Finer Flavor from The Land O' Corn

For this assignment, I came across an advertisement for Rath Bacon in the November 1959 issue of The Reader’s Digest. It portrays six strips of bacon on a plate with one on a fork, all over a blue and white checkered tablecloth with cream and a cup of coffee residing in the background. Above the bacon sits the quote, “-it’s real Iowa corn-fed bacon.” The ad beneath the picture states, “You hear a lot about Rath Bacon (and its all good). One good cook tells another. And so another family sits down to a platter of this delicious rise-and-shine bacon…..Try some – this very day.”

The picture is quite reminiscent of the kitchen of a home in the country, with simple furnishings and the common blend of blue and white being quite prominent throughout the picture. Upon close inspection of the plate on which the bacon resides, I can see that there is no grease underneath, and each strip looks sliced and cooked to perfection. The eye is almost immediately brought to the finest piece of bacon, which has been carefully staged at a noticeably obscure angle with respect to the rest of the bacon. The cup of coffee offers reassurance that bacon should indeed be as regular a breakfast item as a strong cup of freshly brewed beans.

As for the phrasing of the advertisement itself, I find it difficult not to notice that it is subtly community/family based. With the first line of, “One good cook tells another,” the impression is given that whoever is eating this bacon has at least one friend who cooks, and that both friends talk often enough to know that they are both good cooks. Cooking, by its nature, is a fairly communal affair. Often people cook together, or at least interact with others to gather the food which will be prepared. Meals cooked by a member of a family are rarely eaten by just the cook; more often than not, they are shared by the family. This notion of sharing meals with others is supported further by the next line in the ad, which reads, “And so another family sits down to a platter of this delicious rise-and-shine bacon.” This sharing of food is good news for the people at The Rath Packing Company, as they will sell far more bacon if people tell their friends, who will then purchase enough to feed an entire family as opposed to just one person.

It seams that advertisements today do not really have the same sense of sharing (most of the few that I’ve seen have been devoid of any communal aspects at all). The last line of the ad reads, “Try some – this very day.” I’ve seen several ads with similar lines in the magazines that I looked through for this assignment. It seems like advertisers were a bit more direct in their approach to sell their products than they are today. Today, perhaps because of the aid of advanced visual technologies, advertisers tend to let the product sell itself.

For more on the issue of food advertisement directed towards children, I recommend the following article:

Moore, Elizabeth S, and Victoria J. Rideout. "The Online Marketing of Food to Children: Is it Just Fun and Games?." Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. 26.2 Fall 2007: 202-220.