Sick days home from school will never be the same.
Campbell’s Soup company is changing the recipe for a few of their most beloved soups. No more potassium chloride, no more monosodium glutamate, no more disodium of any kind (inosinate or guanylate!). Goodbye, maltodextrin, corn starch and “flavoring” (soybean oil and soy lecithin.) Goodbye, also, for some reason, celery.
We’re left with a mere 20 ingredients listed on the can (10 fewer than before). Dramatic changes made in the hopes of making our national panacea more, actually, healthy.
It’s pretty amazing and, at base level, undeniably good news.
Having grown up in America over the past half-century, I never expected to see the “seismic shift” towards dietary health-consciousness that is apparently taking place. I grew up on TV dinners, powdered Kool-Aid mix and McDonald’s. My mom used to stop at the drive-thru on the way to dropping me off at kindergarten every day to ensure that I started my morning with the “healthy protein” of an Egg McMuffin sandwich. Every day.
To be honest, the food was so bad I don’t know how I am still alive. (My kindergarten teacher burned my hand with the cigarette she was smoking during class once, too. Hahaha. The 1970s ruled.)
So I am impressed with us, American consumers and the corporations that react to our demands. We’re smarter and more far-sighted than I thought we were. (Who knows, maybe if enough of us voluntarily extinguish ourselves there will be an inhabitable planet left for the coywolves in a hundred years.)
“We’re closing the gap between the kitchen and our plants,” Campbell’s chief executive, Denise M Morrison, told the New York Times’ Stephanie Strom. “Before, when we talked about our business, we talked about how many cases we shipped. Today, we’re talking about our food.”
I have a problem, though, with this. I realize it’s irrational, but I don’t want Campbell’s and McDonald’s to make their food healthier. I don’t want them to change their recipes. Much of the appeal of iconic food brands is nostalgic. My taste buds, like my olfactory sensors, are closely connected to my memories. If I am going to open a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, I want it to taste exactly like it used to on those days when I tricked my mom into letting me stay home from school by pretending to be sick.
When I go to McDonald’s (a couple times a year still, on road trips), I don’t order a salad. And I want the fries to be just as deliciously salty and greasy as they were when I was a kid. I am knowingly eating less-healthy food.
With this in mind, I am hereby advocating a completely unrealistic business proposal for the purveyors of iconic American mass-market food.
Campbell’s (and McDonald’s and Kool-Aid, etc), I would ask that your leave your less-than-entirely-healthy food products the way they are. Let them exist for people like me who want to consciously go on an unhealthy splurge from time to time. And, as the public’s taste shifts toward smarter, healthier options – smaller operations, local, regional companies – let your market share shrink.
Focus on the alternative: T-shirts.
Certainly, Campbell’s Soup owes as much to the designer of the wonderful labels affixed to its cans (since 1898!) as it does to its soup chefs. That great carnelian red, the gorgeous lines of that cursive script – it was no mistake when Andy Warhol chose those iconic cans to make iconic postmodern art from (in 1962!).
I’m sure millions of people would love to wear the Campbell’s logo across their chest. So fun, so retro-chic, so American. So how about it, Ms Morrison? Will you shift your company’s primary focus to selling T-shirts emblazoned with that terrific label? You could make posters and mouse pads and stuff, too. Oh! Coffee mugs! To drink your soup from! In fact I’m sure you already do, so just make more of them!
And if the T-shirt business doesn’t generate enough revenue to support your flagging soup brand, well, some things are better left in the past. To be honest, the soup was never really that good in the first place. It just tasted that way since we were eating while we got to stay home and watch TV in our pyjamas all day.
Correction, 10 November 2015 at 16:03: An earlier version of this article stated that the soup with an updated recipe was the Campbell’s Condensed Chicken Noodle soup; it is instead the Frozen Shaped Pasta with Chicken in Chicken Broth soup, as well as its Star Wars branded soups
