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Just in case you didn’t watch the Grammy Awards (I didn’t either), it featured this commercial, which is a fairly good example of ecological communication. By explaining a complicated system with concrete symbolism, this is a good demonstration of how advertising techniques can promote positive thinking. Chipotle, which you may have seen featured in the documentary Food Inc., wants to highlight its “food with integrity” program that promotes the humane treatment of animals and a decentralized food system. The soundtrack features Willie Nelson covering Radiohead. Wow!

For more background info about the ad, Esquire provides in-depth coverage.

Here’s a bonus video. The following vid is the opening sequence for Food Inc. Notice how the narration and visuals are a kind of food media literacy.

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I’m having a hard time digesting this ad. First off, it draws upon McDonald’s marketing brilliance which relies upon a mnemonic memory device– a simple melodic jingle–to program our memory. The song is catchy and weird, perfect for the Gen X ironic set.

But then the creepiness factor sets it.

How do we reconcile the cute animated fish with the factory-processed soma sandwich it wishes to consume? This has always baffled me: why does the Pollo Loco place have a guy in a dirty chicken outfit outside its restaurant advertising cooked members of its species inside? Or any food product that portrays animals as funny cartoons when in fact the product being sold is something from a house of animal horrors? I guess I answered my own question. It seems as if the talking, cute animal characters of the food industry are meant to create a bit of cognitive dissonance regarding what we eat so as to distance the food’s reality from having any meaningful spiritual connection to our bodies.

Michael at Evolver.net writes:

Fast food advertising traditionally attempts to divorce the food from the animal and factory farm source and make it seem as though it had grown on trees (quite literally in the case of past McDonald’s efforts which have included artificial trees with plastic hamburgers growing on them in children’s play areas). In this case, however, McDonald’s alludes to the true source of the sandwich, fishing (massive, destructive overfishing in fact), but then turns the idea into a dark comedy, asking the viewer to laugh off the absurdity of how a complex organism like a fish (in this case an intelligent, singing one) could have become the “delicious” friend brown rectangle they are pushing into their mouths.

Unfortunately, this fish is viral.

Yep. American food culture is truly dysfunctional.

Via Boing Boing

Sometimes it’s hard to make the case that most chow advertisements are a kind of food porn, but then the advertising gods deliver us something like this to make our point a little easier.

Though I haven’t seen Food, Inc., this looks to be another promising documentary about our monocultural food system. The film’s trailer starts off with a quick lesson in media literacy by juxtaposing the images of food market/ing with the reality food production. It should be noted, however, that the top PR and propaganda spinners know that people only remember pictures, and not words. So though the narration does a good job of deconstructing the images of the supermarket, one is still left with the pastoral image of an artificially abundant the food system (I say “artificial” because the high yield monocultural crops we are accustomed to are produced on borrowed time by depending on petroleum-based fertilizer that destroys biodiverse soil– a temporary fix that has long-lasting and destructive consequences on the food chain).

Nonetheless, I really like this sequence and hope the film is as compelling. The montage alludes to a deeper suspicion I have that supermarkets are more effective tools of food system propaganda than media. I urge people to consider the psychological conditioning of the market as one of the primary forms of system architecture.

Jacqueline Hassink explores sacred spaces of multinational capitalism: boardrooms of banks and corporations, and fitting rooms of haute couture. The above image is from Nestle’s boardroom. What strikes me about it is the far wall, which is the old Mercator map projection originally designed for shipping. In essence it’s a colonial map because of the obvious distortion of land mass that makes Europe and North America far larger than the southern continents.

This is the map most of us are familiar with from school, but it’s probably the least relevant map we could study, except for historical context or as a sample for a kind of thinking. In recent years there have been alternative map makers that have tried to reflect accurate land mass or even turn the world upside down (my favorite) to illustrate that how we map the world is a matter of interpretation. Not surprisingly, Nestle’s boardroom reveals a lot about their colonial subjectivity, one based on what Vandana Shiva calls “monoculture.” Moreover, can you imagine a more sterile, disembodied space for decision making that impacts peoples in far off lands? Imagine the strange rituals practiced in this space of global command and control.

Slap and chop your diet? So much for slow food.

Maybe without intending to do so, this video ends up being a pretty good deconstruction of our food system. As a humorous remix of Steve Porter’s Slap Chop, it decontextualizes popular (mis)conceptions of food: that it’s boring; it’s something needing to be done quickly and on the run; it’s a matter of convenience (not quality); a technological solution makes food better; and there’s nothing like a little violence and aggression to improve your diet! The only thing missing is a way to do this in your car.

Thanks Andree!

If you don’t have time to read Michael Pollan‘s books, then at least watch this video. He makes a terrific argument for avoiding any foods that are advertised. This is a perfect example of how sustainability, food and media intersect.

From Democracy Now!:

Michael Pollan is one of the nation’s leading writers and thinkers in this country on the issue of food. He is author of several books about food, including The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and his latest, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. In light of what he calls the processed food industry’s co-option of “sustainability” and its vast spending on marketing, Pollan advises to be wary of any food that’s advertised.

Listen/Watch/Read

PS Here is Monsanto’s “sustainability” campaign that he refers to in the interview.

Speaking of food, there is more to the Domino’s YouTube PR disaster than a bunch of board teens having fun with their cellphone cameras. It represents another example of the denigration of our food system. In Italy this kind of thing would be unheard of because the places where I buy pizza I have a relationship with the proprietor and cooks. We know each other, so through our relationship and human connection, we feed off each other, so-to-speak. We are not engaged in a dehumanized food environment.

The following commentary really captures what I think has been missing in the discussion of the Domino’s story. In it the author links the video with Sinclair’s The Jungle and Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. (I recommend reading the whole commentary)

Communicative Action: Digital Sinclair:

From the perspective of a media ecologist, the actual food-handling and inexcusable “tampering” are secondary to the communication of the story itself. Upon reading and watching the story on-line, it occurred to me that I was witnessing a kind of Digital Sinclair. The workers, themselves, had exposed the horrific treatment of our food albeit without fully considering the consequences. (They have been arrested on felony charges.) The exploitation of labor was lost on Sinclair’s audience, and perhaps again with respect to Schlosser [author of Fast Food Nation]. Perhaps it was the very exploitation that each man sought to describe that drove the two Domino’s employees to perform their raunchy acts, and also to show them to the world at large. Perhaps the unspoken, psychological impact of thankless and robotic work in the fast food factory environment pushed them to abuse our food supply and then pushed them to cathartically demonstrate it to us. I’m only an amateur psychologist, but in terms of the medium, it appears as though the Internet and it’s many communication environments has taken the printed word, distilled it into the instinctive reactionary elements that touch us at some fundamental level, and eliminated the rest.

We still are given access to the horror, to revel in its raw power, but we are left without the depth of analysis and the contextual treatment that the literate-minded Sinclair, and his modern counterpart Schlosser, provided. The outcome is potentially the same. The sensational aspects of each story are what remain. The YouTube version of the story simply cuts out the wordiness of print and hits us where we react most instinctively. In the gut. If the outcome is oversight and reform, each of these examples spoke to the communication sensibilites of its public. If it’s understanding of the issue in a more complex and interconnected sense, with respect to its impact on labor and the human condition, it most certainly will fail. The critic will shout from the rooftops that this new medium is failing in a very specific sense, but I wonder if that critic might be forgetting the lessons of Sinclair’s experience.

Our future?

This just in:

Mallika Chopra: 1,500 Farmers in India Commit Suicide: A Wake-Up Call for Humanity:

The crop failures, which took place in the agricultural state of Chattisgarh, were prompted by falling water levels. Nearby forest depletion and poorly planned government dam projects contributed to the falling water level. Combined with the vicious money-lending schemes that are prevalent in the region, many farmers felt that death was the only option in the face of insurmountable debt.

Judging from mainstream media coverage, the Chattisgarh suicide story is not ranking as critical (sportscaster John Madden’s retirement seems to be bigger news– thanks to the HuffingtonPost for keeping this story on our radar). This is unfortunate, since the mass suicide was probably the most important news item of the year, if not the century. Why? Because if you follow closely what is happening in India, you will see the farmer debt crisis is a sign of things to come for all of us. Farmers are driven to despair through global policies that deprive them of their ability to live and survive off the land. Drying water, peak oil, and monoculturalization are caused by a global debt slavery system that is shielded by the misused term, “progress.” The plight of Indian farmers in India is a consequence of when land-based people are converted into pie charts and infographics in New York and London, whose livelihoods are traded and commodified by financial managers that are unconscious of the casino game reality they are playing. Like it or not, the sock market is a really a video game with real world consequences, so dire that 1,500 farmers took their lives. And this is only the latest of a growing trend.

Sadly, in the global scheme of mediated reality, these are unworthy victims, disposable people whose lives are not as meaningful as the God of Growth that our society worships. Imagine the difference in public discourse if 1,500 stock brokers or celebrities killed themselves, and you get a sense of how inhumane our mediated reality has become. As Vandana Shiva argues, we cannot live in a post-food society. And she is right. So fuck the singularity and global electronic brain if we can’t eat. We have to put the issue of a fair and just food system back on the global table, because down the line none of us will be able to eat data for dinner.

For more info, start here.