The title question should be easy to answer. Tonight, for example, I’m having chicken, pasta, and veggie salad. My friend Catherine prepared this meal out of things I recognize. Yesterday I had my specialty, “use-it-or-lose-it” soup, which I make from any lightly shriveled vegetables in my refrigerator. My meals might not qualify for a Cordon Bleu award, but at least I know what’s in them. Which brings me to the subject of this post: the bewildering labels sellers tack onto food. Take a look at this one:
I snapped this photo through the bus window when we paused next to one of the food carts that provide quick, cheap lunches for New Yorkers. The NEW YORK HOT DOG they’re selling may be delicious, but if I asked for that, I’m not sure what I’d get. Here’s the wide-angle view:
My choices appear to be a hamburger using an alias or an actual HOT DOG.
Nor would I know what to expect if I patronized this food cart:
Or this one:
Would I be eating an actual Executive or whatever the cook thinks an Executive wants for lunch?
Writing about food has made me hungry. Perhaps some cheese:
Now I just have to hope that the block this NATURAL CHEESE is off of isn’t the one I live on. Bon apetit!
I generally read labels only when there’s an outbreak of food-borne illness or when I’m shopping for someone with an allergy. I probably should pay more attention, because labels can be fertile ground for my brand of snark.
Take a look at this product, which I bought in my local supermarket solely because I wanted to snap a photo and clicking without buying seemed unfair:
To me, WILD implies “wilderness.” Thus I assumed the packager wanted me to think that this veggie hadn’t been harvested from a farm. The joke was on me, though, because according to Google, there are two types of ARUGULA.WILD ARUGULA has broader leaves than ARUGULA. Fortunately for me, I liked the salad. Even more fortunately, while I ate it I had fun picturing someone chasing WILD ARUGULA with a net.
This label provides better (WILDER?)material for snarkiness:
The expression wild crafted (which strictly speaking should be hyphenated) seems to contradict itself. If it’s wild, it wasn’t created in a factory or a lab. But crafted implies shaping. I guess you could craft in the German Black Forest, but then the label should be “crafted from wild ingredients.” Before I move on, I have to point out that a skin-care system isn’t Born; it’s made. And is anyone marketing a complete system of skin care that is designed NOT to work?
That’s enough wilderness. Moving closer to home is this sign:
Is the store selling only one BAGEL? Do they turn away someone in search of breakfast for a large family or a single teenager? The phrase ON PREMISES sounds good, I grant you. Anything emerging from an oven, even a single BAGEL, is pretty FRESH if the oven is in the store — ON the PREMISES. I inserted “the” because that’s how the phrase usually appears. Without “the” my mind turns to a different meaning of PREMISES: “assumptions.” I bet the assumption behind this BAGEL label is that customers will pay more if they think a BAGEL is local, not baked in a corporate facility far, far away.
Last one:
This shop owner wants to corner the “support local businesses” market. No problem! I do that myself. But green? Most of the baked goods I buy are tan or brown or iced, though I have seen un-iced green bagels on St. Patrick’s Day. Somehow I don’t think that’s the meaning here. I bet it’s “be virtuous and pay a little more because this bakery is environmentally friendly.” What “environmentally friendly” means in the context of baked goods is beyond me.
I’ll think about that while I stalk some WILD ARUGULA. If you have a theory, let me know.
Signs and labels are supposed to offer information, but sometimes the message doesn’t reach its destination. Take a look at this ice cream container I bought recently:
I admit I’d never given much thought to where the cherries in Cherry Vanilla ice cream came from until I read this label’s proud claim to country-harvested fruit. Ever loyal to my urban home, I hesitated before dropping the package into my cart, wondering whether I should search for ice cream made with city-harvested cherries. Unfortunately, Second Avenue is not rife with orchards. Even Orchard Street on the Lower East Side is treeless these days. So I bought the product, reasoning that the label’s reference to vanilla and cherry flavor with other natural flavors and cherry pieces implies more lab-harvesting than anything else, and the lab could indeed be in my home city.
Onward to Broadway, courtesy of my friend Orli:
As Orli pointed out, the construction of this sentence depicts Audra McDonald as packed with suspense. Anyone who’s ever seen her perform knows that Ms. McDonald is packed with talent, which no amount of suspense can replace. I, for one, plan to buy a ticket.
Now to the front door of a medical office:
Verbally granted access? Um … okay, if you say so ( and you literally must, according to this sign). Yet I can’t help wondering what other type of granted access doesn’t measure up at this location. Are buzzers banned? If I enter through the door an exiting, silent patient holds open, will I be thrown out?
As always, theories welcome. And as we approach whatever wave of the pandemic is next, I hope you stay safe!
Now that the holiday season has arrived, it seems appropriate to look at what we’re eating — not in terms of nutrition but rather identification. This is not always easy to do, as this label reveals:
How do crackers qualify as entertainment? They’ve always seem rather boring to me. I imagine the person who came up with this label decided consumers need to be told when to serve the product. But is it really so hard to figure out when to serve crackers? Are there rules for cracker serving, like a penalty if crackers show up in a lunch box?
On the same theme, take a look at this label for a vegan product, a Celebration Roast:
At least the label lets consumers know which veggies and fruit they’re eating when they tuck into a Celebration Roast. But stuffed implies a wrapper or a container (e.g. a turkey), and there’s no way to tell exactly what is stuffed with butternut squash, apples & mushrooms. The celebration?The cellophane the roast is packed in?
These signs offer specific (and useless) description:
Nice to know what shape my ham is in and the color palette and nationality of my cheese. And yes, I do know that American Cheese is the name of a processed product that bears a passing resemblance to cheddar. Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking that these signs lack essential information, such as whether the ham is cured or uncured and how many additives are present in a sandwich made from pear shape ham and yellow or white American cheese.
Bottom line: Please tell me what I am eating. Don’t tell me when I should eat it or what it looks like. Bon appetit!
We all like to eat, right? And most of us like to eat right. We do our best to select nutritious and delicious food that doesn’t bust the budget. But finding such food isn’t always easy. Indeed, sometimes figuring out exactly what you’re buying can be problematic. Take a look at this item, which my friend Sean spotted:
What is it with the canine references? A couple of posts ago I showed you a sign indicating a “large bread dog park.” Now someone’s putting pastrami on Snoopy! This label is also evidence of (in my opinion) a culinary crime. Lettuce and pastrami shouldn’t go together on a beagle, a bagel, or anything else.
The next photo comes to you courtesy of last night’s dinner:
The meal was quite tasty, but I did wonder whose hands were involved with my salmon, and how. Handcrafted, my dictionary tells me, means “made skillfully by hand.” Unless my biological knowledge is faulty, salmon make salmon, and fish don’t have hands. Yes, I know the handcrafted part might refer to grilled. In that case I hope the hands wore heatproof mitts. Otherwise those dark stripes on the salmon were . . . well, let’s not go there. I ultimately decided that handcrafted is similar to artisanal (a label I have also seen applied to fish). Both mean “you’re paying too much.”
I did not buy this dessert, but I did wonder what the store was selling, and to whom:
Is this treat intended for an extremely small lover of chocolate? Or is the store informing the customer that the chocolate bits in the sundae are undersized? Maybe the sundae is smaller than the size the store usually sells. The whole thing can be resolved with punctuation: I favor a mini, chocolate-lover’s sundae. Actually, I favor a maxisundae, but I shouldn’t indulge.
I hope this sign, like the previous one, has a punctuation problem, because if it doesn’t, someone better call the cops:
