"Bakery Fresh" Crap For Your Kids
 

Every once and a while I'll see some horrible idea and its inane marketing and I want to scream. Microwaveable meals are bad enough, but when their labeling is so self-evidently ridiculous, I feel like I'm living in a hellish parody of reality. Then it sinks in: "No, Brian. This is the real world, and billions of people buy this crap and FEED IT TO THEIR CHILDREN!" I actually start feeling sick and depressed. Yesterday it was a box of Lunchables Hot Dogs:

http://www.wildfreshness.com/brian/a...lunchables.jpg

The package I saw proclaimed that the rolls in which the slaughterhouse waste sticks rested were "Bakery Fresh." Are you fucking kidding me? Your buying pre-cooked, preservatives-injected, shrink-wrapped hot dogs and you're gonna actually think or care that the friggin rolls are "Bakery Fresh?"

Or "Hey, Oscar Mayer. What the fuck do you mean by "Bakery Fresh? That they actually came from a small bakery where some guy with a big white hat and covered with flour lovingly dotes over small batches of hot dog rolls that he then carries to your processing plant in a basket just minutes after they come out of the brick oven?"

How could any thinking parent buy such shit and feed it to her own children? The only conclusion is that they DON'T think at all. One visit to the supermarket and I'm convinced that the majority of Americans are just a bunch of idiotic automatons. In 1996, Oscar Mayer celebrated the production of the one billionth LUNCHABLES® Lunch Combination. As another blogger put it: ONE BILLION OF THESE BRIGHT, COLORFUL LITTLE SHIT BOXES! Wow. Among their "healthy" concoctions are Pepperoni Pizza with BUTTERFINGER® and CAPRI SUN® Juice Drink or Cheesy Chip Nachos with Fudge Squeeze and CAPRI SUN®

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You are absolutely right in every way.

My personal rule of thumb is: the more heavily marketed a food is, the more likely it is to be utter crap.

Hey, whoa, don't diss lunchables, Lunchables Cheese Pizzas got me through just about all of 8th and 9th grade. I'm serious.

Sure, and I ate cafeteria "nachos" every single day from 7th grade to 9th grade, at which point I switched to buying the frito pie every day instead. Doesn't mean it was good for me.

Pangloss, you should watch the show "Honey We're Killing the Kids" on TLC. Or maybe you shouldn't. The whole point of the show is they improve the family's eating habits, but seeing how these supposedly average people live will seriously make you want to hit something.

Yeah, clodster, I've seen the promos for that show. I'll skip it.

My true confession is that I don't have kids, so perhaps I should not post on this particular thread, but I've dated a harried single mom before and her kids chose from what seemed to me to be an exclusively microwaveable menu. Not surprisingly, I don't date her anymore. She wasn't a "bad" person, but she just gave in to the convenience of such products and the refusal of the kids to eat anything else. Hey, we've all had our weak moments, but Lunchables each day?

Heh, back in Maryland, at the Fort Meade commissary, you could get six-inch frozen pizzas for like, 67 cents... I would get like, fifteen, and pop two in the oven every day after school...

...What? Stop looking at me like that...

My problem with Lunchables was always the complete falsehood of their convenience. How hard is it to put a piece of cheese, a piece of ham, and some crackers in a kid's lunchbox? I mean, at least with a Hot Pocket, I can say, "It's true, I couldn't cook some meat, douse it in tomato sauce, wrap the whole thing in dough, and bake it in a reasonable amount of time." But Lunchables? All they did is cut it into little squares for you.

Because plenty of parents aren't living in reality because doctors are afraid to tell them the truth.

Check the article and then look at the picture of Trisha Leu. Look again and understand that this girl is seventeen years old.

I find it interesting that the article notes that the obesity epidemic is due in part to doctors' being sensitive to their patients' weight, yet the only group which can be universally insulted and joked about (in much the same way that we used to make Polak jokes, etc) is fat people. The obese are *not* covered by the political correctness strictures in society these days.

Watch Conan sometime. See if there's not at least one fat joke each night. You'll see it in a lot of other venues as well. It is because obesity is perceived as being voluntary, the result of a lack of self-discipline, and therefore allowable as humor.

I stopped talking to people about what they feed their kids and what I give mine... it is just a bad thing to talk about.

My Dr. is always on me about my weight, good man.

I have never been driven to the depths represented by the "Lunchables".

Besides, a can of beans and a sixpack is cheaper.