"F*ck the Diet" - now THAT's a food slogan

Du Darfst is a German company that produces butter, cheese, sausages and other rather gluttonous foods. For their latest campaign, they have decided to create a movement, "Fuck the Diet", encouraging people to make nutritional contrariness part of their social identity.



In addition to the above video and links to a Facebook page the campaign site features advice from a nutritionist named Silke Kayadelen who says "I want to stay as I am!" It champions the approach of simple choices in food and exercise to enjoy life without getting fat. And it features recipes.

Yeah... I'm assuming this is aimed at women.

It may not be the most nutritionally sensible approach, but I sure do love the tagline.

Thanks to Tatjana Vukic for the tip!

Hot dogs are bad for your ass #FdAdFriday

"Okay, I guess I'll stop sticking them up there now."

Ah, the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine! Always at the forefront of getting headlines by any means necessary.

Last year, they told Wisconsonites not to eat cheese during football games. Now they're telling people in Chicago not to eat hot dogs just in time for baseball season.

Their message:

"Consuming processed meats increases the risk of colorectal cancer, according to a large number of studies, including the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study. Studies also show a strong link between other types of cancer and processed meats. An NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study, for example, found that processed red meat was associated with a 10 percent increased risk of prostate cancer with every 10 grams of increased intake."

So if I eat 100g of hot dogs, I'm have a 100% chance of getting prostate cancer? I'm already a goner many times over!

As usual, PCRM is just making waves while preaching to their shrill choir. Yes, processed meats are bad for you (especially those nasty factory dogs). But this provocation will do nothing to educate people about making better eating choices. It will, if anything, have the opposite effect as angry Chicagoans are motivated to have a dog just to spite the billboard.

"What about the mustard, relish, onions, pickle, tomato, pepper and celery salt?  Those are vegetables, aren't they?"

Meanwhile, the American Meat Institute does itself no favours by protesting too much:

"Hot dogs are a great Chicago tradition and part of a healthy, balanced diet. They come in a variety of nutrition and taste formulas and they are an excellent source of protein, vitamins and minerals," said National Hot Dog & Sausage Council President Janet M. Riley. "This group's claims are an effort to seek attention for their animal rights cause.” 

...

"Consumers need a healthy balanced diet and they need balanced, credible information," [says] Riley.  "When it comes to nutrition and cancer, check with health sources such as your doctor, dietician or the U.S. Dietary Guidelines. You can be assured that they will tell you that a healthy diet can include processed meats like hot dogs alongside your vegetables, grains and dairy." 

Damn it, Janet. This isn't health food we're talking about here. People know that hot dogs are salty, smoked, conglomerations of scary dead pig leftovers. We know they are junk food. And we love them anyway. 

Tip via The Consumerist

"Pink Slime" producer fights back in PR food fight

Is it any worse than a McRib?

I just got around to picking up a copy of Food Inc. this week and watching the film. It's pretty good infotainment. (My 7-year-old loves it, and has been watching it over and over again!)

One of the corporate targets of the documentary makers is BPI, "Beef Products Inc.", the company responsible for extracting the meat paste from trim that has become infamous as "Pink Slime".

The actual finished product, via BPI

Coincidentally, Pink Slime is in the news right now, after McDonald's stopped adding it to their burgers and the USDA okayed it for school lunches.

Meanwhile, BPI is fighting back with a campaign Wordpress site called "Pink Slime is a Myth" in which they tell their side of the story.

Actual copy: "Ammonia is essential for life. This naturally occurring substance is found in virtually all life forms, from plants to animals to humans. Life could not have evolved and cannot survive without it."

They make the usual mistake of protesting too loudly that boneless lean beef trim (their term for the product) "is beef – period".

What it is, is meat that has been separated from the trimmed fat of cow carcasses through chemical and mechanical means and has been sterilized with Ammonium Hydroxide .

What it is not, is this:

That's mechanically separated chicken. Want a nugget?

I'm not defending BPI. I think what they do is gross, and I don't want to eat it. But if we're going to stop putting processed animal byproducts in our meat snacks, we're going to have to give up cheap meat and accept a more wasteful meat industry.

What? 

Let's look at it this way: livestock are more than steaks and chops. Traditional trim, carved off the bones with an expert knife, wound up as sausages, cold cuts and ground meat. It still does, if you buy your processed meats from a butcher who makes them in-store. (Which I am, admittedly, a real snob about. Even organic packaged hot dogs gross me out.)

But even the most expert cutter misses lots of digestible protein that is in unpalatable organs, bone marrow, and inextricably merged with fat. The old-school solution would be to render it into gelatin, tallow or lard, or make it into stock. But back in the '60s and '70s, food scientists started looking for ways to get more edible and saleable product from each animal. Mechanically separated meat entered the market, and it got into many of the packaged soups, burgers, sausages and finger foods you eat. 

This was seen as a good thing. Consumerist quotes Roger Mandigo, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln:

"Most people would be extremely unhappy if they were served heart or tongue on a plate," he observed. "But flaked into a restructured product it loses its identity. Such products as tripe, heart, and scalded stomachs are high in protein, completely edible, wholesome, and nutritious, and most are already used in sausage without objection." Pork patties could be shaped into any form and marketed in restaurants or for airlines, solving a secondary problem of irregular portion size of cuts such as pork chops. In 1981 McDonald's introduced a boneless pork sandwich of chunked and formed meat called the McRib, developed in part through check-off funds [micro-donations from pork producers] from the NPPC [National Pork Producers Council]. It was not as popular as the McNugget, introduced in 1983, would be, even though both products were composed of unmarketable parts of the animal (skin and dark meat in the McNugget). The McNugget, however, benefited from positive consumer associations with chicken, even though it had none of the "healthy" attributes people associated with poultry.”

McRib, McNugget: McAnicallySeparatedMeat. (Although the McNugget changed to "real" chicken a few years ago.) So why is this beef process singled out for disgust?

People love this shit.

It's purely subjective. First, Jamie Oliver grossed people out on his show with a demonstration of how ammonia and water dissolve meat into red goop. Then there was the Food Inc. exposé. Then McDonald's and the FDA. Combined with the mislabelled chicken visual, the negative PR shitstorm has stirred public anxiety over one particular kind of processed meat product.

But is it really worse than the others? The process at issue is the decontamination with ammonia, which is toxic. It was actually a breakthrough for BPI, since the trimmings that are their raw product get disgustingly  contaminated in industrial butchery, and were previously not fit for human consumption. The ammonia was supposed to fix that. 

But when you look for research on the safety of the process, it's not trace ammonia that's the big problem. It's that it still lets some pathogens, like e. coli and salmonella, through. BPI had been exempted from regular testing and recalls, simply because the US government was overconfident with the efficacy of chemical sterilization.

Factory mass-production of meat is gross, period. But it also allows companies to offer $1 hamburger deals and other cheap meats, plus it feeds more people per animal—which has some significant environmental benefits. The original process of mechanical separation of beef from bones was banned in the US following the mad cow epidemic, so this is one of the cheapest sources of total animal utilization available.

(Ironically, the "nose-to-tail" foodie movement attempts to accomplish the same goal, but by gourmet means, by creating recipes for offal and other unpopular animal parts.)

If we want to stop eating questionable meat, we will have to eat less meat overall and pay a lot more for it. But as long as enough people are ignorant or ambivalent about what goes in their meals, there will always be a market for Pink Slime.

My advice for BPI, and consumer advocates, is to be absolutely honest. Activists need to stop misusing the chicken image and focus fairly on all mass-produced factory meat processes (as well as related food safety, worker rights and animal welfare issues), not just the cause of the day. BPI needs to back off on its claims that their product is virtually identical to ordinary lean ground beef, and take the position that using more of the animal is more economical and sustainable as long as you don't think about it too much.

Epilogue: BPI was so outraged by its portrayal in Food Inc. and on Chef Oliver's show that it commissioned its own reactionary video series:

A brand worth dying for?

Branding junk food as bad for you is a common trend these days, but a customer tucking in to a "Double Bypass Burger" coincidentally suffered a heart attack right in the Las Vegas restaurant.



According to Wikipedia,

The establishment is a hospital theme restaurant: waitresses ("nurses") take orders ("prescriptions") from the customers ("patients"). A tag is wrapped on the patient's wrist showing which foods they order and a "doctor" examines the "patients" with a stethoscope. The menu includes "Single", "Double", "Triple", and "Quadruple Bypass" hamburgers,[1] ranging from 8 to 32 ounces (230 to 910 g) of beef (up to about 8,000 calories), all-you-can-eat "Flatliner Fries" (cooked in pure lard), beer and tequila, and soft drinks such as "Jolt" and Mexican-bottled Coca-Cola made with real sugar.[2] Customers over 350 lb (160 kg) in weight eat for free if they weigh in with a doctor or nurse before each burger.

Eater  recognizes the possibility that this was a ("incredibly sad and evil") publicity stunt, and adds that the man is reported to have survived.

Owner "Doctor" Jon Basso told FOX5 he felt ‘horrible’ for the man.

“Tourists were taking photos of him as if it were some type of stunt,” Basso said. “Even with our own morbid sense of humor, we would never pull a stunt like that.”

(He added that there have been a “variety of incidents” at the restaurant, but this was the first full-scale coronary.)

Let's hope the staff get medical training along with their uniforms:

By the way, February is Heart Month.

Meanwhile in Canada, cup sizes are increasing rapidly

I'm talking about coffee, pervs. My brother David shared this snapshot of Tim Horton's newly- recalibrated coffee sizes.

The extra large is now 710 ml, or 24 ounces. That's over three cups of coffee in one.

According to City TV:

The change brings Tim Hortons sizes more in line with American chains, that have phased out the 236 mL “small” cups, and competitors including Starbucks, Second Cup and McDonalds.

They are, obviously, responding to customer demand. But is it really a good idea? I've had that much coffee in one sitting before, sure. But I drink mine black. Imagine the amount of cream and sugar it takes to make one of these as sweet and creamy as the traditional "double double" — quadruple quadruple? Quintuple quintuple?

Hey, do what you want with your life. But please don't fool yourself into thinking that getting a coffee like this every day, with the fat and calories that go with it, isn't going to weigh heavily on your health. (While we're at it, I guess we had better recalibrate clothing sizes again too.)

Cottage cheese thighs?

"Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine," who are basically a vegan advocacy group, are hating on cheese again.

These billboards were recently erected outside Albany, New York, in dairy country.

Strangely, this is part of a campaign to have cheese removed from (or reduced in) school lunches.

"PCRM president Neal Barnard, M.D., has written a letter to members of the Albany city school board, asking the city to cut down on dairy products served in schools to help students reduce the risk of childhood obesity.
...
School lunches in Albany include an abundance of cheesy foods. The city’s high school menu, for example, includes dairy- and fat-loaded offerings such as chicken parmesan and lasagna with three different types of cheese. Cheese pizzas are available daily."

I won't defend the nutritional value of crappy school lunches. But as an ad guy, I find PCRM's ads as useless as ever. Eating too much fat makes you fat? Gee... thanks. Quite the medical breakthrough there. Targeting one food as the enemy, however, oversimplifies the issue.

Tip via Sociological Images

What the hell is in this baby formula?

Copy says, "New! A natural solution that keeps your facial skin revitalized. A better sleep for your baby with Materna's Good Night infant formula."

Does it have Benadryl in it? Gravol? Morphine? According to this source, the secret ingredient is "special composition of carbohydrates, giving the baby a longer feeling of fullness."

What a terrible idea. Babies wake up and cry because they aren't really supposed to be left alone. (Think about it — in a state of nature, they'd be eaten by wolves.)

I understand that not everyone can or wants to breastfeed or cosleep. But an ad promoting a formula that keeps your inconvenient baby quiet so you can get your beauty sleep really irks me. It's playing to selfishness and vanity.

By JWT, Tel Aviv, Israel

Via Ads of The World

Has McDonald's been forced to label its food carcinogenic?

There's a pic going around showing a "new" McDonald's warning label about cancer-causing ingredients. But here's the kicker: that shit is in most of what you eat.

If you've been paying attention, you've been hearing about acrylamide for years. It's naturally present in ripe olives, and dried plums (prunes) and pears. It's in your coffee. And it gets produced every time you brown many of your favourite foods (like meat, potatoes and bread) at high heat. In short, it's in everything you like.

This picture showed up on Buzzfeed today, but a web search seems to indicate that it is a hoax from 2009, based on conjecture about whether California's strict food safety laws would lead to fast foods being labelled the way cigarettes are. I can't find any evidence that that is actually happening.

Of course, that won't stop this image from going viral, again, with reactionary comments like this:

"It stands to reason that this is a legal/precautionary measure; after reports swirled about fast food wrappers containing cancer causing chemicals that have been found in the fecal matter, blood, and urine of tested subjects, McDonald’s likely placed these notices on their wrappers to save face. 

For us, this is a wake up call. Personally I wish I could throw up the Big Mac I ate last night (if it weren’t too digested) but since I can’t, I’m going to be forced to take a brief hiatus from my local Dirt Ronnies. Will you continue to eat McDonald’s without shame or concern, or is a warning like this big enough to scare you away?"

No, it does not "stand to reason". Even the faux label itself admits that the compound is naturally occurring, and that that the FDA has nothing against it. If McDonald's were forced to issue this warning, so would all those other cooked and prepared foods I listed above. It is simply not a "McDonald's issue."

My feeling is, if you're going to trash McDonald's for selling sugary, fatty, overprocessed and marginally nutritious food to kids and other vulnerable groups, then do that. McDonald's is not a nice company (although I do love an Egg McMuffin). But random and ill-informed anti-McDonald's panic is not helping the conversation about nutrition, culture or corporate ethics.

Related:

Georgia's "fat kids" campaign: wake-up call or useless guilt trip?

Annie at Fuse Communications sent me a link to this Georgia childhood obesity campaign from Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, asking for my opinion. It's a tough one.



The brutally frank ads target the parents of overweight children, who are thought to be either unaware or in denial about how their children's diet and activity choices affect their health and self-esteem.




According to ABC news:

"Children's Healthcare of Atlanta chose the straightforward approach after its survey of two towns in Georgia found that 50 percent of parents did not know childhood obesity was a problem and 75 percent of parents with obese children did not think their child was overweight."

But here's that defensive processing dilemma, that keeps showing up in social marketing campaigns. Negative portrayals of viewer behaviour tend to make  the target market turn away, rather than mend their ways, and can even backfire.



The issue of parenting is an especially volatile one. Try having a civil conversation about breastfeeding versus bottle feeding, infant male circumcision, or co-sleeping with a random group of parents online. You'll end up with a flamewar.

Diet and fat-shaming is another one of these issues. While parents need to be aware that their obese and/or inactive kids need healthier habits for their own sake, when you criticize someone's parenting you really hit them where it hurts most. I expect this campaign did exactly that.



From the original article:

"Blaming the victim rarely helps," said Dr. Miriam Labbok, director of the Carolina Global Breastfeeding Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "These children know they are fat and that they are ostracized already."
...
"While guilt and fear are motivators, they have to be meted out with the answer to the situation," Labbok said. "The ads with the children do not offer help to them."
According to health communication experts, successful public health campaigns offer a clear call to action. Labbok says the Georgia ads address the problem, but don't give viewers a clear solution.

So what's the answer? Social marketing theory says positive modelling is the key. But positive modelling takes a long time to be effective. All social change does. It's understandable that Children's Healthcare of Atlanta chose a more confrontational approach, because they can see that it is an urgent public health crisis. But then again, so is smoking (especially around kids), alcohol dependence, and a general lack of concern about buying, cooking and eating healthy food.

None of these problems is going to be solved quickly using the blunt instrument of guilt advertising. All that does is preach to the choir, making impatient activists feel better that something major is being done.

No matter what people tell you, ads can only do so much. This is a job for doctors, nurses, educators and community leaders to take on, full-time, for the next 10 or 20 years. It's complicated, slow, and will not win anyone any awards. But it's what has to happen for real change to occur.

F'd Ad Fridays: But what about the smells?

"Stops the noises"

Via Copyranter