Linkapalooza 2/23/09 – Food

(Ed. note: I’ll start including dates on these “linkapalooza”-style posts, because it makes it hard to find a specific one)

I guess there’s a bit of a Mario Battali backlash brewing among the foodies. Doug at BarfBlog has this rather unflattering post which is mostly directed at the thoughtlessness of R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe, but manages to throw in a couple of good slams at Mario, too. And Slashfood tattles on Mario’s molto vulgaro behavior in front of the King and Queen of Spain (cue Moxy Früvous here). Serious Eats failed to chime in, but that’s probably because Mario’s a contributor there, and you don’t want to aggravate your celebrity buddies.

The New York Times reports that the brand management people at PepsiCo-owned Tropicana have decided to give up on the recent redesign of their packaging and go back to the older graphics due to lots of complaints from customers. Well, maybe not LOTS of customers, but some very loyal and (I presume) loud ones, anyway. Mutual Friend of Torrez, David Wertheimer may or may not have been one of those loud and loyal few, but he sums up the problem with the new packaging pretty accurately: the old cartons made it very easy to tell which sub-variety of Tropicana juice you were buying, but the new packaging makes it next to impossible, and that pisses off anyone who has to waste time searching for it in the grocery store.
I wish the people who redesigned the labeling for Pepsi itself would take a lesson from this. The redesign of the labels on the assorted Pepsi soda products sucks ass. The logo has been parodied all over the Internet for looking like everything from a fat guy to someone’s ass crack, and the typeface used for the actual content labels is unreadable. Not long ago, I bought what I thought was a 12-pack of Diet Pepsi, only to get home and find that I had bought caffeine-free Diet Pepsi because the words “caffeine-free” can’t be read on the package, and because they changed the label’s color from the industry-default “brown means decaf” to white. Bastiges! At the same time, I have also read that Pepsi plans to bring out a temporary promotion with “throwback” versions of regular Pepsi and Mountain Dew made with real cane sugar instead of HFCS, and I notice in that article that they also plan to use the older logos (in the case of Pepsi, a very old logo). Pepsi did very well with its “Pepsi Raw” promotion in international markets last year, and despite those stupid pro-HFCS ads all over television, there is a lot of well-founded opposition to the over-prevalence of HFCS.
Oh, and while the attention has been focused on PepsiCo, the Coca-Cola Company somewhat quietly announced that they will drop the word “Classic” from their Coke packaging. Considering that the reason they put it there in the first place, namely the ill-fated New Coke, died almost 20 years ago, I’d say they’re a little slow on the uptake.

Häagen-Dazs is trying to make a play for the “simple foods” crowd by marketing several flavors of ice cream under a label called “Five”, meant to stand for there only being five ingredients in those blends: milk, cream, sugar, egg, and whatever flavoring the ice cream has, That’s all you really need for any ice cream, but you’d be extremely hard pressed to find any national brand of ice cream that doesn’t contain things like carrageenan or guar gum to “enhance mouthfeel” and assorted other food additives to prolong shelf-life and retard ice crystal formation. But wait, you say…I remember those commercials for Breyers Ice Cream where they specifically said they didn’t have any of those other things. Well, yes you do, grasshopper, and so do I, but those commercials are from the distant past. You see, in 1993 Breyers was bought up by the conglomerate Unilever, and while they left things alone for a while, eventually their greedy little desires got the better of them and they started adding a substance called “tara gum” , and then finally gave up pretending and moved on to using guar (check the ingredients of, say, plain vanilla). But…but…but what about Ben & Jerry’s? Surely those aging hippies would NEVER use additives! Mais non, mon cher, Unilever also owns Ben & Jerry’s nowadays (though they keep Ben around for appearances’ sake) and that wholesome Vermont hippie shtick is just so much horsehockey. Now, for the big bucks, guess who owns Häagen-Dazs…I think you can see where this is going.

There is no food more uninspiring than the commercially-grown supermarket-grade tomato. All but flavorless, with a texture somewhere between gelatinous and rubbery, they are picked green, refrigerated for weeks, and sprayed with ethylene gas to turn red even though they are nowhere close to ripe. All in the name of looking perfect on a grocery store display. But as bland and blah as they are, the industry that produces them engages in the modern-day equivalent of legalized slavery to get them to market. This eye-opening story in the latest Gourmet magazine explains that 90% of the tomatoes sold in the U.S. during the winter months come from Immokalee, Florida and that practically all of the growers there systematically intimidate, abuse, and hold against their will tens of thousands of legal and illegal immigrant farm workers. A local action group called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is making slow headway against the abuses of the growers but is still trying to convince the Republican governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, to take enforceable legal action (fat chance).
I have enough links for another Food Linkapalooza post later in the week, so stay tuned for more!