This organic tomato sauce may or may not contain severed head

My friend Gord sent me a link from Good that points out a pretty hilarious packaging gaffe. Or is it?

Tropical Traditions, originally a coconut oil importer in the US, has branched out into organic packaged foods. One of them is an Italian pasta sauce line, with labels showing women from Renaissance Italian paintings.

Organic Spicy Tomato & Roasted Garlic, for example, features Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, but without the breasts:

Organic Tomato & Basil uses Raphael's Woman with the Veil:

Organic Tomato and Grilled Eggplant gets one of my favourite portraits, Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo:

OK, the weasel is a little weird for a food label. (Assuming the sauce doesn't have much weasel in it.) 

But let's move on to the final jar, Organic Tomato & Porcini Mushroom:

What is with that woman's face, anyway? She doesn't look too impressed. Perhaps we should have a look at the uncropped painting, which is Caravaggio's... Judith Beheading Holofernes?!?

That's right, it's a decapitation. In the apocryphal Book of Judith, the eponymous heroine is a righteous Hebrew who saves Israel by talking her way into the tent of Assyrian general Holofernes, then hacking off his head after he passes out drunk. Since Christians love them a good grisly death, this scene has been portrayed by several artists over the centuries.

But why choose it for a food label? Especially a food that itself kind of resembles gore?

There is no way the designer was unaware of the painting's context, as she or he would have had to research a public domain version of the whole work from which to crop the label.

In fact, I believe what we are seeing here is a clever little prank. A designer who counted on his or her client to be ignorant of the source material. The Botticelli and Leonardo portraits are well-known enough that they probably sold the idea of using Renaissance Italian paintings of women to give the sauces a note of "old-world authenticity." But a severed head, spouting arterial blood, is probably one of the last things I want to think about when I pour this on my spaghetti.

Cute Cheerios ad incites racist flamewar

There was a time, a few years ago, when it was common casting procedure on our Canadian government ads to cast families of different ethnic backgrounds. This was an easy way to show population diversity even when the action took place in a single household. The challenge was always to avoid making it look forced, or turning it into a cliché. We just wanted to show families that more people could identify with, and not feel excluded by.

So it was interesting for me to open up Gawker and read about the controversy surrounding a new Cheerios spot from the United States:



Apparently, Cheerios had to shut down the comments thread in its YouTube post of the ad was flooded with racist hate speech. I can't give you a firsthand account, but AdFreak Editor Tim Nudd describes it as "devolved into an endless flame war, with references to Nazis, 'troglodytes' and 'racial genocide'."

But almost as surprising, to me, is what a huge (positive) deal people on Cheerios' Facebook Page are making, as if depicting families that don't all have the same complexion is some kind of marketing revolution.

I guess both the bad and the good show how far American culture has to go when it comes to getting over its obsession with "race" (whatever that means). When everyone can look at an ad like this and just see a family, then we'll know there's been progress.

By the way, to circle back to my first point, congratulations to Saatchi & Saatchi NYC for achieving an effortless realism in what was apparently a very momentous casting choice.

A mascot for GMO cereals?

boingboing featured this art piece, which is a combination of 16 different classic cartoon mascots for kids' cereals from Kellog, Post and General Mills:

Considering that transgenic corn, wheat and other plants plants are now common in our processed food supply, the idea of combining silly rabbit, frog, pirate and leprechaun genes to create a novel mascot is pretty damn timely.

According to the artist: "Some may complain he's a grotesque abomination of nature, while others may claim copyright infringement, but what no one can deny is that looking at him makes one more hungry and willing to ingest things than ever before."

It also makes you want to figure out who all 16 characters are. Can you name them? No cheating.

An open letter to the Can, on its 200th birthday

Dear Can,

Has it already been two centuries? You're still so full of beans!

I can't tell you how much you have changed my world. For marketers, you are the great-grand-daddy of packaged goods. But you are much more than that.

Your father, French inventor Nicolas Appert, must be so proud. That is, if he weren't long dead. And if his idea hadn't been patented instead by an Englishman.

But you, my friend, opened up a huge can of whup-ass on history. Before you, armies and explorers were limited by their ability to source fresh food. According to CBC's Peter Nowak, author of Sex, Bombs and Burgers, the Emperor Napoleon himself started the can rolling by offering a prize to anyone who could come up with shelf-stable food for his troops. By the second decade of the 19th Century, European armies were marching all over the world fuelled by tinned meat.

Oh, wait a sec. Does that mean you're responsible for Victorian colonialism? Ouch. That's got to keep you up at night.

That, and the murder of the Franklin Expedition. Well, I suppose I can't blame you for experimenting with lead solder in your youth. We've all had our toxic moments.

But you've had your successes, too! Consider SPAM. (No, scratch that.) OK, how about creamed corn? Oh,wait, I've got it. Your finest achievement was preserved for all time in art:

Those iconic images, and the comfort foods they represent, more than make up for some of your more embarrassing moments:

And yet here you are, 200 years later, rocking food preservation from soup to nuts. But I have some bad news for you, my old friend. Today you still form the staple of my pantry and my emergency preparedness kit. But the end may be near.

You see, the space age brought some changes to food packaging. It's taken 40-odd years, but now tetra packs and soft foil "retort pouches", pioneered by NASA, are really starting to take off. You may be recyclable these days, Can, but you're heavy and awkward (aren't we all, when we're older?) and you cost a lot to move around. I'm afraid we'll be seeing much less of each other in the future.

But this is not a goodbye, Can. Not yet. Whether or not you embrace my tomatoes a few years from now, we'll always have beer.