Stay Tuned/24 August 1997

This was a cynical Sunday for me. No, I mean more so than usual. I had to vet my choices with someone else because all the advertising was making me turn nasty.

So perhaps starting on a good note is in order: If you haven't seen any of the print ads for Gardenburgers yet, you should. They're hilarious. There. That's my note of good cheer for the day.

Say ... doesn't this look good?

A nice beef-and-rice dish. Maybe a little greasy but altogether edible.

We'll come back to this in a minute. I just wanted to whet your appetite. Because today we're going to talk about foodstuffs. Yup. Every item in today's screed is about food.

I have pounded on the Kraft people before for their singularly ill-chosen slogan for Philadelphia Cream Cheese: "Heaven is within your reach." I should not do it again. But I will.

This wouldn't be such a bad slogan if it weren't always shown next to foods which are guaranteed to get you your next triple bypass - this week it was some sort of swirled cream-cheese brownie. I eat plenty of high-fat foods and I'm no Puritan about this matter; it only seems to me that they're giving themselves problems by leaving the avenue open for such an unfortunate juxtaposition of ideas.

In a short and unscientific survey, when I showed the ad to two friends, they immediately jumped on the reason why I had clipped it, without any prodding from me. So that proves I'm not being unreasonable here. Or maybe it just proves I have two friends who are as cranky as I am.

Kraft is also guilty of perpetrating the slogan "Now you can eat" for their parmesan cheese powder - the implication being that it's not a proper dish until white cheesegoo has been sprinkled all over it. I find myself getting a touch resentful at slogans like that. Of course, I sprinkle grated Parmesan on a great deal of food, but I go out and get the real stuff, so it's not like I have any reason to bear grudges against Kraft.

If I wanted a reason to snarl at Kraft, I would pick the orange cheesegoo, not the white stuff. As bad as Kraft's "parmesan" is, it's several cuts above that orange stuff Kraft puts in the little envelopes for the boxed macaroni and cheese. So guess what new product Kraft is introducing?

Yup. For only a nominal cost, you too can buy a shaker of deadly orange powder to sprinkle on all your foods and make them all taste like insipid fake powdered "American" cheese! Not to mention how much more colorful your dinner plate will become.

I don't care if it is being marketed primarily to kids. It's still a vile idea.

Here's an example of a case where I feel like I don't really have a good reason to be cranky, but something about this copy bothers me nonetheless. So I handed it to a friend for assessment.

"Right about now, she's opening her lunch box and looking at the Jell-O snack you packed for her. You can almost hear her giggle."

He has even more of a hair trigger about these things than I do, generally, but his only comment about this one was, "Vaguely erotic." Which is most certainly not what had been itching me. So I'm at a loss.

I think it's the idea that having a little container of gelatin in her lunch box is going to make anyone giggle. Or prevent her from throwing out the squashed sandwich and just eating the gelatin, for that matter. Or keep her from spending her milk money on a candy bar, which is what she really wants to eat anyway. Never mind. Let's just drop it. It bothers me, OK? I don't know why.

You don't think the Quaker Oats people have a self-esteem problem? Look at all the weird things they're trying. We will not mention the Captain Crunch Bars again in this space, but how about the nasty stuff above? Check out that surface texture, folks. Yummmm.

By creating "flavors" such as Oreo cookie oatmeal and S'More oatmeal, the process of turning what was once one of the healthiest foods around into pure junk advances another inexorable step. And Quaker develops more and more of a split personality, as they increasingly find themselves in a cycle of "hawk sugar to the kids, hawk health to the adults."

In other words, they're becoming just another breakfast cereal company. That's a shame.

I am also over my legal limit on snide comments about Fancy Feast cat food ... but, geez, can I help it if they continue to offend? The latest is a "pate" style cat food which appears to be tan-pink paste with chunks of some beige substance imbedded in it. The effect is like someone tried to cast tofu squares in a substrate of wood putty. Fortunately it comes so far from looking like anything I'd eat that I am spared true nausea.

I feel that pet food manufacturers, who are in the admittedly uncomfortable position of having to sell their wares to an audience that is not their primary consumer, should not show their foods in an advertisement. No matter how attractively they package it, the food always looks repulsive, and it ultimately works against them.

And if the food somehow manages to not look repulsive to humans, the effect is even worse. As I learned today. Via this ad.

Funny - it looked appetizing at the top of the page ....

I had one person tell me that the Reward dog food had not, in fact, looked appetizing at the top of the page and that she had seen through my feeble ploy. Oh, well.

I agree that it doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. The thing is, it looks just enough like people food to be vaguely disturbing ... and the setting heightens the effect.

At the time I didn't quote one of the Gardenburger ads, for reasons which now elude me, but you will find the text of one much, much further along, on 9 November 1999.

and now back to our program

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