Skip to main content

Land o' Lakes and a sense of loss



I can't look at a package of Land o' Lakes butter without feeling a sense of loss. 

Four years ago,  the company dropped Mia, the "butter maiden," from its package design. Mia had been around since 1928. She was a young indigenous woman, kneeling in stereotypical garb and clutching a Land o' Lakes container. The container had ... an image of Mia on it, clutching a Land o Lakes container.  

An inquisitive youth without enough to occupy his time could spend much of it staring at the design wondering how many regressions there are, trying to count the boxes nestled within one another. 

How do young people today first encounter the notion of infinite recursion, without Mia? 

What is worse: there has been no NEW package design.  The old design of a serene lakeside view has been retained unchanged, except for the absence of Mia.  That big "O" in the center of the product name that once framed her face now frames ... nothing.  Literally, it frames white space. It is as if the new designers were too lazy for a re-working so they just went with an erasure.


Yes ... I know and sympathize with the reasons for a change in packaging. A straight-up erasure? They could have done better. Heck, the Cleveland Indians became the Cleveland Guardians, a name that honors old Art Deco sculptures that are themselves part of the town's self image. 

The Indians did not become the Cleveland Blank White Spaces.

Just sayin'. 

Comments

  1. Why was Mia's picture and why was the Cleveland Indians' name deemed offensive?

    ReplyDelete
  2. In the case of the cleveland indians, the problem was more the childish maniacally grinning image as a logo. The name was retired as collateral damage with the image. In the case of Mia, it was more a generic objection to the use of generic Indians as corporate mascots, a practice activists see as dehumanizing.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak