20th Century, this film argues that there was a concerted attempt to remove Palestine from Jaffa oranges and to rebrand them as emblems of Israeli civilisation. It’s settler Colonialism 101. To piece this history together, Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan spent five years sifting through numerous archives for Jaffa-orange photos, films, advertising and resistance. He showed what he found to Israeli and Palestinian people- academics, poets, retired orange workers, advertising executives, others – and filmed their reactions. What he created from this footage is – many have said – a profoundly insightful and moving documentary. It has generated considerable critical and public acclaim from audiences around the world. First screened in 2009, it is still a go-to documentary to spark debate about the Palestine-Israel conflict today. And Sivan continues to attend screenings to answer questions about the film and the futures that might be possible in the region. Sivan’s politics, and films, are anti-Zionist. He has struggled to raise funding and to gain screening opportunities in Israel. He and his films have generated criticisms of anti-semitism. But the main argument in ‘Jaffa, The Orange’s Clockwork’ is that, if Arab and Jewish people were able to work together harmoniously in the past – like they did in Jaffa’s orange groves – they can do so in the future. You have to see this to believe this. Why not watch the film? Read the comments below. See what you think. We’ve tried to captire all of the discusion we’ve found online.
Page reference: Lucian Harford (2025) Jaffa, The Orange’s Clockwork. followthethings.com/jaffa-the-oranges-clockwork.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
“How Sushi Went Global“ A popular academic research article by Theordore Bestor published in the Foreign Policy journal. Image of paper journal printout embedded above. Click image to access the .pdf version here. Click here to read the online version (which includes only the article’s text).
If you want the best bluefin tuna for your sushi, it has to be graded in the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo. But the fish are farmed and caught in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and elsewhere. And the restaurants where you can eat it are all over the world. So whose lives are connected through this intricate global trade? How did it develop? And what can sushi tell us about globalisation? That’s what an American anthropologist Ted Bestor wants to find out. He travels to different places in this tuna supply chain – a fish dock in Maine, USA; a Mediterranean fishing town in Spain; and Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market. He sees tuna caught and off the US and Spanish coasts being graded in Tokyo to sell in the fanciest sushi restaurants around the world. They travel, iced, in containers called ‘tuna coffins’ in the bellies of Boeing 747 jets. Years ago, except in Japan, these fish were only suitable for sports fishers or cat food manufacturers. But what’s developed as sushi has gone global is a sophisticated international trade feeding the popularisation of Japanese cuisine. These fish cross cultures and following their movements helps Bestor to vividly explain the concept of globalisation. Commenters say his article provides a view of globalisation that’s embedded in and between social relations in specific places. It’s a well old story, a gem of a ‘follow the thing’ study that’s widely used in classrooms around the world.
Page reference: Olivia Hoffman and Erin Teich (2012) How Sushi Went Global. followthethings.com/how-sushi-went-global.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
“Gravesend, 2007“ An art work / short film by Steve McQueen premiered at the Venice Biennale and exhibited at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, USA in 2007 and at the Uneven Geographies exhibition at the Nottingham Contemporary Gallery, UK in 2010. Gallery photo above. Renaissance Society exhibition photos here. Acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA here. Not available to watch online.
After a decade of rare earth metal mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for use in the growing consumer electronics sector, and recognising the history of African colonial plunder artist Steve McQueen sets out to make a short film that brings this story into one piece of art work. He travels between the coltan mines of the DRC and a coltan processing facilities in the UK. The miners, sometimes children, dig coltan from muddy trenches. This is brutal and poorly paid work wrecks the environment and funds a civil war in which 4 million people have lost their lives. The specialist metals which emerge from this ravaged place are perfect ingredients for modern consumer electronics, because they can conduct electricity without getting too hot. McQueen visits a pristine, computerised factory facility in the UK where this coltan ore is processed. The film he makes out of these loaded and shockingly different elements is described by critics and viewers as abstract, poetic, animated (sometimes), deafeningly loud (sometimes), beautiful, intense, opaque, meditative, melancholy, that works though ‘phenomenological estrangement’, has no titles or narration and scenes and moods that leap between places and dissolve into one another. The coltan miners appear in it as ‘ghostly absences of light’. For McQueen, this isn’t a documentary film. It doesn’t give supply chain workers a voice. It’s a film about looking. It takes its name from a town in the British county of Kent, which sits on the banks of the River Thames where Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness book begins. You can only watch it in an art gallery when it’s being exhibited. Some commenter are impressed with its intellectual purpose and depth, while others say they need to read the museum brochure to understand what it’s about (e.g. coltan). It seems from what people say that this isn’t an activist film or art work. It’s not setting out to motivate its viewers to understand and to act. But it is, for some, intensely haunting. Maybe you have to be there, watching it in that gallery space, with other people, other art work, the signage, the space, the lighting. This is a space where its viewers to ‘make the necessary connections.’
Page reference: Tom Bollands, Alistair Brouard, Amelia Cozon, James Hornsby, Phoebe Park & Louise Richardson (2024) Gravesend, 2007. followthethings.com/gravesend.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
“My Apple iPod” Undergraduate coursework written by Rebecca Payne, published in the Teaching Geography journal. Full text below.
The students’ first task in the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module at the University of Birmingham is to make a personal connection between their lives and the lives of others elsewhere in the world who made the things they buy. These are the people who help you to be you, followthethings.com CEO Ian tells them. So choose a commodity that matters to you, that’s an important part of your identity, that you couldn’t do without. Think about its component parts, its materials, and the properties they give to that commodity and your experience of ‘consuming it’. And write a 500 word first person account that connects your lives. One student – Rebecca Payne – is sitting in the university library wondering what to write. To block out the noise, and to help her concentrate, she listens to music in her iPod. And this is what she starts to think about, and to research, for her coursework. She spends a lot of time with her ‘little white friend’. She charges his battery. Takes him for a run. And he helps her to create the sonic bubble she enjoys living in which connects her to the work of her favourite musicians. Here coursework wants her to pop the bubble, though. So she looks at the ‘made in’ information on her iPod, and they consults the internet for a iPod teardown, where tech nerds take things to pieces to see what their component parts are. Then she looks up news stories about their places of manufacture. She find some connections. And thinks about the factory workers who have also helped to create this bubble she enjoys so much. She finishes with catchy turn of phrase: ‘I can only feel separated because I’m so connected’ and, mimicking Apple’s advertising tagline at the time, ‘iPod therefore I am.’
“iPhone 4CF (Conflict Free)” A spoof website, press release and direct action by The Yes Men & students from the Parsons New School for Design via the Yes Lab. Website pages embedded in slideshow above. Original iPhone CF website – www.apple-cf.com – shut down. Now partly available here.
Culture-jammers the Yes Men create a spoof ‘Apple’ website to launch a new iPhone whose ingredients are ‘conflict free’. They announce that you can upgrade your iPhone 4 to the conflict-free version free of charge. Working with students from the Parsons School in New York, they dress up as Apple staff outside a store and hand out leaflets that encourage shoppers to go inside and upgrade their iPhone to a conflict-free one, at no charge. This is such a brilliant idea, especially with all the recent news stories about a civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where regular iPhones’ rare earth ‘conflict minerals’ may have been sourced. For many, Apple is taking the lead in this highly competitive and fast moving sector. Which it loves to shout about. It’s acting to remove conflict minerals in its supply chains, and inviting its shoppers to come on board as ethical consumers. When the shoppers take their leaflets into the store and are refused their free upgrade… When they realise that a ‘conflict free iPhone’ does not exist… When the Apple Store staff, many of whom were pleasantly surprised that Apple was doing this, realise that some of the people who look like their colleagues may be activists causing trouble… When the police are called in… When the story gets into the press (the whole idea) and Apple is forced to quickly publish a press release denying that a conflict-free iPhone exists… When the Yes Men quickly release a fake Apple press release that explains what the company is (not) doing to remove conflict minerals from its supply chains… When Apple forces the web host for The Yes Men’s fake iPhone 4CF website to take it down within hours… … the knowledge that Apple’s iPhones contain ‘conflict minerals’ becomes an international news story. It helps that the Yes Men are highly experienced corporate impersonators (they call this ‘identity correction’). It helps that the carefully planned and often hilarious unravelling of the lies the Yes Men tell are a magnet for business journalists who often don’t have many fun stories to report. And it helps that this is a positive critique: it’s perfectly possible that Apple could produce a conflict-free iPhone if it put its mind to it. This isn’t a negative, anti-capitalist critique of Apple – although the company seems to respond as if it is – it’s a good idea. The Yes Men have shown what it looks like. How Apple could market it. That shoppers would trade their only iPhones for a conflict-free upgrade. Critics call the activists’ understanding of supply chain sourcing and the war in the DRC simplistic, but this prank kickstarts a debate which – years later – saw the production of conflict-free smartphones by a Dutch startup called Fairphone.
Page reference: Jack Parkin (2018) iPhone 4CF. followthethings.com/iphone-4cf.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
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Choc-full of Easter Egg-sploitation 
