Corporations don't do anything by whim or chance - so you can assume that every product they create has been painstakingly conceived, researched, considered and tested. Then why is it that we consume these products without giving real thought to what is implied by each item?
More specifically, each snackable item, mass-produced to combat our munchies, has implications for our culture. Many of them even directly comment upon modern life and posit philosophical truths.
Some of these are fairly obvious - kid stuff really, fun sized"" food for thought. The Oreo's earnest plea for racial integration has been well-documented, and the reaffirmation of Nietzsche's ubermensch by Go-Gurt is a common topic of small talk in the academic community.
But this is common knowledge to any high school graduate, so let's take this one step further and analyze the societal implications for various other snack foods, some of which have been shunned as too simplistic by the academic community. It turns out that many of these provide sharp insight into the American condition.
The Cheez-It seems innocuous enough until one considers the way in which it subverts tradition. While most snack crackers are content to exist in simple squares, the Cheez-It has a small hole in the middle, indicating that at the center of any entity is emptiness. It is a small hole where nothing exists, and no matter how orange and tasty we may be personality-wise there is still an empty nothing at our center. Heavy stuff, my salty little friend.
The Fruit Roll-Up is corporate America commenting upon its own role as a controlling force in the mind of the child consumer. With its rainbow-colored fruit pullouts, each one in the shape of some sort of mind-bending design or popular cartoon character, the Fruit Roll-Up is a cheeky admission that most foods are subtly telling you what to think. Instead of this product simply being fruity leather that you can twist, cut or massage into whatever form you like, the Fruit Roll-Up comes pre-cut so all one can do is pull out the outline of various pre-decided ""tongue tattoos."" Fruit leather, one of our oldest indigenous traditions in America, is now used to relay subtle messages to the consumer. Fruit Roll-Ups cheekily acknowledge their role in the corporate scheme.
The Reese's peanut butter cup is an insidious attempt to frustrate the consumer with worries over mental inadequacies. The long-running advertising campaign ""How do you eat your Reese's?"" implies that a wide variety of ways existed to consume this peanut butter cup. The ad campaign failed to inform the consumer, though, that there's really only one way to eat a Reese's: you bite into it and eat the damn thing. That's all there is to it. You don't eat the center first, unless you want chocolate smeared on your face like the neighbor kid you used to avoid when you were five. And the proposition that a vampire can suck out the peanut butter with his fangs first ignores the fact that most vampires prefer Nutella to peanut butter any day of the week. This snack, which logically can be eaten only one way, exists to frustrate the consumer, heightening feelings of nihilism in a world already dark enough when one considers the implications of the Ho Ho and BBQ Pork Rinds.
What implications does your food have for our culture? Does your food support your morals? Let Joe know. E-mail him at jblynch@wisc.edu.
