Skip to main content

Real Food, Fake Entertainment, and Framing a Movement

The Ethicurean's Dairy Queen had a post today titled Truthiness and Real Food: Hellman's, get your paws off our framing! The title alone referenced, Steven Colbert, food and framing, so I had to read it. Turns out it touches on a lot more of the issues we've been covering this year in class. Hellman's Mayonnaise is starting a "real food" web campaign, and was trying to get bloggers to join in. I can't quite figure out what it all entailed, but apparently Unilever attempted to pitch an integrated marketing show (ie, "infotainment") to the Food Network, which turned them down, so they've now developed a "In Search of Real Food" website on Yahoo where people can share recipes and thoughts on "real", local, and fresh foods--and Hellman's mayonnaise.
What’s keeping me up so late with annoyance is the insidious way that Hellman’s/Best Foods is trying to co-opt the idea of real food by velcro-ing their manufactured "foodlike product" to it in this smarmy marketing campaign. It’s factory food: sterile, shelf-stable, and the "natural flavors" it mostly tastes like come from another factory, one that makes chemical compounds that mimic real food.
To emphasize her point, she posts the ingredients list for Hellman's. The fifth ingredient is high fructose corn syrup, and it gets worse from there. Now, I'm no snob. I think there's a place for Hellman's mayo, and I'm pretty sure one of those places is in my refrigerator. But "real" is never going to be an adjective I'm going to use to describe mayonnaise. Just like no one has ever described McDonald's and "good food." I've heard it described as many things--fast, convenient, addictive--but no one's ever going to confuse it with home cooking. It's a stand-in for when we're too tired/busy/poor for the real thing.

I refuse to link to the actual site, but I think it's worth a laugh to look at the original press release on PR Newswire.

You know you've made it when your frame is being co-oped by Unilever. I think "real food" is a good frame--the folks over at Farm Aid call it The Good Food Movement. Simple and effective. I've been struggling with framing this issue for a few months now-"organic" and "local" don't encompass it all; "slow food" is elitist. And although "sustainable" works as a concept, it's not a word that works with the public. I never even bothered with epicurean or agrarian...
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This post was a whole long longer and more emotional an hour ago...

First off: It's sad that I get better wireless reception in my backyard than in my apartment, right? Sigh. I normally try to stay out of the quagmire that is the abortion debate, but as usually, elyzabethe wrote something insightful about feminist issues that I had to comment on. Actually, I had to comment on the framing war that was going on in the comments section between elyzabethe and another friend. Then I ended up emailing back and forth with her for awhile. Then someone at work mentioned how the "choice" frame is starting to lose ground, even though advocates don't want to admit it. I started scribbling notes, sighed, and thought, "well, I'm gonna have to blog about this." Elyzabeth rants often against anti-choice organizations and legislation, as is her wont as a libertarian feminist. She’s particularly good at teasing out how anti-choice (A, if you’re reading this, bear with me, I’m referring to ‘anti-choice’ as more than just the abortion issu...
1 comment
Read more
The City of Milwaukee launched this ad campaign this week (along with Serve Marketing , my new dream employer). My first reaction was that it was a striking and effective ad, but then I realized it was aimed at co-sleeping, not just putting babies to sleep on their backs. I know next to nothing about co-sleeping, but I have a feeling that there are healthy ways to co-sleep, and un-healthy ways to co-sleep. Putting a child in bed on their stomach would be one of those un-healthy ways, but so is putting them on their stomach in their cribs. I don't know that it's necessarily fair to confuse the two issues. Plus, according to the City of Milwaukee's web page , Between 2006 and 2009 there were 89 infant deaths related to SIDS, SUDI, or accidental suffocation.  Of these 46 (51.7%) infants were sleeping in an adult bed at the time of their death.   Meaning that 48.3 percent (or 43 babies) were not co-sleeping, but presumably in their cribs. Although I loathe to say tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

Less Blogging, More Tweeting

FYI, I haven't been happy with how a lot of my posts are turning out, as well as the frequency with which I'm posting. Since most of the time, I just want to share a link that has an interesting take on telling its story, I'm going to dust off my Twitter account to share those and only post here if I'm really inspired. To the twelve people who read this blog, thanks.
Post a Comment
Read more