I spoil my cats. I give them my best maternal attention. My children are grown so Simon and Brina are the daily recipients of lovingly displaced neurotic concern. The focus is none other than, my all-time favorite, FOOD. A respected TV chef is now making cat food. My Sabrina loves, loves, loves her chicken with gravy. Why do I have a problem with this? Celebrities have always had products lines.
Products and fame go hand and hand. For years I have happily bought and consumed a well-known Hollywood star’s salad dressing. Does the millennium generation know or care that the man on the label was an actor? I also own a pressure cooker and enjoy coffee that has a famous chef’s face on the label. He didn’t develop the pressure cooker that carries his name, or the coffee. It is more of an endorsement. Did the famous actor make the salad dressing? This is getting very confusing. What’s wrong with a chef making pet food? She has crossed the line. To switch from people food to making cat food makes me say “Yuck.” I will declare to a highly select group of readers, that a chef shouldn’t cross the line from making people food to pet food. There, I’ve said it. Kitty and pup may love table scraps but boldly I ask, “Do you cook for pets or for people?” Honey, it was a poor decision on all counts.
Let’s take a look at the dark and mysterious world of food product names. What’s in a name? Was Aunt Jemima real? If you have pondered the authenticity of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, there is a ‘tell all’ website that does just that, it tells us if they were real or not. As for the beloved pancake auntie, she’s a fake. Aunt Jemima was developed in 1889 by the CEOs of the Pearl Melly Company. If you are wondering about Uncle Ben, he too was a marketing scheme that worked. We know Mrs. Smith (pies) isn’t real and a big thank you goes out to the late Andy Rooney for debunking that scandalous fraud. Was Betty Crocker a real person? Did I hear someone say, “Who cares?” I love the story behind Birdseye frozen vegetables. There was a real Mr. Birdseye, a Brooklyn taxidermist who saw fish successfully frozen in the natural and with a seven-dollar investment of a fan, some ice and brine, he developed a product called frozen food. He sold the patent in 1927 for twentytwo million dollars. Why can’t I think of something like that? He went on to invent a harpoon for whales. Were people still harpooning whales in the 1920’s? That seems sort of primitive.
Inspired by Mr. Birdseye’s success, have you seen my foolproof, Catch Your Run-Away Cat trap? Inside a box lined with cat nip, I have recorded the sound of a can of cat food being opened, which for some reason may be preferable to walking outside and opening numerous cans of cat food in the hope that your precious darling will hear the familiar snap and come running. The patent is ‘in process.’
The last product name that I will scrutinize is Haagen-Dazs ice cream. In 1976 a man sat at his kitchen table uttering syllables that he liked the sound of and came up with two words that mean absolutely nothing. They are not Danish, they are not anything, but they were two words that Mr. Reuben Mattus, a marketing genius, knew would sell ice cream. The words were: Haagen-Dazs. Next came the explanation that the name was inspired by the Danish treatment of Jews in WW2.
Obviously, this explanation is after the fact. If this was an attempt to honor Denmark, we would be eating Copenhagen Cream, not Haagen Dazs. According to Reuben’s daughter Doris, her father “Sat at the kitchen table for hours saying nonsensical words until he came up with a combination he liked.” I can relate to this. My son calls me Dobro. After the fact, he discovered that a dobro is a musical instrument similar to a dulcimer. He liked the sound of the word. Haagen Dazs has outsold brands with real names proving that babble works.
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