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...