The chocolate in the photograph

At a kiosk in Cairo, a boy on his way home from school spends the last of his coins on a packaged croissant.

The wrapper shows it torn in half, chocolate pouring from the middle, a few drops caught in the air. It is a good photograph. Somebody lit it with care.

He opens it on the pavement outside. The croissant is smaller than the one on the wrapper, and soft in the way pastry goes after weeks in plastic. The chocolate is a brown line through the centre, thin enough that he has to look for it.

He eats it anyway. He is twelve, and it is food.

But somebody chose that photograph. Somebody held the real croissant as it comes out of the wrapper, decided it would not sell, and paid to make a better one for the front. That choice won the sale. It also settled what happens on the pavement a minute later, every time, for every child who buys one.

I do not think that is a packaging decision. It is a decision about what the business is for. A wrapper that promises more than the inside can give is not really selling croissants. It is selling a small letdown, one coin at a time, for as long as that picture stays on the front.

The honest options were always there. Put more chocolate in, or put the real croissant on the wrapper and see who still wants it.

If neither feels possible, the problem was never the picture.