Crackers

Animal crackers in my soup
Monkeys and rabbits loop the loop
Gosh, oh gee, but I have fun
Swallowing animals one by one  -Shirley Temple

I suppose by now you have heard about Nabisco changing the design on the box of animal crackers.

For years the box featured pictures of animals, in "cages" because the actual name of the snack is Barnum's Animal Crackers and it meant to convey the idea that the circus was coming to town. The idea being that the nearest the average consumer would get to a lion was to see one at the circus.

However, in the past few years, the whole idea of a circus has fallen out of favor.  Clowns are considered "scary".  Jerry Seinfeld once commented about going to the circus and he "didn't know what the hell was going on".  Barnum and Bailey's Circus went bankrupt.

Instead of being behind bars in a circus wagon, the animals are now shown just chillin' on the African plain. The animals: zebra, elephant, lion, giraffe, and a gorilla.  From my research (a misbegotten childhood watching "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom") I believe the lion would attack at least two of the other animals.

I will let you guess why Nabisco made this decision. You guessed it right: they were pressured by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) to change the art of the box.

Twenty years ago, PETA was decrying animals caught in steel traps to make fur coats. They were protesting lab research done on animals. Now, they are mau-mauing companies about art on cookie boxes.

PETA, in a released statement, said, “No living being exists simply to be a spectacle or to perform tricks for human entertainment, yet all circuses and traveling shows that use animals treat them as mere props, denying them everything that’s natural and important to them.” 

(Just for the record, my 21-year-old cat, Gracie, agreed saying that she doesn't exist to perform tricks for human entertainment, like some dog. Additionally, Gracie is pretty ticked off about not making the Top Ten of Cobb County's cutest pets for Cobb Life magazine. That has nothing to do with the issue at hand, but her mind tends to wander sometimes.)

Most people chalked up the new animal cracker box design as another example of PC culture gone wild. We can't get the Pope to decry child molestation by rouge perverted priests, but doggone it, we can free cartoon African animals from their cages on cracker boxes.


However, the crowd at Woke University isn't giving each other high fives for forcing a major corporation into doing something which was totally unnecessary. No, the problem is it didn't go far enough.

Vox, an online magazine, published a piece titled: The Big Problem With The Animal Crackers "Cage Free" Box Design by Daisy Alioto. The subtitle to the piece stated, "The new art doesn't address any of the underlying issues about ethics, exploitation, and corporate greed".

To be fair, the art on most food items doesn't address any of the underlying issues about anything, much less issues about ethics, exploitation, and corporate greed.  Have you ever seen a box of Sugar Smacks?  It has a stupid frog wearing a hat and a jacket eating a bowl of cereal with a spoon. Who wants to eat something a frog eats? Why would a frog wear a hat and a jacket? Wouldn't it get all wet? Was the hat and jacket made by child laborers in Bangladesh? Does the frog have health insurance? None of these questions are answered by Sugar Smacks, but that's big cereal for you.



In an interesting twist, Ms. Alioto admits that her great grand uncle, Sidney, designed the iconic original package in 1923.  I found this amazing. Because I too have a great grand uncle that was into design.

According to family folklore, my great grand uncle Zellbert Manis created the design for the moonshine jug.  It was his idea to put XXX on the jugs.

Somehow, this admission by Ms. Alioto doesn't get her banished from the cool kid's table. She makes a credible defense of Uncle Sidney. She says his design was about joy and not animal cruelty. Too bad she wasn't in the boardroom when PETA came to town.

However, she decides to spin off from the silliness of the new design to placate a bunch goofballs because, hey, this is Vox and there has to be something more terribly wrong.

She says, "the symbolic significance of changing the animal cracker box design does little to dismantle the elements of capitalism that exploit animals, people, and the environment".

Dismantling the elements of capitalism that exploits animals, people, and the environment is a pretty tall order for a box of crackers.

For example,  the former head of Mondelez, the company that now owns Nabisco, made 402 times the amount as their median worker.  Ms. Alioto doesn't specify how much more the head of Mondelez is supposed to make over the median worker.  But, you know, it is just not fair for a CEO to make more money than a guy on the cracker line.

However, she doesn't say anything positive about the capitalism that allowed Uncle Sydney to get a job and to create a design that lasted 95 years.

She continues, "I don’t believe that what PETA’s animal cracker box campaign has done is censorship, but I do believe it places an unfair burden on an artist’s contribution without addressing any of the deeper ethical issues in play." 

Of course, it is a type of censorship. It is the type called "shaming".  It is to elevate Uncle Sydney's creation to the level of other anachronistic icons of brands like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben when it clearly is not.

Ms. Alioto has discovered that some of the campaigns of the left are crackers.