"Ezekiel 4:9" breakfast cereal?!
Just now, shopping at my local(non-religious) grocery store, I came across a brand of "sprouted grain crunchy cereal" called Ezekiel 4:9. That's the actual name, analagous to, say, Special K.
The box also includes the brag "As described in Holy Scriptures", followed by the text in question:
Not sure what I really wanna say about this, except to register it as a total "WTF?" moment. Most obviously, it's pretty, umm, unusual, to see food with explicitly religious names and packaging sold in secular grocery stores. Also, the text in question doesn't strike me as having any deep theological significance, it just seems like a recipe for making bread that the writer wanted people to use.
FWIW, this store has a higher-than-average percentage of Muslim customers, so maybe some of them would be drawn to Old Testament stuff? Not sure what type of Christians would tend to frequent this place, though I wouldn't expect the Haitian Catholics here to be generally bowled over by English translations of the Good Book.
I'd be curious to know if anyone else has seen this style of marketing in a secular context. Can't say I have, except for stuff like kosher labels, which are just factual statements about how the food was prepared.
The box also includes the brag "As described in Holy Scriptures", followed by the text in question:
Take also unto thee Wheat and Barely and Beans and Lentils and Millet and Spelt and put them in one vessel and make bread.
Not sure what I really wanna say about this, except to register it as a total "WTF?" moment. Most obviously, it's pretty, umm, unusual, to see food with explicitly religious names and packaging sold in secular grocery stores. Also, the text in question doesn't strike me as having any deep theological significance, it just seems like a recipe for making bread that the writer wanted people to use.
FWIW, this store has a higher-than-average percentage of Muslim customers, so maybe some of them would be drawn to Old Testament stuff? Not sure what type of Christians would tend to frequent this place, though I wouldn't expect the Haitian Catholics here to be generally bowled over by English translations of the Good Book.
I'd be curious to know if anyone else has seen this style of marketing in a secular context. Can't say I have, except for stuff like kosher labels, which are just factual statements about how the food was prepared.
Comments
Let's not forget that in the original text, Ezekiel's bread is meant to be baked over a fire kindled from human dung. So there's that.
Hm. I didn't know that. The company is called Food For Life. According to their website(just checked), they have, in fact, been around since 1964.
All their products seem to be called Ezekiel 4:9, but apart from that, they don't seem to engage in much proselytization. Though the name alone is likely to appeal to at least a few Christians.
Those two tendencies CAN go together, more often than one might expect(*). Families I knew as a kid were into various multi-level health food marketing schemes, and evangelical Christians were disproportionately represented among their business associates.
Food For Life makes a point of saying they eschew GMOs, which tends to be a position more widely associated with environmentalists and back-to-the-land types.
Oh wow, that just makes it absolutely hilarious. Thanks!
(*) Certain conservative Christians like to accuse environmentalists of following a philosophy rooted in paganism, and some eco-types return the favour by claiming pro-industry types are following Genesis in believing that God made man lord over nature. Both views strike me as oversimplifying the reasons why people buy into certain belief systems.
Yeah, I've been seeing their bread in supermarkets for years. I look at it, say "oh yeah - overpriced crunchy multigrain bread that's unlikely to actually taste good" and move on.
I have a visceral aversion to any food that advertises itself as healthy, eg. anything using "nutri-" as a prefix(*). Adding bible quotes into the branding just makes it all the more vomit-inducing.
(*) The one exception is diet soda, eg. "Diet Coke". For some reason, that never bugged me, back in my pop-drinking days.
That's what you get when you take a single passage out of its larger context. The context is God's judgment on a rebellious Israel and the underlying subtext is "if you keep being rebellious this is the kind of shit you're going to have to eat". It's a marketing campaign premised on Biblical illiteracy.
Do people really regulate their own lives by this Biblical literalism Stuff?
Doesn’t seem that different to me from the history of Kellogg’s.
Quaker Oats? Mogen David wine? Promised Land milk? Celestial teas?
Well, I think Quakerism on the Quaker Oats box is being referenced more as a cultural entity, one associated with purity and honesty, than as a theology. As a test of this, a non-Quaker could still find the image appealing, whereas I would have assumed that "Ezekiel 4:9" would only really be enticing for Christians.
And "Promised Land" is now a pretty secularized phrase, eg. "In this election, voters seem to be looking for a party that will lead them to the Promised Land".
Mogen David I always assumed was connected with Jewish people somehow, though since Jews tend not to evangelize(at least to the same degree as Christians), it might have flown under my radar. The word "celestial" I think is now fairly profane, as can be seen by duckduckgoing "celestial objects".
As for Kellog's, while it's religious history is indeed fascinating, you pretty much have to go out of your way to find out about it. It's not like Corn Flakes are sold with quotes from Ellen G. White on the box.
I should admit, however, that when I saw the Ezekiel oatmeal, I assumed right off the bat that it was a new thing. So, if nothing else, this thread has been educational for me.
I think I read on wiki that the guy who founded the company was not a Quaker, he just thought they had a wholesome image that would work well for a food company.
Though point very well taken, @Doublethink.
Why might Jews not also be enticed by reference to one of the Jewish prophets? And why would non-religious people not be enticed, if it’s the kind of bread or cereal they like. I don’t really see any basis for assuming that Ezekiel 4:9 would only appeal to Christians or religious people, and my experience tells me otherwise.
It is. The name “Mogen David” is a reference to the Star of David.
Your statement to which I was responding was that it's pretty unusual to see food with explicitly religious names and packaging sold in secular grocery stores, not a statement about using branding to proselytize or evangelize. Whatever the history, Quaker Oats and Mogen David are two examples of common brands with explicitly religious names and, at least in the case of Mogen David, packaging. (I’ll grant that Promised Land and Celestial may be a bit more generic, but would note that Promised Land is a diary business, so is clearly playing on the “milk and honey” thing.)
Maybe it’s just because I live in the American South and the Bible Belt, but the idea of religious brand names or packaging in “secular” grocery stores (are there non-secular grocery stores?) really doesn’t strike me as odd at all.
I suppose you could view an ecclesiastical supplies place that sells communion wafers as a "non-secular grocery store" in the right light.
It would be hard to regard kosher or halal shops as wholly secular.
True. Thanks.
I guess in the Quaker example, I'd see several degrees of separation between the image and the theology, whereas Ezekiel strikes me as a more direct appeal.
Kinda like the difference between Blue Nun wine, which could appeal to eg. a lifelong atheist who had a crush on Sally Field from the sitcom, AND a hypothetical wine with the name of a papal encyclical about transubstantiation on it, a quote from said encyclical, and the name of the Pope who wrote it. The latter I would assume to be marketed particularly at Catholics.
I guess they might be. Maybe, as with your possible Bible Belt bias, my pretty thoroughly gentile background would lead me to assume that very few people are taking that into account when buying the product.
Interesting. I find that no matter how repulsive the images I might have in my mind, I can still eat sweet foods like candy and cake(I don't care for honey) without gagging. I suspect you wouldn't want to adverise, for example, canned stew the same way.
As for religious grocery stores, the internet would seem to reveal that the old Mormon-run ZCMI stores in Utah had a grocery section. (I only know about those from whichever Great Brain book I read.)
Is this the point at which I should mention that Food for Life also makes a Genesis 1:29 bread?
Not at all. There are hordes of people who haven't an ounce of faith in Jesus, but are nevertheless absolutely glued to the pseudo-documentaries on the History Channel and old "In Search of..." reruns. The kind who put their knives under pyramids to sharpen them in the seventies, and who have sixty theories about the Knights Templar and their influence on what you put in your bathwater and such. Ancient Aliens.
Such people are rarely committed orthodox Christians in my experience, because they are always looking for the next sensation. They do tend to be conspiracy theorists, though.
Would they be likely to respond enthusiastically to the mere NAME of the bible verse, as opposed to its content? The Ezekiel boxes have both, but the name is really what you notice first.
I could easily imagine a taxi company appealing to Christians and non-Christians alike by calling itself Good Samaritan Cabs. Not so much if they called themselves Luke 10: 30-37, even if they included the verse on the doors.
The Adventists here have a wide range of processed food available generally through supermarkets. They're a major player in the breakfast cereal range as well as many other products. They also operate a major local hospital (the Sanitarium, usually abbreviated to the San) with a high reputation for quality treatment. When we were children, mothers of mates/friends would go to the San for a few days, and return looking slimmer and with a new baby in their arms. These days, many more fields are covered. Madame and I have both had operations there. Unless some very specialist equipment not available at the San were required, that would be our hospital of choice.
That was meant to read "buffet-style". I think my keyboard has some stupid function that finishes your words for you, and it kicked in without my knowledge.
[While "buffet-subtle" sounds like it could be a real phrase, I honestly can't right now think of a context where it would be used.]
Does this work for other religious groups? For example, would something called "Jew Investment Bank" reference "a cultural entity, one associated with [shrewd business practices]", or would it just be referencing a common anti-Semitic trope?
I'm not sure I see the two things as mutually exclusive. Jews are associated by some people with shrewd business practices, and that association is based on a common antisemitic trope.
So, basically, yeah, the same thing is going on with the Quaker Oats logo, except that the tropes represented there are positive ones(*).
Personally, I don't like any kind of stereotyping, though I will say that "wholesome, trustworthy Quakers" has almost certainly done less harm, at least in the modern era, than has "clever, conniving Jews".
(*) Just to be clear, by "associated with", I meant in the public perception, not that there's neccessarily an actual causal connection between the religion and the values.
[And I don't mean this as some sorta big "Gotcha!", since I myself had pretty much forgotten about that phrasing after I wrote my OP. Nevertheless, it IS there, and probably reveals something about the intended audience for the imagery.]
I’m still not sure why this warrants more than a “that’s a little different.”
Okay. So imagine a hypothetical cereal box that has all the same trappings of the Ezekiel box, but really IS trying to appeal to devout Christians.
What would we have to add to the box in order for you to say "Okay, now THAT is definitely aimed at Christians"?
But why should I care that it’s more than just an “appeal to ancient wisdom” as others have described and is really an attempt to target devout Christians? Why is that any different from the way that Mogen David, Manischewitz or Hebrew National are particularly marketed to observant Jews who keep kosher?
Truthfully, your average semi-ignorant Christian isn't going to recognize Ezekiel out of the church context either. Genesis, maybe. Not Ezekiel.
No, I think the makers/marketers may have INTENDED to appeal to Christians (Jews, whatever), but that's a very different thing from actually pulling it off. In this case I suspect the "Ezekiel whatsit verse" is sufficiently odd in an aisle full of "Baker's Delight" or whatever as to stand out and catch the eye (as it did for OP, for instance). And the people I've been discussing would be very much attracted to that, at least for an initial "Hey, what is that?" which would get them to read the "ancient secrets" type bullshit copy, and there you go. Right into the trolley cart, next to Dr. Bronner's soap and various doubtful remedies from the cough and colds section.
Truly, Ezekiel's bread hasn't got a great deal to say to modern Christians. I mean, the passage as a whole can be preached on, but anybody, Christian or not, who gets fixated on this particular detail sufficiently to actually try to MAKE that recipe and sell it is clearly, um, a wingnut? And those who expect wondrous benefits from eating it are much of the same.
By the way, my mother got caught in an amusing minor similar trap when I was about twelve. They were promoting something called "tree bread" for a very brief--not brief enough--period in Southern California at that time, basically the end of the 70s. It was exactly what it sounds like--bread in which a major ingredient was trees. As in, undigestible wood fiber. Oh, my poor stomach!
I should probably at this point clarify that I, also, do not want people to "care" about this issue, in the sense of somehow trying to stop it. Or even get outraged about it. It doesn't bother me morally that this product exists, nor that it's being sold in my local grocery store. Mostly, I just found it singularly zany, and wondered what other peoples' experience with such branding was, a topic on which we've had some interesting discussion. Not that I don't enjoy the debate, but I'm not prepared to take it to the point of "Give me Ezekiel-free stores or give me death!"
I will say that I don't quite buy the comparison with kosher labeling, which is simply directing people with a pre-existing interest in certain dietary practices to appropriate products. The Ezekiel stuff seems more about convincing people to desire the product in the first place, by telling them it will put them in harmony with biblical values(*).
(*) And I acknowledge Lambchopped's point that alot of the Ezekiel buyers will probably be switching to Templar Corn Pops in a few weeks' time.
And it will walk off the shelf if price sufficiently reduced….
We took it as meaning that while there was no meat on your plate, what was there covered that up. So you got a vegetarian meal without realising that was what had happened.
Well, thanks for the opinion. I think you're the first contributor to actually discuss their experience with it.
Nicely played. Though if that had been the point, I think the better phrase woukd be "vegetarian-subtle". "Buffet-subtle" sounds like it's a buffet, but you don't realize it.
And, for the record, I think it IS the case that I wasn't aware that I was eating a vegetarian meal until someone pointed it out to me.
My wife has been eating it for decades, so we’ve been buying it and having it in our house on a regular basis for decades. I can actually remember the first time she brought some home from the store. I looked at the name and the label, thought “huh, that’s kind of different.” She said that had pretty much been her thought, and we didn’t really think anything more of it.
Yeah, I think that’s stretching things. In my experience, the market for Ezekiel 4:9 bread is people with a pre-existing interest in what some used to call (or still do call) “health food.” I have a hard time imagining many consumers thinking that eating the bread will put them in harmony with biblical values. But as has been noted, those consumers may well harbor the idea that “the ancients” knew about good nutrition—not unlike how the bag of Bob’s Red Mill Flaxseed Meal in my kitchen talks about “The Wisdom of the Ages”* and “The Science of Today.”
But I appreciate the clarification on caring about this.
*From that bag: “The Wisdom of the Ages. Flax has been prized since ancient times. Its Latin name, Linum usitatissimum, means “most useful.” Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, prescribed flax to patients with intestinal issues. King Charlemagne was so convinced of its benefits that he passed laws requiring his subjects to consume flaxseeds.”
Croesos: 'That's what you get when you take a single passage out of its larger context. The context is God's judgment on a rebellious Israel and the underlying subtext is "if you keep being rebellious this is the kind of shit you're going to have to eat". '
That should sell like croissants. 'The story dates to 1683, during the Ottoman Turks siege of Vienna. Legend has it that a baker working late at night heard the Turks tunneling under the walls of the city and alerted the military. The military collapsed the tunnel in on the Turks and eliminated the threat, saving the city. The baker baked a crescent shaped pastry in the shape of the Turk’s Islamic emblem, the crescent moon, so that when his fellow Austrians bit into the croissant, they would be symbolically devouring the Turks. Marie Antoinette popularized the croissant in France by requesting the royal bakers replicate her favorite treat from her homeland, Austria.'