[07. Contemporary
It is the packaging that knows how to be in constant relationship with the society of which it represents the values. Packaging reflects the culture of the company and in turn contributes to creating it. They do this through messages, which pass through their shapes, their graphics, their symbols: in this way they transfer models, participating in the evolution of contemporaneity.
From Aunt Jemima to Uncle Ben’s: when packaging is responsible for eliminating stereotypes and prejudices
In addition to the Covid-19 pandemic, one of the news events that most marked the course of 2020 was undoubtedly the death of George Floyd, following his arrest by the police of Minneapolis (United States).
The video in which one of the agents keeps his knee on the neck of the African American man for several minutes to immobilize him – despite the desperate plea to be released due to lack of oxygen (“I can’t breath …”, he kept repeating, “I can’t breathe… ”) – spread widely in various national and international media and triggered protests in various countries of the world against the abuse of power and the racist behaviour of the police.
Floyd’s death brought the activist movement “Black Lives Matter” back to public attention, originating within the African American community and committed to the fight against racism, perpetuated at socio-political level, towards black people in the United States.
Furthermore, it provoked a major process of revision of all those symbolic elements present in US society – from American football teams to food products sold in supermarkets – that could express racial stereotypes or forms of cultural appropriation towards minority groups such as the African American. In some cases, the changes were already under consideration before the outbreak of the protests, however the events that occurred during 2020 contributed to greatly accelerate the change.
Among the brands on the US market, which in the last year have been subject to revision to eliminate racist stereotypes, Aunt Jemima is perhaps one of the most emblematic.
Aunt Jemima is a line of food products for breakfast, known in particular for its syrup and pancake mix, the latter invented in 1889 by the Pearl Milling Company and sold as the first “ready-mix” for the preparation of this kind of pancakes typical of North America.
It was in 1890 when Davis Milling decided to hire a black woman to represent “Aunt Jemima” as a testimonial in advertising and on pancake mix packaging.
Nancy Green, an African American woman born in slavery at the beginning of the 19th century, was first introduced as Aunt Jemima in 1893 during a fair in Chicago, where she showed the preparation of pancakes: the success of that first appearance was such that it marked, not only the success of the product, but also the successful career of Green who played the advertising character until her death, in 1923, at the age of 89. Nancy Greene was the first African-American model to work in advertising and thanks to the economic independence obtained thanks to Aunt Jemima, she dedicated herself as an activist to the fight against poverty.
The construction of the character of Aunt Jemima is based on the figure of the “Mammy”, a woman of large size, with dark skin and with a maternal and caring personality. It is, in fact, a stereotype rooted in the history of US slavery, specifically in the southern states, in which black women were sold to white slave families to engage in housework and childcare.
This caricature of the “Mammy”, in addition to advertising, was also used by cinema and television (just think of the character of the housekeeper of Tom & Jerry, who in the 40s and 50s was represented with dark skin and an African American accent) and helped build the distorted image of the happy and fulfilled African American woman in a domestic servant role.
Despite the changes made over the decades and the restyling that led to the replacement of Mammy’s image in the late 1980s with that of a black woman without a handkerchief on her hair and with pearl earrings on her ears, alluding to a housewife from higher social status, the character of Aunt Jemima continued to cause strong criticism in the United States, accused of being a symbolic representation of the exploited African American woman.
For this reason, PepsiCo. – a group of which the Quaker Oats Company, which has owned the Aunt Jemima brand since 1925, is currently a member – announced in June 2020 that the product line would be renamed the Pearl Milling Company. After a year, from June 2021, the packages will no longer show the name and image of Aunt Jemima, giving way to the name of the creators and first owners of the pancake mix.
The change in the name of the product line takes on even greater significance when we consider that the character of Aunt Jemima seems to have taken her name from a song on a Minstrel Show, a form of comedy that originated around 1830-1840 and which consisted of a combination of comic sketches, variety, dance and music, performed by actors painted in black, ie in “blackface”. The Minstrel Shows portrayed African Americans in a stereotypical and almost always offensive way: in these shows they were shown as ignorant, lazy and superstitious; moreover, their love for music was accentuated in a grotesque and caricatured way.
Like Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben’s rice also changed its name and eliminated the character of “Uncle Ben”, to avoid contributing to perpetuating racial stereotypes. Titles like “Aunt” and “Uncle” were, in fact, used in the southern states to refer to African Americans, instead of the more formal and respectful “Miss” or “Mister”.
Uncle Ben ‘has thus become Ben’s Original and has removed from its packaging the representation of the smiling African American man with gray-white hair, sometimes depicted with a bow tie, which according to some critics evoked servitude.
In addition to Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben’s, there are several products that have been accused of having contributed to building a strongly distorted imaginary of black people: from the packaging of Cream of Wheat from which the character of the black cook widely known as Rastus has been eliminated and present for 120 years on the cereals of the B&G Foods, to the bottle of Mrs. Butterworth’s, which according to the statements of Conagra Brands would reproduce the profile of a caring grandmother, but which in reality, according to some, would seem to recall again the figure of a “Mammy “.
Other interesting examples, referring to the stereotypical representation not of African Americans but of North American natives, are Land O’Lakes and Eskimo Pie. The popular character known as Mia, the woman depicted since 1928 on Land O’Lakes butter packs, was removed in 2020 even before the protests over Floyd’s death. Similarly, from the package of Eskimo Pie, the first chocolate-covered ice cream bar sold in the United States and patented in 1922, the cartoon-style representation of the “Eskimo” boy wearing a fur-lined parka was eliminated in 2021; in addition, the name of the product was changed to Edy’s Pie, from the name of the candy manufacturer Joseph Edy, co-founder of Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, since the word “eskimo”, commonly used in Alaska to refer to the Inuit and Yupik, means ” raw meat eater ”and is, in fact, considered disparaging.
The list could be expanded further to include products not only locally present in the US market, but also globally. Furthermore, the reflection could also extend to other types of stereotypes, such as those of gender, which through advertising and packaging often contribute to perpetuating the objectification of the female body or the reduction of familiar roles to binary and opposite ones, of “father / head of the family” and “mother / angel of the hearth”, to name only some of the phenomena that can be found.
Packaging has been transformed, in the current scenario of consumption, into a real mass-medium, which helps to transmit messages of different types and with different purposes, not necessarily referring to the container or its content.
It is now clear that the “communicative discourse” that is articulated on the surface of the packaging is not limited to seducing the purchase or informing consumers, but expresses symbolic meanings that go beyond the brand and the product, and can lead to behaviour of people and change their way of interpreting reality.
In this sense, it is key to strengthen the ethical dimension of packaging, which in addition to its commercial function is increasingly assuming a social role, with the responsibility of communicating without stereotypes and discrimination, in line with contemporary values.
