Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Food Porn (30 Sept. 2013)

            As often noted, it says something significant and disturbing that commercials on CNN and the other cable-news channels trend toward advertising catheters, large cars, Cialis and other drugs for old people: the audience analysis for the news channels is, apparently, the same that has newspapers' placing their editorials right after the obituaries. What I've been noticing lately, though, is the commercials on the day-time re-runs of the fake news shows: the restaurant, cooking-school, fast food, booze, soft-drinks, and candy commercials with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

            I'm on the treadmill or elliptical trainer, switching from MSNBC to Comedy Central to my iPod, with the TV on mute and trying really hard to deny my ears and eyeballs to the hucksters during the interminable commercial breaks. But up there before those eyeballs are incredible images, impossibly perfect images, of impossibly perfect food.

            I'm trying to diet and get exercise, and I've just heard a very clever Colbert riff on Michelle Obama's plugging for Americans' drinking water (as an alternative to sugary drinks), and then I find myself staring at a double cheeseburger with bacon, slowly dripping what looks like extra-rich bourbon barbecue sauce. If I ate that thing I'd have to spend another hour on the treadmill and have a salad and fiber bar for dinner, and I'd still be over my "Lose It!" calorie allowance — no shit; there's an exclamation mark in the name — I'd still be over my calorie allowance for the day.

            CNN and MSNBC are catering to old farts, and Fox-News is trawling for old farts with anger issues. Comedy Central et al. are going for younger demographics, who are apparently strongly into highly fattening food, or, perhaps, can be tempted to buy highly fattening food.

            This is not good.

            In terms of minute-by-minute content, the youngsters are getting better news than their elders, but they're also getting the message that it's not only normal behavior but downright cool to eat a 1300-calorie superburger, washed down with beer or sugar-cola and followed with a casual chaser of M&Ms and Cheetos.

            In throwing Eve and Adam out of the Garden, God pronounces a severe sentence on them, but He has his harshest words for the serpent that tempted them. Arguing "On Liberty" in 1859 — he's in favor of it — John Stuart Mill allows that society probably has to tolerate a lot of, as I'll put it, whoring and «john-ing», but we are freer, if we choose, to regulate pimps or at least bring down upon them social disapproval. It's one thing to get your rocks off illicitly; it's another to tempt people into such behavior and make your living at it.

            In terms of US public health, pimps who provide STD testing and condoms are less of an threat than the hucksters pushing to young viewers a Tuesday-night special of a bottomless pasta bowl, all-you-can-eat breadsticks, and a turtle cheesecake dessert. For that matter, small-time drug deals are probably less of a threat to public health than the hucksters pushing to young viewers deliciously seductive food porn.

            SUGGESTION TO FTC, FCC, AND OTHER REGULATORY AGENCIES ALPHABETICAL: Do require calorie disclosure on menus and flashed across the screen in all those ads.


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ADDENDUM: As often, the satirists were on to a trend way before more earnest folk such as I. See Trey Parker and Matt Stone's South Park espisode 14.14, 17 November 2010, "Creme Fraiche" — not commercials but full-frontal Food Network!

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