In the supermarket or variety store, I am given essentially two choices of soft cat food: the "pate" kind, and the runnier stuff. The pate has some semblance of meat, whereas the runny stuff looks like it might come out of the back end of your dog an hour after begging for scraps at Thanksgiving dinner. I usually choose the pate.
So today, I'm perusing the pate foods. I come across a green can, bland and innocuous- looking, and I pick it up for a closer look. As a consumer and cat owner, I'm familiar with cat food names, which are usually too fancy for something an animal is just going to thoughtlessly inhale and then shit out a short time later. But the name on this green can simply confused me. This particular flavour of Friskies cat food was called:
"Chef's Dinner"
Now, what do you infer from that name? Does it seem to imply that the chef will eat the cat food? This name is probably the product of a marketing department's attempt to make the food gourmet-sounding without actually using that word. Perhaps some marketing research told the good people at Friskies that consumers were no longer falling for the 'gourmet' line of bullshit.
Regardless of motives, the word choice is wrong. "Chef" in the possessive form tells the reader that this cat food dinner, in fact, belongs to the chef. Picture yourself at a restaurant, having just ordered, and waiting for your food. Your food. Do you ever once, in your thinking about the upcoming food, consider that food to belong to the chef? No. The chef might cook the food, the chef might prepare the food, but it does not belong to the chef. From the moment you ordered the food, you entered into a contract to buy the food and have it prepared by the chef. It is yours--your dinner.
Here's a more sinister possibility: perhaps this possessive phrasing is intentional. Maybe Friskies is finally marketing to the countless poor, elderly people across this continent who find themselves in their twilight and scarfing down cat food. From this perspective, "Chef's Dinner" almost gives this horrifying economic state an air of class and dignity:
"If this stuff is good enough for a chef, perhaps things aren't so bad after all. What would you like for dinner tonight, Orville--cat food meatloaf?"
Regardless of motives, the word choice is wrong. "Chef" in the possessive form tells the reader that this cat food dinner, in fact, belongs to the chef. Picture yourself at a restaurant, having just ordered, and waiting for your food. Your food. Do you ever once, in your thinking about the upcoming food, consider that food to belong to the chef? No. The chef might cook the food, the chef might prepare the food, but it does not belong to the chef. From the moment you ordered the food, you entered into a contract to buy the food and have it prepared by the chef. It is yours--your dinner.
Here's a more sinister possibility: perhaps this possessive phrasing is intentional. Maybe Friskies is finally marketing to the countless poor, elderly people across this continent who find themselves in their twilight and scarfing down cat food. From this perspective, "Chef's Dinner" almost gives this horrifying economic state an air of class and dignity:
"If this stuff is good enough for a chef, perhaps things aren't so bad after all. What would you like for dinner tonight, Orville--cat food meatloaf?"
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