Why Is My Food Talking To Me? – Perspicacious Geek
Well, I just got back last night from going to see the Foo Fighters in Washington, D.C. for the 4th of July. It was my first ever 4th of July in America and I’m pretty sure that next week it will be what I end up writing about. I didn’t really have very much planned for this week, and I was pretty sure I was going to end up dipping into the ever more sparse bucket of “emergency blogs” that I try to keep handy.
However, something has been on my mind lately and I figured I would write about it. What is that something? Talking, anthropomorphic food. More specifically, HAPPY anthropomorphic food.
It all started when I was watching some wrestling on a UK sports channel. You might not know this, but in the UK they’ve got American celebrities shilling random crap that you probably would never seen in North America. It’s a lot those ads we’ve all laughed at that come out of Japan and have Arnold Swarzenegger selling us Pepsi or whatever. Kevin Bacon was talking about using his cell phone on the tube, Harvey Keitel was reprising his role as Mr. Wolf from Pulp Fiction to push an auto-repair shop and Ashton Kutcher was talking to a sexy piece of pizza to sell me on gum? Don’t believe me? Just watch:
See that? What the actual hell? The sexy pizza lady wants to spend the night with him? Are we, the audience, supposed to think the pizza is sexy? If that other (human) woman didn’t show up, are we to think there was a chance that Ashton was going to fuck the pizza lady? I suppose you could make the argument that since this is a gum commercial, the pizza in question is not actually a pizza at all, but is the sexy representation of pizza breath. But the fact still remains that in the end, we have a sexy pizza talking to a movie star and trying to seduce him. It was all very strange to me. However, it got me thinking: advertisers often make food talk to us and run around trying to get us to eat it.
Let me be clear: It is routine practice to make our food walk around and talk in order to try and convince us to eat it. This practice goes way back too.
Why do we want our food to not only be more like people, but to also be happy? What the hell is wrong with us?
It’s an old issue too. Who doesn’t remember the “Let’s All Go to the Lobby” song from old cinemas, drive-ins and probably a Simpsons parody? This commercial has been around since the 1950s. As soon as we found a way to have things moving around and animated on a big screen, we quickly decided to make food walk around and smile:
Let’s take a quick look at that little group of food. There’s the soda, the candy bar, the popcorn and they’re all lead in a jaunty little parade by a… stick of butter? I know his little sash says “Candy Bar” but what the hell candy bar looks like that?
Soda guy is all like “drink up my insides!” Popcorn guy is like “eat my brain corn!” Candy bar is like “tear apart my head and go to town!” Who knows that that stick of butter is doing, but hot damn if I don’t want to eat a whole stick of butter right now.
I suppose you can make the argument that in this little grouping, it’s really more the packaging that’s walking around, and we are to just eat whatever is inside of them. If only the packaging has been brought to life, then whatever they are contaning might only just be food and not, you know, alive. However, there are just as many examples of food existing outside of a container and leading a happy little life or something all while trying to get us to eat it.
Take a look at those little guys over there. They’re the McNuggets. They are smiling little people with outfits and hats and belts who all seem to be dressed up for a various jobs or whatever. I had a bunch of these guys as a kid. We’re not even going to get into the weird thing where they literally made toys in the shape of food (and then expect us not to put toys in our mouths). We can just think a moment about the fact that they expect Little Keith to presumably play cops and cowboys with little McNugget guys at playtime and then have no problem eating them later. What jobs and activities did the McNuggest I just ate do? Did I eat an Army Officer, a School Teacher or maybe a Race Car Driver? Or maybe I ate a McNugget college student who would have gone on to cure cancer. Why have you given my food so much personality?
At least the McNuggets are leading their anthro-meat lives in the same state as they are served to you though. Things get even more weird and messed up when the animal, in its still alive state, is trying to convince you to eat it.
It’s pretty common practice for chickens and pigs to try to get you to eat them in the logo of poultry and pork companies.
Hey look, it’s Chubby Chicken from A&W! He’s got a little hat and a… nipple apron?! It looks just like he’s one of the servers at an old-timey A&W doesn’t it? Now, one of two things is going on here. Either the implication is that A&W employ all chickens to work in their restaurants until their ready to be killed and fed to me OR Chubby signed up as the mascot to save his own life and lives a life of depressing horror as he serves the grilled flesh of his old friends to our hungry human faces.
St-Hubert BBQ has had the same logo for basically as long as I can remember. I never thought that it was that weird, but now I think that it’s super weird. It might even be undead. Stay with me here. The logo is only of the chicken’s head. I don’t know a whole lot about chicken’s but I do know that in order to kill them the standard method is to chop their heads off. You see where I’m going? The body of the St-Hubert chicken mascot has already long since been roasted and eaten by hungry human monsters. Through some form of terrible magic/science they have animated his severed head to serve as their happy, smiling logo, luring us into their house of chicken murder.
Oh come on now, look at that pig. He’s got his little butt up in the air and he’s all smiling and happy. He is practically begging to have a spit rammed through him, be slow roasted and have an apple shoved into his sad, dead mouth. This is just terrible.
What the hell man, what the actual hell?
Keith does all sorts of things here on 9to5.cc, he works with the other founders on 9to5 (illustrated), co-hosts our two podcasts: The 9to5 Entertainment System and Go Plug Yourself and blogs here as The Perspicacious Geek.
McNugget Toy Image From Memory Glands
All logos/mascots Copyright of their respective owners.
