I am so out of the viral-video, social-media loop I guess, that I just saw this one in one of those year-end round-up lists.
Any comments? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUtnas5ScSE http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/09/chipotle-mexican-restaurants-animated-film-sustainable-food-marketing.html ------------------------snip Earlier this month, the Mexican-food chain Chipotle released an animated short called “The Scarecrow <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUtnas5ScSE>.” The film opens on an overall-clad scarecrow with a burlap face and shiny black eyes who approaches a smoke-spewing building: Crow Foods Incorporated. Fiona Apple’s mournful, menacing cover of “Pure Imagination” plays in the background while the Scarecrow goes about his workday. He watches as a tube extrudes a substance that’s later labeled “100% Beef-ish”; a robotic crow injects a chicken with a green fluid that makes it expand like a balloon; and a cow with haunted eyes trembles inside a tight metal box. At the end of the day, the Scarecrow returns home to his little farm, with its white fence and red barn. He seems beaten down by what he’s seen, but when he picks a familiar red pepper<http://www.chipotle.com/france/en-us/assets/images/common/chipotle_logo.png>, the lighting brightens and the music becomes happier: the Scarecrow has an idea. He harvests vegetables and travels to the city, where he opens a burrito stand. “Cultivate a Better World,” instructs the banner that unfurls above his little operation. The message is something like this: Chipotle is not only tasty, it’s virtuous. “The Scarecrow” has been praised<http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/09/12/chipotle_scarecrow_video_is_totally_amazing.html>as an innovative piece of marketing<http://theweek.com/article/index/249607/watch-fiona-apple-and-chipotle-channel-willy-wonka-to-slam-factory-farming>and beautiful<http://gawker.com/theres-no-getting-around-it-the-new-chipotle-ad-is-am-1308234473>work of art, and applauded<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/12/chipotle-scarecrow_n_3914281.html>for its anti-factory-farming message. As of Monday afternoon, it had been viewed nearly 6.3 million times on YouTube. But not everyone is impressed. Funny or Die released a parody last week called “Honest Scarecrow<http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/da66b8f1aa/honest-scarecrow>,” which casts the video as all sanctimony and no substance. In this version, which pairs the original animation with new lyrics (“Pure Imagination” gives way to “Pure Manipulation”), we’re reminded that Chipotle is a “giant corporation,” tugging at our heartstrings with oppressed bovines not because of a genuine interest in sustainability or animal welfare but to make us buy burritos. Writing in Salon, David Sirota criticized<http://www.salon.com/2013/09/19/chipotles_self_serving_deception_a_vegetarian_bait_and_switch/singleton/>the film for using vegetarian imagery to sell meat; the Scarecrow, on his farm, harvests sun-dappled peppers and corn, but the only animals we see are suffering in confinement at Crow Foods. Chipotle gets credit for our veggie-related good feelings, without having to depict what alternatives to factory-farmed meat actually look like. (“Indeed, no matter how it is farmed, meat is still energy intensive, it still poses serious health problems when consumed in American-level amounts<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/02/americans-eat-the-most-meat/>, and it only gets to your plate by killing an animal,” Sirota writes.) And while the film’s message has won praise from some foodies and advocates for food reform, some agricultural producers have responded angrily<http://www.righteousbacon.com/chipotles-scarecrow-part-one-lessons-in-corporate-greed/>, accusing Chipotle of peddling misleading representations of conventional agricultural methods<http://agricultureproud.com/2013/09/12/chipotle-takes-on-big-food-with-animated-scarecrow/>: all farmers, they argue, care about their animals, and no one keeps a cow in a metal box or injects a chicken with green slime.
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