Column: Why do big companies think they have to make every food product linked to sex?
Why does everything have to have a make-over? We seem to live in a time where everything has to be updated and I’m not sure that’s a good idea, says comedian and writer Steve N Allen.
Aunt Bessie, the character on the frozen Yorkshire pudding brand, has been made younger and more attractive. There are many factors that I’d consider in my approval of a pudding. The density, the crispness of the outer edge, the size of the air bubbles inside,but I have never stopped to wonder if the drawing of Aunt Bessie on the pack was hot enough.
And yet the brand has given a glow-up to the clip art style picture of the fictional pudding chef.
You may know her as a grandma-esque Bessie with a mixing bowl in her arms as she churns her batter. Well, not any more. They have made her decades younger, lost the mixing bowl and changed the way she holds her arms.
I’m not sure anyone was not buying their brand because they didn’t fancy little drawing on the pack. Some people might buy a pack because they do fancy her and that’s more concerning.
Maybe I am resistant to change, but it feels like they haven’t thought this through. She’s called Aunt Bessie, which implies she has a sibling who has children. That made sense when she was older but now, what’s the message? Are we promoting teenage pregnancy with the starch part of the roast now?
I thought society was moving in the other direction. Many women have taken the BBC to court over the issue of ageism, that I’m shocked we had to make the pudding cooker look like she could do well on Love Island.
The make-over has seen her lose all her wrinkles but also lose the mixing bowl. Is that because showing a woman actually cook is risking a backlash? Advertising rules have become increasingly wary of gender stereotypes, which means if you have someone slaving away in the kitchen you can’t have a woman, you have to have a man.
But you can’t replace a woman with a man. That’d cause a backlash too.
We shouldn’t be surprised that this happened. Aunt Bessie’s is a brand owned by Birds Eye and they did exactly the same thing to their Captain Birds Eye. In 2018 they replaced Captain Birds Eye with a younger, more rugged-looking Riccardo Acerbi.
Why do big companies think they have to make every food product linked to sex? And if that’s the case, what ideas have been floated in the meetings for Brain’s Pork Faggots?