“The fun way to start your day.”
“The fun spread.”
“The fun spray.”
“Made for fun.”
“The fun breakfast.”
All of these are from food ads, as the last indicated blatantly.
When did food become something other than nutritious or at least delicious, if terrible for you? Don’t parents say not to play with your food? Yet food ads never seem to display their value as food, they’re advertised as…fun?
Because, you know, Pop-Tarts are highly entertaining. I love watching them curl up in the toaster so I can’t actually get them out of there. That’s fun! And so is that whipped cream. I press the nozzle, and stuff comes out. Whee!
I can’t help but be reminded of old cigarette ads, where you couldn’t show a cigarette. So you show people in the pool, having a good time. At the beach, having a good time. At a dinner party, having a good time. Except now the drug is food, which isn’t a surprise. We throw in addictive additives, certainly. High fructose corn syrup is in damn near everything. Even things that shouldn’t be sweetened. McDonald’s, for example, adds that sugar to the hamburgers even. A friend of mine, in fact, is allergic to corn. There’s almost nothing he can buy at a grocery store because of it, he has to buy everything from a farmer’s market.
But, the drug is in the ad now. Sometimes. The Pop Tart commercial features people dancing a lot more than eating. “The fun whipped cream!” just had a can of the whipped cream, sitting there. No food, no people. I guess I’m taking it on its word.
Of course, that doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. What kind of measure of a food’s quality is FUN? Am I fencing with these churros? Because they won’t taste good when they’re all hand-sweaty. Am I throwing these Pop-Tarts like ninja stars? Cleaning up the mess won’t be fun. In fact, unless the act of eating is the fun…
Oh, wait, there it is. That’s why we’re fat. Because eating itself is the fun. And that’s taken over for healthy food. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a fatass. I don’t eat a lot of fruit, but I also don’t eat a lot of junk. Sometimes I’ll have a little ice cream, a few chips, more often than that I’ll just eat an actual, reasonably sized meal. Because I’m not eating for the fun factor, I’m eating because my body requires nutrition.
It’s not healthy foods, quality foods, which advertise this way. Hell, even junk foods. I don’t see Ben and Jerry’s doesn’t say “We’re fun!” They just declare that the ice cream tastes really good, and hey, don’t eat too much at once. Oh, and nuclear proliferation is bad.
I guess apple growers need to get together. “Apples-A party in every bunch!” Or we take food for what it is, food. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your food, the French sure do, but they’re also much healthier than we are because they don’t sit at a giant plate and chow down. Same with a lot of the world, at least those parts that HAVE food. We grab something cheap and calorie laden on the way home, our unhealthy snacks are cheaper than real, quality food, the damn opposite of the rest of the first world. Only here can Weet-bix and Corn Flakes cost more than Lucky Charms and Froot Loops, only here can McDonald’s instant garbage be cheaper than buying ground beef and fries at the store.
But hey, McDonald’s is more fun than cooking and health, right?
7 comments ↓
February 2008, I was diagnosed with “borderline” diabetes.
They sent me for a nutrition class, and it was one of the best things I have EVER done in my life. They taught you how to read labels, check ingredients and even how false advertising can be. Fat Free may have double the sugar, No added sugar can still contail a helluva lot of sugar and something that has 10 grams of sugar per serving is only so because a “serving” is less than a handful (meaning people have multiple “servings” just to fill themselves).
How retailers are trying to get the public “addicted” (yes addicted) to sugar so that they keep craving more and more of the product.
Yes. This is why we’re fat.
Well, let’s remember that companies just made breakfast cereals healthier last year by reducing the serving size from 1 cup to 3/4 cup.
What really made me sad were people who said that was okay, not deceptive, because that’s all you should eat anyway. As if 1 cup was ever a serving for a normal person to begin with.
Related post you might enjoy:
http://raceslikeagirl.com/2008/03/14/why-americans-are-fat-and-broke/
I just had Chex Mix and lemon pie for breakfast. A grain and a fruit. Fun, too!
I wanted pie for breakfast, to be perfectly fair. But it turns out you have to have it or the energy to go to the store and get it in order to make a meal of it. Fortunate for me in the end, likely.
You know, when I lived in America (I’m from Brazil) I was always baffled that fast food cost less than actually buying the ingredients and making the same food at home. It was the other way around in Brazil, eating at McD’s was 10 times more expensive than just making your own burger and fries.
That was 23 years ago. McD’s in Brazil is now selling a Big Mac/Medium Fries/Medium soda combo at about four times what you’ll spend if you cook the stuff at home and buy a bottle of soda, and boy are they making lots of money.
At least overhere the portions are half the size of the ones I saw in America. Even 23 years ago the portion sizes were ludicrous, I once ordered a liver and onion dish in a restaurant and was served with a steak that, I kid you not, was a cross-section of the whole bovine liver. The tips hung from the oversized plate.
It’s the other way around most places, really. A big part of it is the food we subsidize. Corn syrup and other fillers cost virtually nothing, and our standards for food are getting lower and lower. Cheap, cheap ingredients that are absolutely terrible for you have become the mainstay of our diets, thanks to those subsidies combined with an extremely efficient system for transporting and preparation, but with very little quality control.
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