Editing/Ethics (Legal) Issue: Royal Pudding Jingle from Long Ago

"Royal...Pudding...

Rich, rich, rich in flavor!

Smooth, smooth, smooth as silk,

More food energy than fresh, whole milk!"

The folklore, anyway was that Royal Pudding was required by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) or other regulator to remove their eminently memorable jingle because it was misleading. The two main ingredients in Royal Instant Vanilla, e.g., are "SUGAR [and] FOOD STARCH MODIFIED, " with some cottonseed oil lower on the list, but there, for your desert basics of sugar and fat. So of course mixing Royal Pudding with "fresh, whole milk" yields an enticing dish with "more food energy" per unit weight than even pretty high-caloric "fresh whole milk."

The FTC — or whoever — ruled that the ad was misleading, making Royal Pudding sound downright healthful as opposed to a high-calorie dessert suitable for only occasional eating, unless one wanted to gain weight (a high-calorie pudding helped save the life of one of my cats when he needed to start eating again after a serious jaw injury).

But "food energy" is what is at issue here — the thing in itself — and "calories" just the unit of measurement in colloquial American; so the ad as it stands should be preferred, one might argue, to stating that the prepared pudding has "more calories per unit of weight than whole milk" (ca. 19 kcal per ounce in one on-line chart, vs. 100 per ounce for Jello Chocolate pudding according to another).

Sooo ... folks who edit now and then or for a living — how would you come down here? Exactness of meaning as stated, or what most of an audience will hear? And lawyers out there (or just fans): Should it be illegal to mislead an audience speaking truth to their ignorance or just failure to think through a jingle?

About Those Ultraviolent Video Games: A Plea for More Graphic Realism

            Until very recently if I heard or read "RPG," I understood it as "rocket-propelled grenade" and not "role-playing game," so I'm obviously no expert on gaming. Still, I watch a fair number of animation shows on television — plus The Daily and Nightly Shows — so I see a lot of commercials for games.

            (And that is "see," or see fragments of; I turn the sound off during commercials and listen to an audiobook if I'm on an exercise machine or read if I'm watching from a couch. So screw you, advertisers! May you contract crotch rot and leprosy on your hands simultaneously while all your teeth fall out except one and that becomes impacted! Four minutes of commercials?!? Die, rot and be damned, scum-sucking swine! …. But I digress.)

            Anyway, I have watched a good many commercials for first-person-shooter games aimed at young people (males especially) and, although hardly the most gentle of people in my fantasy life — I curse telemarketers even more than advertisers — I find the general sensibility of many of the games to be disturbing.

            So I have a suggestion: a highly modest itty-bitty proposal that the governments of the United States, Japan, and other games-producing nations, parents groups, Tipper Gore, and similar relevant entities should "incentivize" (i.e., threaten and bribe) game-makers to develop and offer EXTRA BONUS FEATURES!!!! that might help young users consider a bit the implications of their battle-themed games.

            The Bonus Features would need to be appropriate for different games but most could include for the first level role-playing as EMT's, fire-fighters, Army medics, Naval hospital corpsmen, triage nurses, surgeons, the "green ghouls" of Mortuary Affairs and such, with points being scored for coming in after the initial game and cleaning up. The players who save the most lives and limbs, get the corpses identified and on their ways back to the families of the dead, do the best with the most immediate psychological trauma — these are the winners and can move on.

            The next level would be bomb squads and engineers and demolition teams and construction workers, who can score points clearing away the destruction and starting to rebuild the homes and factories and water supplies and power generation — the infrastructure destroyed in the initial game. And those who rebuild the local area the best can go on to further levels playing counselors, public servants, and diplomats; NGO agents and other leaders and workers who put together societies after the first-person shooters and strafers and bombers and all have finished their play.

            I'd have the Bonus Games highly realistic, and especially graphic from the points-of-view of those handling the wounded and maimed and working with corpses in Graves Registration. A high degree of gore might make the Bonus Games creepily attractive to the sociopaths and psychopaths among the players, but the Dexter/Ted Bundy demographic is small, and it may be just as well if they spend their time playing games. For children, teens, and young adults closer to the medians, means, and modes on psychological curves — for normal young people — a dose of realism in their games would be a damn good thing.

The Serving Size of an American Pizza Is a Pizza (11 Dec. 2014)

   I originally planned to do a rather formal, moderately scholarly essay on John Stuart Mill's "Principle of Liberty" from his monograph On Liberty, and its relevance for publishing calorie counts on restaurant menus (and such). Then I figured that between the holidays and work coming in and an ant infestation, I'd just post something short and simple, and something just written out as a post, not drafted first and then copied and pasted into a blog post. Which I did, and then woke up in the middle of the night and decided to add a head note, and for the first time in years lost an entire piece of writing.
            So to begin again, informally, and putting off the meditation on liberty and nutrition — and delaying a bit my throwing in way more than my two cents on the kidnapping and torturing of terrorist detainees (I'm writing in midish-December of 2014) — and putting off further getting out holiday cards and present; to begin again: The portion size of a pizza in America is, for many of us, one pizza.
            At least it was for me when on paper-grading marathons when I taught and was and remains for me the serving I'm going to eat through within a few hours while coming up against deadlines for the work I'm doing in retirement.
            So a couple days ago I ordered in from Pizza Man Dan, a small, thin-crust, BBQ chicken pizza, with red onions and cilantro, "But hold the cashews." (That wasn't a special order; in California, that's a menu item.)
            What is new and different since my last marathon work session is that I now have the "LoseIt" app and record my food and exercise and discovered that the two slices of pizza I ate when just getting started was about half the calories LoseIt calculated I should be eating in a day.
            Again, this was not a hearty Chicago deep-dish pizza nor the sort of meat-lover's wet dream I used to order before I stopped eating mammals. This was just two slices of thin-crust that I scarfed up hot out of the box before I sat down for an actual meal.
            By the end of that initial attack on the pizza, with only half of it down and on the way to digestion, I was pretty much at my calories for the day: more exactly the calories if all I was doing was the marathon at the computer and hadn't hit the elliptical trainer.
            Now pizza is a most-excellent food. As I used to tell my friends, you dip a well-topped pizza slice in a bit of Metamucil, and you've got all your food groups: carbohydrates, cheese, tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, animal protein, and — if you actually did throw in or on some Metamucil, or ordered a whole wheat crust) — you've got your fiber.
            So it would be handy for poor, thin people to know that pizza is a wise thing to buy to get good caloric bang for the buck. If you're going to have only one meal today, a well-stuffed pizza (on sale or in the dumpster) would be a sensible investment.
            If you're reading on-line blogs, however, you are probably not desperate for calories and dumpster diving, but you are probably in need of information about just how food-energy rich — high calorie — are some of the things (most of the things?) most Americans are cramming into our bodies.
            We need those calorie counts on menus and with prepared food generally, and we need them running across the bottom of our TV screens when evil commercial geniuses are tempting us to eat like we mean it with food porn.
            And purveyors of that food, and more so the food porn, should indeed be compelled to supply that information.
            How to square that sort of compulsion with the great good of Liberty — that will be the subject of a later blog.
            After the rush. After the holidays.

            Maybe after I order in another pizza ….