Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Immoral advertising - good food my a#@

Traveling back from Auckland the other day I followed this truck for a section. The advert made me very mad, so mad that I whipped out my phone and took a photo. Now apart from the poor resolution as there is no optical zoom on my camera and I don't like traveling to close - especially when taking photos !!! So let me point out a few things.....


  1. Good food fast at home. This is the slogan in white underneath the plate of food. Good food ???? !!! what is good about it ??? Sure it might be good food if you were a poverty stricken person  who lived a subsistence life. But in the Western world it is very rare to find someone who is starving. Let me explain why it is not good food:
    • Chicken - assuming it is chicken inside the things (from memory there was a chickeny logo thingy top middle, this chicken would be battery raised. That is it flesh would be very low in nutrients such as carotenoids and other fat soluble vitamins
    • Coating. To make the coating taste nice it will be white flour or something similar. Therefore this is empty calories, nothing good here. 
    • Fat in coating. To make them cook quick and taste nice there will be fat in the coating. This fat will either be margarine (don't get me started) or a highly processed, heat extracted cheap oil. Again no nutrients in it. To hide the fat they likely put in casein into the mixture. The casein holds onto the fat, so they look less fatty out of the oven. By the casein makes it to your table, I would be very surprised if any nutrients left in it. 
    • So in conclusion I can't find anything good about this product
  2. The plate is full of processed meats, and very small amount of vegetables. The picture doesn't show the vegetables very well. On the top right of the plate there is some corn (looks like frozen corn) some tomatoes (red section) and avocado (virtually unrecognizable in the picture). Vegetables are supposed to be the dominate thing on your plate. Not the minor after thought. 
  3. The white writing in the top left also got on my goat, but I can't remember what this is and the photo isn't good enough to read. 
Why does this make me mad? Because it implies that bad food is good food. I don't mind if you eat poorly - we often do - but we are under no illusions about how healthy the food is. People are affected by advertising, especially ones like this which take unhealthy food and try and make it healthy.

There is a term, greenwashing, were a company pretends to be green, but in reality isn't or they haven't changed to become green. Maybe there should be a term called nutrientwashing where companies make something to be nutritious when in fact it isn't.

Update:Thanks to my sister who emailed me the link to the product packaging so you can see it in all its awful glory. 

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