a short while back, i wasted some time checking out colonel sanders from kfc only to discover that a) he was no colonel and b) timing couldn’t have been better, since all that crap about the kfc slaughter houses went down a few weeks ago (if you’re like, “the kfc what? i never eat anything with a face!” then check out the kentucky fried cruelty site put up by peta, they talk about the nasty video)…oh, so to my point: i wound up getting very excited about a few other folks after stumbling across yet another article examining yet another crop of consumer brand spokespersons…here’s the game: you read the names and then try to make a guess like ‘oh yeah, definitely a real person’ or, ‘no way, total crap’ and then click ‘more’ to see the answers…

betty crocker (that sweeeeet talker)
chef boyardee (wednesday is actually prince spaghetti day)
uncle ben (what’s white and crawls up your leg? answer: uncle ben’s perverted rice)
little debbie (i could live on the fudge rounds, but i think that they cause some kinda fat accumulation)

betty crocker: sweet faker!
first of all, how cool, she’s got her own web site! so it turns out that in the early 1920’s (the age of waxy hair), the gold medal flour company made her up to give a name and face to their customer service organization….surname crocker was from a retired employee and betty just sounded friendly….and so it is quite likely that my imaginary friend the ‘hamburger helper’ is completely bogus as well…dug that up from a crappy magazine that i won’t even link to here…

chef boyardee: yeah, he’s real, who knew?
hector boiardi was a real guy! you can read the dirt at this site …”He was indeed a real person, born Hector Boiardi in northern Italy in 1898. Young Hector was a culinary savant who reportedly worked in restaurant kitchens at the tender age of eleven before immigrating to America and joining his brother in New York at age seventeen….he opened his own restaurant, Il Giardino d’Italia…Boiardi’s spaghetti sauce soon became famous throughout Cleveland, and his restaurant patrons began asking him for extra portions of sauce to take home with them, which he doled out in milk bottles.” and so on and so on…it’s just like nobody could ever spell it correctly, so it got that phonetics-for-stupid-americans name…

uncle ben: open to debate…
there’s a bit of history at this annoying ad-intensive site (click here)…”In the 1940s rice farmers in Houston, Texas, rated their rice against the rice grown by a local farmer named Uncle Ben. Frank Brown, a maítre d’ in a Houston restaurant, posed for the portrait of Uncle Ben…In the early 1940s, George Harwell, a successful Texas food broker, received permission to introduce (the rice et al)…1943, Harwell and his partners shipped the first carload of Converted Brand Rice to an Army Quartermaster Depot….Critics claim that the image of Uncle Ben—a reminder of Uncle Tom, the friendly retainers who might have served meals on a Carolina rice plantation—reinforces racist stereotypes of black servants being happy with their lot in life.”…so that’s kinda open to interpretation i suppose…real guy once upon a time, but not the same guy on the box…

little debbie: super real! and she has great teeth!
yes, she was the granddaughter of the founder and he thought that she’d look super cute on the packages (and how!) ..full corporate history is rich with detail (got some free time?)…”In 1960, McKee Foods founder O.D. McKee was trying to come up with a catchy name for their new family-pack cartons of snack cakes. Packaging supplier Bob Mosher suggested using a family member’s name. Thinking of what could be a good fit for the brand, O.D. arrived at the name of his 4-year-old granddaughter Debbie. Inspired by a photo of Debbie in play clothes and her favorite straw hat, he decided to use the name Little Debbie and the image of her on the logo. Not until the first cartons were being printed did Debbie’s parents, Ellsworth and Sharon McKee, discover that their daughter was the namesake of the new brand.”

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