dc atlantis

This is the tagline from an ad-campaign for Oreo something or other running the wall of some lonely roadside filling station in Pennsylvania.  There is a lesson in here somewhere that revolves around wins and losses for the end-user; the individual at the bottom of a consumer chain.

A powerful message from Hershey, PA

My partner is convinced I go around looking for sneaky penises, so I won’t even bother with the ejaculatory, mammographic, or other evacuatory references.  Moving on from the sophomoric – I’ll be honest, I have no idea how this kind of message could compel an individual to buy anything, food least of all.  Foodstuffs that could be ‘bursting with more stuff,’ should really be limited to items prepared with stuffing, i.e. ‘bursting with more stuffing.’  I could imagine a fancy tech instrument bursting with more stuff – stuff that is so fancy and new-fangled that I couldn’t hope to understand – and, keep talking, I might loosen my purse strings.  A bank account could be “bursting with more stuff,” as could a stock portfolio.  My best estimate is that this kind of advertising is a flavor of the Linen’s n Shit brand marketing where R&D dollars were spent on bad ideas and shifty designer drugs trips with bad endings.

This kind of advertising was already questionable after Ben & Jerry’s first showed up on the heavy end of the culinary scene.  (As an aside, it’s not often that I daydream of bellyflops, but these two men…)  Ben & Jerry’s accomplished two things: first, it raised the baseline for mass-batch produced ice cream.  Second, it lowered that bar by stuffing ice cream full of candy bars, brownies, marshmallows, cheesecake, and small children.  I remember the first time I had “Phish Food” and shortly thereafter I recall something about the veneer of the bathroom in which I tossed my cookies.

Food?

Another palatable interpretation of “bursting with more stuff” involves my buddy, Sarah, who once encountered an overly zealous airport security guard sometime in 2002.  This individual confiscated Sarah’s grapefruit, citing security concerns.  When Sarah offered to eat the grapefruit, the security guard said, “no, we will detonate your grapefruit.”  Bursting with more stuff.  Exploding fruit and stock portfolios.  Possibly pornography, but this kind of promise spoils the punchline.

This morning I ran across another instance of a food that is overfilled with stuffiness, and no one wins.  Admittedly, I shopped around for one this morning in hopes of skipping out good health for the next month, but here we are:

Rocking hard at 2,600 calories, 135 grams of fat (59 saturated), 263 grams of sugar and 1,700 milligrams of sodium

No gourmet restaurant would advertise a single item on their menu as “bursting with more stuff.”  No self- or other-respecting cook would tell his or her dinner guests that the food they had just enjoyed was “bursting with more stuff.”  I have encountered fast-food restaurants that promise shit burgers with more stuff, but never to the point of bursting.  Why would you stick something like this in your mouth?  Enlighten me.