Ingenious Disingenuousness

Ingenuousness is a virtue meaning “noble” which found its name in the late 1500s. It comes from the Latin for begetting, gen-. There is an understanding of honor attached to it, suggesting the bearer is honest, candid, upright.

When first there is a positive thing, it is quickly followed by its evil twin, the negative; thus we have disingenuous, which dates from the 1600s, meaning the exact opposite.

The cover of this book is disingenuous. If you read the subtitle, it claims to be a book promoting health and “low-calorie desserts.” Yet the picture is of a Baked Alaska, which cannot possibly be either healthy or low-cal. It also dandies up a rather plain and uninspiring ingredient — yogurt, which might be hard to sell otherwise. It says that you can maintain your diet by indulging in elaborate sweets, which is a lie.

If disingenuousness is your thing, you can get a big helping of it every day at the supermarket checkout, where the magazine tunnel bombards your brain with the paradoxical message that you can eat your way slim. How do they sell this absurdity? By appealing to their target audience’s two biggest weaknesses: their addiction to junk food and the shame they feel about their weight. 

Any given cover subscribes to a formula which provides both: a lead story about losing weight paired with tempting photos of brightly colored and often seasonally decorated food. It’s guilt porn.  Does anyone really ever make these elaborate cakes? Probably not — all they are is a slick visual designed to tweak that addiction and sell ad space. These magazines have no investment in actually making their readership diet successfully, or they won’t stay in business.

The disingenuity comes not only in the premise emblazoned across the covers, but in their very nature.

Yogurt Cookery, Sophie Kay, 1978

Also from this book: Yogo-Cheese

Yogo-Cheese

As many of you canny readers will already be aware, the end-times are coming, and folks have to prepare or perish. We all know the scenario: a strange meteor will signal higher taxes; plagues of locusts will eat all of our crops; the government will confiscate our guns, women and liquor; rivers will run red; and the Ruskies will nuke us to oblivion in a pinko-commie plot to take over the world.

If you’re going to survive the apocalypse, you need to stock your bunker with hand-crank radios, cans of Spam, toilet paper, and plenty of Sudokus. What you’ll miss is good old-fashioned home cooking, because you’ll be eating out of cans and drinking your own urine for a very long time.

So why not learn some kitchen skills you can use to serve your family a proper meal and stave off the boredom that experts warn could result in a bloodbath? If a nice helping of Yogo-cheese won’t cut the tension in your concrete shelter, nothing will.

It’s easy: all you’ll need is fresh yogurt and a working refrigerator, some Ritz crackers and a sense of whimsy. And salt. You don’t have to call it “Yogo-Cheese” if you don’t want to be too literal. You can call it anything you want. We just called it that to get your attention because we know that your friends and neighbors — the ones who will be eaten, evaporated or shot when disaster strikes — will overlook it.

Be warned: these are the same people who will be pounding on the metal doors trying to get in to save themselves once the going gets tough on the outside, but don’t give in. Did they help you stockpile that case of Ketchup in the corner? No.

Case closed. 

Yogurt Cookery, Sophie Kay, 1978

Also from this book: Burned At The Stake

Also from this book: Ingenious Disingenousness

The Elixir of Life

Life is pretty awesome, so it stands to reason that people have wanted to stick around to enjoy it. To that end, much effort has been dedicated in the course of human history towards finding or creating magical elixirs which could either extend life or provide immortality.

The ancient Chinese thought the answer lay in long-lasting precious stones and metals, and alchemists set out to discover which could be manipulated into a substance to transfer their properties to whomever ingested them. Sadly, their early efforts focused quite heavily upon mercury, which is such an odd element it was often thought an alchemical key, and delicious-looking besides. Being exceedingly toxic, it killed many Emperors for a surprisingly long time. You’d think word would get around: don’t drink the silvery drink, but apparently not.

Ming Dynasty Emperor Jiajing, who survived an assassination attempt by his concubines, all of whom were ordered executed by "the slow slicing method" (lingchi - do yourself a favor and DO NOT look this up) and their families also killed, only to die of mercury poisoning in his quest for the fabled Elixir of Life. 

It is no surprise that the promise of longer life has always been a major tool in the huckster’s repertoire; after all, the actual efficacy of the potion can’t be measured until long after its seller has left town.

In 1973, the Dannon company decided to use this tried and true approach to increase the public interest in yogurt, so embarked on what became a highly successful advertising campaign linking long life to their product. It was called “In Soviet Georgia,” and featured various robust, active peasants of reportedly great age (their names and ages were given as an indicator of veracity) who, it was claimed, owed their longevity to eating yogurt. This was quite a daring stance to take during the Cold War, but it helped that the people in the ads wore traditional garb and didn’t look like typical soviet politicians and babushkas.

Perhaps wary of being too closely linked with the charlatans of old also promising long life, the ads declared prominently that their yogurt might not actually cause you to live longer than you otherwise would (and thus saved them from claims of false advertising), but strongly suggested that it “couldn’t hurt.” Millions agreed, and adopted it into their diets.

Nowadays, yogurt is no longer promoted with claims of a longer life, but of a more digestively comfortable one. Either way, it’s sold less as a food than as a medicine.

Dannon recently settled a $21 million lawsuit over exaggerated claims about the health benefits of its Activia yogurt.

In Soviet Georgia ad, the Dannon Company, 1977