Swanson: Because It's Good to Be Obese

I don't watch lots of TV, and usually zip through the adverts, so forgive me if I'm a bit late in weighing in on this subject. I recently noticed an advertisement that amazes me in just how regressive the mentality underlying it is. It's for Swanson "Hungry Man" dinners, and the main message is that you're not fat enough.

I'm not talking about the basic concept of the product. The idea behind this line of frozen dinners is that competing products don't give you enough to eat. Medically speaking that's not really true (your typical frozen dinner gives you a hefty chunk - if not more - of the calories you actually need), but the marketing concept itself is... justifiable.

Where these ads amaze me is that they try to convince you that eating moderate portions is a Bad Thing.

Here's how the ad goes: Two men are in a locker room getting dressed. We can see that they're overweight because their potato-sack torsos are exposed. They start talking about what they had for dinner last night, and one of them - just as blubbery as the other - describes some fancy dish with the culinary flair of a queen (royal or homo). The other one points his blow-dryer at him, and the sissy (not being heavy enough, even though he easily weighs over 250 pounds) gets blown across the room into the wall. A voiceover assures you that this won't happen if you eat Hungry Man dinners.

Now, there's a not-very-subtle homophobic flavor to this, with one guy reacting to the other because he was talking girly and and turns out to be a "lightweight", but that's beside the point. Homophobes have a right to good health advice as much as anyone. And I can at least respect the satire in the guy's description of his dinner, which is a parody of current adverts for another frozen dinner that describe it like something from a fancy restaurant. If the sales pitch were "simple food for a regular-guy's tastes", that'd be fine.

But the message is that an overweight person should be ashamed of eating food that doesn't make him even heavier, and that's disgusting. Did these people get confused in January 2000 and set their calendars back to the 19th century instead of ahead to the 21st? Because that's where the mentality that a real man should be a fat man comes from.

I'm not suggesting that they should be ridiculing fat people or saying that these somewhat overweight actors are just a cheeseburger away from a heart attack just because they have large, soft tummies. But calling these guys underweight is as unhealthy as calling Britney Spears overweight.

I guess the one redeeming trait of this ad campaign is that it's truthful about the product. Hungry Man XXL dinners - which brag about containing over a pound of bar-quality food - do contain more calories than a typical adult male needs each evening (and enough fat and cholesterol in a single box to get him through a couple days), and will make him heavier. A man who eats these dinners regularly will not get blown across the room by a hair dryer (at least not until he develops colon cancer and wastes away during chemo). But it's a sad commentary on our society when Swanson can get away with calling this caloric overload a feature, not a flaw.