(Does a lack of a title make this titless?)
Getting back to the topic post:
0scar said:
What do you think about companies marketing microwave dinners as ‘gourmet’ or canned fruit and frozen vegetables as ‘fresh’?
I tend to think that advertising and marketing rely on overburdened memory and indifference. The idea of "gourmet" or "cuisine", or "fresh" is intended to appeal to the consumer in a very immediate fashion. The thing is that after the briefest moment's thought, that appeal seems rather absurd. Among my portion of a strange American consumer culture, what happens next is drawn from any number of devices to avoid thinking about such a basic and widespread misnomer.
On the one hand, "We know what they mean". In other words, we know it's a marketing device. To the other, unless you're of the first generation to any such muddling of language, you must either learn the difference or get by without understanding it.
In and of itself, this seems simple enough. Making a point out of "gourmet" or some such label generally gets a response of, "Why does it matter?" Well, it's dishonest. "Yeah, but we know what they mean. What does it matter?"
It's honor among thieves, and true to a Western tradition called "Original Sin", we've come around to expect the worst of ourselves: in the case of honor among thieves, we expect that people understand thievery. We're supposed to understand, inherently, the dishonesty of salesmen and politicians. Of late the politicians and salesmen have insisted on lawyers and journalists being treated the same way, and since we're all thieves, anyway--born into sin, you know--why not?
In an individual, the presence of so many aberrant processes leading to conflicting results would be considered a psychological malady, perhaps even psychiatric. Then again, abstract institutions reflect the individuals who compose them.
In terms of evolving language, the idea of "gourmet" frozen food is clear enough: the food itself is so bad that they've found it cheaper to spice and flavor the stuff to hide the deficient quality. Instead of tasting like plain food from a can, it tastes more like gourmet food. It's like seeing a label that says:
Mom & Pop's
Natural Orchard Cherry
flavored drink
Artificially flavored, contains no fruit juice
After a while, we would learn to expect that anything saying "Natural Orchard Cherry" would mean "artificially-flavored". What happens if Mike & Ike pick up Mom & Pop's flavor for "Mom & Pop's Natural Orchard Cherry® Candies"? Now the phrase "Natural Orchard Cherry", without the word "flavor", refers to Mom & Pop's Natural Orchard Cherry-flavored drink. Given enough time, people will simply accept that "Natural Orchard Cherry" is an artificial, hyper-sweetened flavor. In my corner of the Universe, it turns out that two flavors--"Wild Cherry" and "Fruit Punch"--compete for the honor of tasting like "red". (This is why "Blue Raspberry" was such a phenomenon for a while; that blue should taste raspberry was counterintuitive
until the "Blue Raspberry" rage; I despise "Blue Raspberry", incidentally, so "blue" ends up tasting like "fruit-punch" flavored Sweet Tarts for me.)
By the time we get to arguing the flavors of colors, I would hope it's perfectly clear that the actual fruit flavor alleged of the product is irrelevant. And while the purists might throw a bigger fit about making mint-chocolate-chip ice cream green than they do about making raspberries or fruit punch blue, it's the same concept: I have, before, grabbed mere chocolate-chip vanilla ice cream because a carton was out of place next to the "gourmet" mint-chocolate-chip ice cream (no artificial flavors or colors, the package says).
By the time the consumer is run through that whole wringer--be it "Salisbury Steak" that has no meat in it whatsoever, or "Fri-Chik" that has no chicken in it whatsoever (and tastes a little less like chicken, imho, than does cock°)--it really doesn't matter. Everybody seems to accuse everybody else of paranoia, and I think the conclusion that can be purported is fair enough: we're all freaking bonkers. While my own sentiments about marketing might seem like a liberalistic, Sesame-Street appeal to decency and honesty, it turns out the conservative up the street who claims to have not voted in the presidential election because all of the conservatives were either too liberal or not Christian enough is of the same mind. In fact, I hear more about it from him than I bother to think about it myself anymore.
I can't speak for the rest of the world, but Americans seem perfectly happy eating their "gourmet" food and buying "quality" "handcrafted" items° and guzzling down their blue raspberries.
I mean, think of what we call beer. I'm told you can buy Anheuser-Busch "Budweiser" in Germany, but it's a different beer than we're used to in the states. The American "King of Beers" isn't even beer. Nor was there "wine" in Bartles & James' "wine coolers".°
I'm told it's even more strange in Tokyo, though. And a friend recounts from Liverpool that the English version of the issue may well be an example of what Oscar Wilde meant by amusing the poor.
____________________
Notes:
° cock - My apologies for the random-seeming profanity, but really ... the opportunity presented itself, and it's true as well. Who in their proper comedic mind could resist making the audience groan for a bad anti-pun? And really, how many times do you get to start a footnote with the word "cock"?
° handcrafted items - So the other day, a random search for internet porn turned up a couple of suspect links, including "handcrafted" underwear manufactured somewhere in the third world. I don't know if that disturbed me more than Bob Vila hawking little girls' panties, but it was troubling that I came across either in that particular search. Yes, I'm just running with a thematic subtext, so file it under "T" for "Things We Never Wanted To Think About".
° no wine in wine coolers - It still took me a while to figure out that drinking Boone's, then, was the better option; it was about that time, coincidentally, that I started drinking real beer, real wine, and developed an evil and even dangerous affinity for Rumpleminze.
