I gleefully anticipate the coming war between General Mills and Barilla: “Hey, you got your gay, interracial cereal in my family-oriented pasta!”
I guess it’s pretty easy to tell if the actors/models in your commercials/ads are straight or not.
What central role for women do you imagine Barilla might have been referring to? Considering he is discussing a product that you cook, as the owner and spokesperson for a company that makes products that one typically keeps in a kitchen?
Anyway, I don’t read the “right, because a woman’s role is in the kitchen” as making a claim about what Barilla said, but rather, as expressing an argument that one may safely assume that Barilla was referring to a role in the kitchen. Whether that assumption is actually safe is a decent question to ask. I think it’s a safe assumption, but I wouldn’t be amazed if it turned out to be wrong. But in either case, the blogger isn’t claiming Barilla actually said anything about kitchens.
“We won’t include gays in our ads, because we like the traditional family. If gays don’t like it, they can always eat another brand of pasta. Everyone is free to do what they want, provided it doesn’t bother anyone else.”
I’m fine with this.
That being said, I don’t know if I’d trust the heterosexuality of any man who sells thick spaghetti, if you know what I’m sayin’.
Whelp, I don’t include Barilla in my kitchen now, because I like non-homophobic pasta in my family.
No bigotoni for you?
It’s a good thing I base my purchases on the quality of the product and not the personal opinions of the owner or anyone in an organization. Because Barilla is my favorite pasta. I’ve never been very boycotty.
With a side of these.
Deciding that your ads will all feature traditional nuclear families is not wrong in itself - brands very often have a defined image of the customer that is only a subset of reality.
What’s wrong (or at least, very stupid) is making a public statement framing the choice as prejudicial, and telling customers to go away - because they will do that.
Well, now I know what kind of pasta to serve to Nanny Ogg.
I’ll take him up on his offer to buy my pasta else where. He could have just kept his bigoted mouth shut.
Yeah, this.
Maybe the guys who own the other pasta companies hold even worse views of my kind, but they are smart enough not to broadcast them.
I like their pasta. Then again, I’m sure there are other good brands marketed by less bigoted (or at least less stupid) people.
That’s not the best of arguments, lots of major brands don’t advertise much if at all with racial minorities. Advertising is rarely multicultural unless it’s advertising for say, a University, then the mailers they send out to prospective students always show a group of kids showing out, one from each major racial group and then sometimes a random kid in a wheelchair thrown in.
I have if from a good source that some of them even sleep with the fishes.
Honestly, grocery store mass produced pasta is, IMHO, a commodity. You put enough stuff on it in your average pasta dish that - unless you are going for fresh pasta or homemade pasta - one box of dried out flour/eggs and water is much like another box.
Maybe for buttered noodle aficionados or super tasters, there is a difference between one brand of white flour grocery store pasta and another - I’ve never been able to taste it.
(Now, in gluten free pasta, there is a huge difference depending on what the substitution recipe is. And I’ve noticed more of a difference in whole wheat pasta).
I just checked my cupboard to see what pasta I actually had. I have a box of Barilla Angel Hair pasta and three boxes of Kroger brand penne. I think that pasta may in fact be one of the least brand conscious decisions I make. All the boxes are typically the same color and all of them are very similar in price. Additionally I typically notice very little difference in taste.
I think when I buy pasta it’s more, “I need some regular noodles, maybe some rigatoni, maybe some penne” and then I just grab the first boxes I see for each type of noodle.
Prices vary widely at Kroger (and I assume elsewhere). One brand of spaghetti goes for a dollar. Another brand goes for five.
Yeah, I’ll buy whatever brand of pasta. I’ve never had one that was unacceptable (except that Barilla box with the spider in it!).
I did end up buying Barilla more than half of the time though, and sometimes their sauce too. No more.
I’ll have to check the next time I’m at Kroger, personally I can’t remember paying more than $3 or so for pasta, and the pasta I’m buying the price differences are usually too small to care about.
I’ve noticed something like Angel Hair, the Kroger brand might be $1.29 or something and the Barilla or whatever will be $1.99 maybe. Usually anything that starts with $1.xx is low enough that I’m just grabbing the first one my hand reaches.
I’ve noticed rigatoni is always a bit more expensive than the non-hollow pastas, and I want to say it’s around $2.xx-$3/box but if there are $5/box pastas at my Kroger they must be invisible to me because the concept of paying that much for a box of dry pasta is so ridiculous my mind just mentally blocks it from my sight.