Some of the most popular foods out there are symbols of food, rather than food itself. Sure, they contain thebasic components of food- fats, complex carbohydrates, minerals, simple sugars, msg, maltitol, sprinkles...but they, themselves, are symbols of and substitutes for, other culinary experiences.
Take a product my roommate is quite fond of: Chik Patties. She loves them. They are not chicken. They do not contain chick peas. They are something...else. They are patties, shaped to resemble something that is, in itself, a processed food. (breaded, shaped chicken patties, where the chicken has been shreaded, pressed, water and stabilizers added, breaded, fried, and frozen- in order to resemble- a hamburger patty) There are so many layers of substitution, deprivation and derivation that these -things- have lost all connection to anything that grows, walks, or flies. Anything, that is, traditionally eaten and prepared by human beings from scratch.
And chik patties, at least, can be used as an ingredient on a plate that contains other food products, as the serving suggestion on the box cover suggests.
It's too easy to pick on vegetarian food products. Of course there would be substitutes for childish comfort foods, stripped of meat (actual meaning) and injected with soy (symbolic meaning). So how about something for us meta-omnivores out there. Hot Pockets Subs Brand Stuffed Sandwiches (the full name of the product). This one here is pepperoni pizza style.
Let's contemplate that, for a moment. Pepperoni Pizza is, indisputably, a food. You have crust, sauce, cheese, and pepperonis. It has predictable characteristics: It is round, comes from a flat box, served hot. It can be delivered or picked up, or prepared frozen. Pepperoni Pizza exists. It is known to us. It is a cultural icon, even.
Hot Pockets Subs Brand Stuffed Sandwiches Pepperoni Pizza Flavor...is not pepperoni pizza. It is not even the major components of pepperoni pizza, served as a sub. It is pepperoni pizza, interpreted through the worldview of hot pockets. In a hot pockets context, people are always on the go. In a hot pockets context, people need food portably, somehow. They can't be bothered with sitting and eating! Certainly not with forks! (Pepperoni Pizza is not eaten with a fork). You can't slow the hot pockets people down! They need their pepperoni pizza in...some sort of edible tube. And thus, Hot Pockets Brand Stuffed Sandwiches, Pepperoni Pizza flavor was born. The people rejoiced.
But whither the sub variation? Who demanded a re-interpretation of the Hot Pocket translation of pepperoni pizza into a hot-pockets submarine-style tube sandwich format? Too meta. No more. Not food.
It was probably similar go-getters who fueled a demand for another needless metafood...gogurt. Or should I say "Go-gurt Brand Portable Yogurt" At right, you can see a package of "Scooby-Doo! Rogurt". This is, apparently, tubes of sweetened, artificially flavored yogurt that are somehow reminiscent of a 1970's television show about a group of skeptics who travel around in a van with a talking great dane, which was itself a take off on stereotypes of students from the five colleges in Amherst MA. (Velma is Smith, Daphne is Mount Holyoke, Fred is Amherst, that goddamned hippy is Hampshire, and Scooby is UMass Amherst). So, stripping away layers of intervening metaphore, what we have here is:
Yogurt meant to taste somehow like crime-solving college students in western massachusetts in the early 1970's would, if they were sweetened flavored dairy products, that has been conveniently packaged into tubes in order to be eaten either very quickly, or very sponteneously.
And of course, it's marketed toward children.
All of this makes Velveeta seem very, very simple by comparision. There is only one layer of hidden meaning. Velveeta is a cheese spread made to resemble cheese. It is cheese product created from, and meant to resemble, cheese itself.
