Lemonsucker Proxy
People in the UK may know Paul Newman from his roles in movies such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Cool Hand Luke, or perhaps from seeing his face on bottles of salad dressing in Waitrose. Over in the US, Paul Newman is far better known. You can see his face on boxes of cookies, bags of popcorn and bottles of pasta sauce. As we’ve already seen, some US food companies put bible verses on their packaging. Thankfully, Paul Newman’s food packaging gibberish is as good as the next man’s. This is from the carton of Newman’s Own lemonade:
LEGEND: The marathon in Africa… I’m halfway out and barely chugging. Mountain coming! Liquid needed! What’s around? Water’s bitter! Beer’s flat! Gator, blah blah!… Fading fast. Then a vision-sweet Joanna!-Tempting me with pale gold nectar… Lemon is it? Yes, by golly! Lemonade? No, Lemon aid!… Power added! Asphalt churning!… Cruising home to victory! Hail Joanna! Filched the nectar (shameless hustler)-in the market-Newman’s Own.
However, whilst he donates all his after-tax profits to charity, and the products are made from organic ingredients, it’s not specified which charities are the beneficiaries, and almost all the products include the ubiquitous and fattening high fructose corn syrup. “Gator, blah blah,” indeed.
The salad dressings (which were the start of his food empire, and remain the core of it) are healthy stuff, and don’t contain nasty American rubbish*. Obviously the cheese and fat flavoured dipping sauce won’t be good for you, but the stuff that should be healthy is, and there aren’t any hidden nasties.
Also, most of the Newman’s Own stuff is available quite widely in Blighty, so there’s not much culture shock there. Sainsbury’s do it, as does Scummerfield.
He *is* a bit coy about exactly which charities he’s supporting, and only lists one on the website, a kids’ cancer charity caled The Hole In The Wall Gang Camp. It does seem that the charities are specific to the nations the products are sold in, so perhaps it’s just not feasible to list them.
*I was looking through an issue of “Cooking Light” the other day, and there was an article on Five Ways To Eat Better And The Countries That Best Exemplify Them. Amazingly, America was given as a good example of both “use more spices” and “eat fewer processed foods”. The justification for the former was along the lines of “there are foreigners in the US, and they have restaurants you can visit” which to me seems a very broad definition of “use more spices in your cooking”. The latter was justified with a paragraph explaining that non-processed foods can be bought in supermarkets. Why this is something specific to the US, I don’t know.
Well, as we know, the salad dressings do routinely hit that “Paul Newman Spot” that other rival brands just don’t come close to. That alone justifies their existence. Plus they now come with free delirious rantings on the reverse of the label it would seem. Hail Joanna!