If you are what you eat, I am the most boring person alive. At least at lunchtime.
My typical noonday meal consists of a sandwich, a banana and a handful of baby carrots—simple, nutritious fare that I eat, in part, to make me feel better about the cheese-encrusted noodles I’m likely to scarf down at dinner.
The most pedestrian part of this incredibly boring lunch has always been, for me, the carrots. While the sandwich allows room for creativity (Mayo? Mustard? Both?) and the banana sometimes comes with a cute little sticker, the carrots are inherently non-descript—a collection of little orange fingers completely devoid of indivuality or pizzazz. Baby carrots are the spooky clones of the food pyramid—high nutrition meets The Stepford Wives. They’re so nondescript that I never pay attention what brand of carrots I buy or whether they’re grown organically or anything. I mean, they’re just carrots, right?
But as I was packing my lunch this morning, I noticed something different about this particular bag of baby carrots: It came with a picture of E.B., the main character from the movie Hop, on the front. “Paid Celebrity Endorsement,” the package read.
Now, this wasn’t the most shocking thing to happen to me today—nor even, truth be told, while I was making my lunch (we ran out of mayo). But the picture sparked sufficient curiosity within me to do something I’ve ever done before: Read the bag in which my baby carrots came. And on the back of the package, here’s what I found:
Hop and Baby Carrots: the most obvious movie tie-in ever.So there's this movie brought to the world by the creators of "Despicable Me," and it stars cute CGI bunny rabbits. And what do rabbits eat? Bingo. It's a match made in marketing heaven. So Baby Carrots are selling out and product placing like the pros. Gas up that limo, roll out the orange carpet and make sure to get on our good side because there's a new star in town. Baby carrots are going Hollywood, baby.
I put down the package and thought to myself, carrots must be brain food, ’cause this is slightly and strangely brilliant. E.B. on the front of the package might attract the kids. The snidely cheesy marketing copy appeals to cynics like me. And most importantly, it got me thinking differently about carrots.
This particular carrot grower has a whole website dedicated to the joys of baby carrots: “Eat ’em like junk food,” the company’s tagline reads. And they’re now packaging some of these carrots in junk-food-like pouches.
And here’s the thing: The packaging and website made me feel strangely better, even hipper, about my baby carrot purchase. This morning, baby carrots didn’t feel quite as—well, boring. It’s not like the carrots themselves are markedly different from the ones I’ve been eating for three years. And most of me still could care less about who grows’ em or who packages ’em or what’s on the bag.
But there’s a piece of me—the piece that buys into the brands I surround myself with, be it Apple computers or Mountain Dew—that whispered to part of my brain, “Psst. You made a smart carrot purchase. Of all the baby carrots on the market, you picked one that boasts bizarre but strangely compelling marketing copy. Be proud.”
Advertising is a weird, weird thing. Many of us claim to be immune to its influence. But if we were all so staunchly principled as to be unswayed by pitchmen or clever commercials or even the image a brand presents to the world, we’d be seeing far fewer billboards, commercial breaks and pop-up ads.
Now, my experience won’t affect what I eat for lunch. It won’t change the number of carrots I packed.
But today—maybe just today—my lunch feels just a smidge less boring.
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