Lay's potato ad: no wonder there is a disconnect to where our food comes from!!

[Marlina E]

Anyone get National Geographic magazine?  Check out page 11 in the March 2008 issue (the one with Betsy the smart dog on the cover).  The Frito Lay ad depicts a potato harvest where it appears that the harvesters are picking the potatos off of the plants! And the spuds are all nice and clean in the harvester's basket and the bag depicted!

I don't know about your potato harvests, but all of mine have occurred in lots of dirt after ripping the plants away to dig the dirty roots out of the dirt.  A totally messy (yet fun and satisfying) affair.

So either the ad makers have no idea where the food comes from, or they think that the public really has no clue about where their food comes from....and they may be right....so they can create this image for a pretty ad.  So do we really wonder when our children and adults have no idea that a potato even grows under the ground?!

This one really got me....

[KellyT]

Wow... thanks for the good laugh.   

That is just crazy. I have this image of the people at the ad company sitting around saying, "well, we don't want to show DIRT of course...who wants to buy something that came from the dirt..."   

That will be right up there with the Seven Up ad saying they are "all natural" and picking the Seven Up cans growing on the farm (like strawberries). Last time I checked, high fructose corn syrup came from a laboratory, not a farm.

 

[AmyB]

That is insane!!! 
I know what you mean by messy, yet fun.  We grow several kinds of potato in our family garden every year, and harvesting them is a HUGE mess!  (My 7 year old son thinks it's a blast!)