The Shady Milkman

I ran across this ad in a Family Circle magazine (was reading it at my Grandma’s house):

Better call Mike Sorrentino, because we have a situation on our hands:

Mom is recently divorced. She’s got a couple daughters, and wants to make sure that having dinners with the frat boy she met while out on the prowl, instead of their father, doesn’t turn them into some drug-abusing skanks with daddy issues. Her solution? “Easy Express” microwave dinners by Stouffer’s.

If mom’s idea of a ”home-cooked family meal” is a 2 lb frozen lasagna that sags its way out of the microwave after it’s been nuked for a brisk 18 minutes, then dad leaving should have come as no surprise.

However, I’ll hand out an E for effort to the ad agency responsible for this. At first glance, you wouldn’t think Family Circle is the ideal magazine in which to place an ad whose whole angle revolves around a family potentially being ruined by divorce. But with every other marriage ending in divorce these days, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the main readership of this magazine was a bunch of recent-divorcee cougars who need to prepare meals quickly so they can get back to trolling the clubs for young pieces of meat.

I see what they tried to do here. I get it. It was a valiant attempt at turning something predominantly negative, like divorce, and making it positive by using the advertised product: quality, microwavable meals.

Unfortunately, this ad was doomed the minute execs approved this idea, just like the your expectations are the moment you decide to pick up any microwavable meal while you’re starving: 

You know the feeling:

You’re hungrily shopping for groceries late after work; you haven’t eaten since noon. You’re staring at the meat counter like a ravenous wolf as you venture towards the siren of the supermarket—frozen foods. Walking through this section on an empty stomach is like bringing a fat kid to a KFC buffet.

Appetizing images of gourmet meals surround you, five rows high, and they all come with the promise of being ready to eat in mere minutes. You try to rationalize, “They can’t possibly be as good as that picture on the box,” but their siren song is too strong. You settle for “Golden Honey-Glazed Chicken Breast on a bed of Rice Pilaf and Seasoned Autumn Harvest Vegetables—codename for processed chicken with white rice and broccoli.”

You cut a small slit in the plastic film covering the plastic tray that’s filled with a solid block of colorshapes and slide it into the microwave. Your hopes are still sky high, though—your stomach, not just your eyes, saw that picture on the box. You punch “5 0 0” into the keypad as your mouth salivates at the thought of complimenting the peppery vegetables with the sweet, succulent flavor of the chicken.

You stare at the rotating black tray through the mesh glass window as the timer counts down. You briefly worry about the radiation that may or may not be penetrating your skull, but not for long. The microwave beeps, and like Pavlov’s human, you swing open the door to grab your steaming food without any disregard for the warning on the back of the package that said “CAUTION! CONTENTS WILL BE HOT! Wait 1 to 2 minutes before removing the food from the microwave.” That giant plume of steam doesn’t intimidate you either. Your taste buds are ready for some wild honey autumn goodness.

You gather a portion of each food item onto your fork to assure you’ll get the “best of both worlds”, raise it to your mouth and sink your teeth into the molten-hot amorphous blob that is your meal.

It is at that moment that everyone finally realizes, no matter how good some ideas sound at the time, their outcomes will always be disappointing.