Someone on Twitter pinged this satirical ad for a new line of American “Paleo-esque” snacks to me. It’s a very clever pisstake of the latest health fads, specifically the Paleo movement. Self-referring pisstakes are always the best.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPB8W1rEnAc[/youtube]
I love it all, except for the punch line, which is a sell for a fad-free health snack of nuts and cubes of cheese. I love this, too, except for…the plastic.
A bunch of basic snacks that anyone can package up themselves in a reuasable container at home is instead passed along an assembly line, packaged in molds and wrapped in plastic, shipped around the world and then marketed with expensive (albeit clever) ads. We get lulled into accepting this atrocious waste via a “good” ad message.
We’re going to see more of this: great messages masking atrocious means.
The world is waking up to great messages. And so manufacturers are catching on and catching up.
But none of us are getting the wastage thing. At all. This kills me.
I’m seriously finding it harder and harder to cope with our blindness to wastage, our acceptance of crass consumerism and our embracing of “hygiene phobia” (which drives a lot of the wasteful packaging these days).
We talk green, but accept the free snack on the Virgin flight and the plastic bag of hygiene accroutements.
We worry about the environment, but drive to work when it only takes 5 minutes extra to walk.
We carry our eco laundry detergent home in plastic bags.
It’s like we want to be associated with “good” but we don’t actually want to do anything ourselves. We just want to buy into it. We don’t want