French baker ordered to remove 'racist' cakes

A court in the French Riviera has ordered a cake maker to remove cakes from his bakery after he was accused of inciting racial hatred and the cakes branded "obscene". On Thursday a court in Grasse, in the Alpes-Maritimes department of south-eastern France, ordered the town to force the baker to remove the offensive pastries from his boulangerie, deeming them an “attack on human dignity”. The sweet pastries in question, named “Gods” and “Goddesses” are in the form of obese people, covered in dark chocolate with over-sized sexual parts.



While the baker who sells the little men and women filled with shortbread and chocolate mousse saw the cakes as inoffensive, for one anti-racism group in France, they were anything but. “It’s pure and simple racism,” Louis-George Tin from France’s Representative Council of Black Associations (CRAN) said prior to the court ruling. CRAN denounced the “obscene slave trade caricatures that tap into the tradition of colonial racism” and threatened to lodge a complaint for inciting racial hatred.



“We are in a country where the word equality is part of the constitution, which means it doesn’t allow for racism. Does he think these treats adhere to the values of the French Republic?” said Tin. “We must fight this kind of racism. I cannot imagine what would be said (rightly) if an African baker decided to represent Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary in a similar way,” Tin said. However, baker Tannick Tavolaro is defiant.



He said he finds the complaint absurd and firmly denies he is racist. “At first I thought it was a joke. It’s absurd and hurtful. These pastries have absolutely no racial connotation at all," he said. They are made of chocolate mousse, which is why they're black. The characters are little human beings, a man and woman but not a black man and a woman. These people who attack me don’t know my story or my career or who I am. It’s just intellectual terrorism. I am not racist. I do not belong to any political party. I just argue for freedom of speech.”