Finding Sam Breakstone

Finding OJ (The juice, not The Juice)

2011-08-02T17:06:00.000-04:00

While I've been quietly taking the summer off, here's someone who actually followed through when she investigated a basic food comodity.

Author Alissa Hamilton blogged about orange juice back in a 2009 post: Freshly Squeezed: The Truth About Orange Juice in Boxes

It turns out that even "not from concentrate" orange juices are deoxygenated and stored in large vats, robbing them of flavor. Throughout the year, the inventory is refreshed with flavor packs that come right from the same fragrance firms that naturally and artificially enhance the flavors of much of our processed food.

The Consumerist recently reposted Alissa's findings in a piece titled: The Flavor Of Your OJ Is A Chemically-Induced Mirage.

This prompted the Florida Department of Citrus to issue this remarkably meek denial:

By utilizing state-of-the-art technology, Florida is able to provide a consistent supply of high quality, nutritious orange juice year round.... During processing, natural components such as orange aroma, orange oil from the peel, and pulp may be separated from the orange juice. After the juice is pasteurized, these natural orange components may be added back to the orange juice for optimal flavor.

As the discerning reader may notice, the Florida Department of Citrus denied absolutely nothing. They merely pointed out that the "flavor packs" used by the industry, are originally derived from parts of oranges.

The Consumerist sums up its findings:

If this is the type of thing that bothers you, buying OJ from the store in May through June is the only way to ensure that most of the juice is from fresh Valencia oranges. The rest of the year it's reflavored sugar water from a tank farm.

You can learn more from the United States Department of Agriculture in this study. To read more marketing gibberish designed to sell orange juice without technically flat-out lying, you can go to the misleadingly-named www. OrangeJuiceFacts.com, put up by the Florida Department of Citrus.

What do you think about OJ?

Finding A Crack

2011-07-08T13:11:00.001-04:00

Here's a brief article on a Friday afternoon. It's a little overly alarmist, but it does mention milk at least once.

And it's from one of my favorite places on the web, Cracked.Com.

The 5 Most Horrifying Things Corporations Are Taking Over

They're funnier than me, but only insofar as their jokes are concerned.

Finding A Nice Cup Of Tea

2011-07-06T00:14:00.004-04:00

Creeping Breakstonism.

Breakstone's is a small name owned by a huge multinational agribusiness, still trading on a folksy familiarity that is long gone if it ever existed at all. We know it happened. Does it still happen? Can we watch evolution in progress?

Friend of the FSB, Leonard Stoehr, may have found an example.

See? It's a great company. Because they're
having fun right now.

Sweet Leaf Iced Teas hasn't been around for very long, but they've got a great story. Clayton Christopher, a former cyclist, got the idea in 1997 to make a bottled tea that tasted better than the available brands. He wanted it to be as good as his grandmother, Mimi's. With garden hoses, pillow cases, a used van and a loan from his dad, he bottled his iced teas and begged shop owners for shelf-space.

Clayton was joined in 1999 by his childhood friend, David Smith. The brand took off at the 2002 Austin City Limits music festival. Since then, they've upgraded their headquarters several times, grown to 45 or so employees, grown their line to a dozen products and counting, and begun distributing teas and lemonades worldwide.

But they're still a crazy, young, upstart of a company, as the hand-drawn look of their website invites us to think. They believe in "laughter, high fives, and good music." They blog about music festivals. They delight in telling us that employee Elizabeth Barber's beagle is named Bentley, although they never get around to describing what EB's job is. And they heavily invoke the image of granny, who's picture is their logo.

Grandma be fat.

Now, you can probably tell that a lot of the Sweet Leaf brand image is hokum. For instance, they tell us that granny's recipe called for "pure cane sugar." It's amazing that granny, all those years ago, would accurately be able to predict the consumer trend away from high-fructose corn syrup in the late 2000's. And no matter how much their employees love wholesome parties and alt concerts, they must be getting some work done.

Some information about the company is just plain missing. For instance, Sweet Leaf magically went from being brewed in a garage to not being brewed anywhere - the website makes no mention of where their products are made. Likely, they'd been bottled by contract-factories in different parts of the country for several years.

And some information on the website is a flat-out lie. Founder Clayton Christopher is still listed as an employee (or "tea-mate" as the website calls him). Under their Frequently Asked Questions appears this:

QUESTION:
Is Sweet Leaf Tea a public company?
ANSWER:
No, Sweet Leaf Tea is a privately held company.

That's not true. The truth is, however, there on the website. It's not easy to find and it's buried under a whole lot of nonsense. But it's there. What makes this a case of Creeping Breakstonism?

Sweet Leaf Tea is wholly owned by Nestlé.

Nestlé: the largest food corporation on earth. If you have ever eaten, you've eaten Nestlé. Here's a partial list of their brands.

I do not agree with this website. But the graphic is hell-a-cool.

Sweet Leaf benefited from a large investment from Nestlé, turning over 35% of its shares in exchange for $15,600,000.00 in 2009.

Founder Clayton Christopher took to the company's blog to explain the decision:

Having Nestle help us with our distribution it will put our brand on more shelves and give more consumers the choice of buying a better bottled tea. They are also going to help us reduce our bottle weight which is great for the environment (Nestle uses less plastic in their bottles than any other beverage company on the planet). If it takes letting the “Big Guys” own a piece of our company in order to give consumers healthier and tastier choices then I think it’s absolutely worth it.

He didn't exactly mention that he had been paid millions. And the multinational wasn't "helping" with distribution so much as it was "owning" Sweet Leaf's entire distribution network. In fact, Nestlé made more than a few small changes, including installing their own man as president of the company. But Clayton did make a bold statement:

If they buy the rest of our company years down the road and change our recipe (won’t happen under my watch) then David and I will start another tea company and do it all over again.

In other news, Nestlé bought out the rest of the company. Also, Clayton Christopher ended his watch. The Nestlé guy is now the president and CEO.

Seriously, some people really have a problem with Nestlé.

Now, let's make a couple things clear: Sweat Leaf teas seem to be good products. They won awards from Self magazine and BevNet. People are buying them. Also, the company really was started by two best friends with a van and a dream. Furthermore, Nestlé is not evil. Nor has Nestlé's ownership affected the quality of the beverages - both awards were won after the conglomerate's investment. And they don't seem to have replaced the cane sugar with HFCS,

But Breakstonism is upon us. The world's largest food distributor is pretending it's a small iced tea company. The myth of Sweet Leaf remains firmly in place, with no mention of the food giant on the company's front page and a slideshow of the company's history that stops in 2008. And Nestlé is free to change the recipe, add or subtract flavors, limit or expand markets and generally do whatever they want.

Will there be changes? Eighty years from now, will the product be the same as all other mass-produced teas? Will Clayton Christopher become Sam Breakstone?

What do you think?

GMIICTDT IV: Finding Sam Adams

2011-06-28T22:30:00.001-04:00

In honor of Independence Day, I took a short break from finding Sam Breakstone (which I totally did) to look for another mythic figure from American History, patriot Sam Adams.

Sam Adams: American patriot and
all-around scary looking guy.

Samuel Adams, the second cousin of John Adams, was born in 1722 in Boston. He lived most of his life in the Boston area and became a passionate champion of American independence long, long before it was fashionable. A born populist, Adams spent years agitating for colonial rights. He managed to somehow be at every single important event in the politics of the Revolutionary War - participating in the Boston Tea Party, creation of the minutemen, the Second Continental Congress, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the writing of the Articles of Confederation.

Here's how important Sam Adams was: You know Paul Revere's famous midnight ride was undertaken to warn that the British were coming. Did you know Revere was riding specifically to warn Sam Adams that the British were coming to arrest him? That's the only reason Revere was on the horse.

Adams served in the Massachusetts Senate and was the fourth governor of the state. It is speculated by some that Adams would have made an excellent candidate for President except that he died eight years before the position was created. Incidentally, he was for mortgages on land and against Shay's Rebellion, putting him on the right side of history every damn time.

And how has his memory been honored? By being appropriated by businessmen to openly invite consumers to delude themselves.

Oh, for the love of ...

First of all, Samuel Adams Boston Lager has nothing whatsoever to do with Samuel Adams.

Are any of the founders of the Boston Beer Company related to Sam Adams? No. Not even remotely.

Did they use Sam Adam's recipe? No. They did not. Founder Jim Koch's family had been making beer for five generations. His great-great-grandfather, Louis Koch, started brewing in the 1860s. The particular recipe on which Sam Adams is based dates from the 1870's.

Koch's family story is actually pretty cool. He's the first-born male lineal descendant of beer brewers. His father was a brewer, his father's father was a brewer, his father's father's ... it's a long line. Prohibition stopped them for a time (usually known as the 1920s). Large distributors like these guys had driven his father out of business. But in 1984, at the age of 35, Koch (pronounced Cook), was poised to make a comeback with a 110-year-old four-ingredient recipe he made in his kitchen.

It's a great story. In a lot of ways, it's way better than Breakstone's. But Jim Koch didn't like it enough to sell beer. Instead, he just called the stuff Sam Adams and desperately hoped that the real Sam Adams wouldn't rise from his grave and representatively legislate him to death.

Adams is in here somewhere, decomposing patrioticly.

Okay, Adams didn't invent Sam Adams Boston Lager, but he was a brewer, right? I mean, it says so right on the bottle.

Well, they're half right

Nope. Adams wasn't a brewer. His father was a maltster, owning a business that Adams ran as a young man. This leads naturally to the question of what the hell is a maltster. It turns out that a maltster is a person who makes malt for use in the making of beer and other alcoholic beverages. Barley or another grain is sprouted, roasted, mixed with sugar water, thrown away and then the water is boiled down to a dark mess. It's all detailed here. In the old, old days, brewers would make the malt themselves. By the 1700s, though, specialized maltsters had sprung up. You can still buy the stuff. It comes in all sorts of varieties and is useful for making bagels, baked beans, beer and other things that start with B.

But being a maltster does not equal being a brewer any more than, say, making paper equals publishing the New York Times. Any more than picking cotton equals making soft, comfortable Hanes undershirts. Make up an example of your own. It's fun.

So, Sam Adams has nothing to do with Sam Adams. But it's at least made in Boston. Right?

Right?

Finding One Actual Sam Breakstone

2011-06-21T20:40:00.000-04:00

Sam Breakstone just accepted my Friend request on Facebook!

Samantha Breakstone, currently in law school, is now officially a friend of mine ... and over five hundred other people. But the important thing is that, in a small and possibly psychologically unhealthy way, I have found Sam Breakstone.

No pictures of her out of respect for her privacy, but this is great. I was starting to get a little discouraged.

My wife, for example, is not impressed.

Finding Dean Hunter

2011-06-13T22:48:00.001-04:00

There are certain times when I really miss this guy:

Pictured: Not Eliot Spitzer

That's my former law school dean and contracts professor, Howard Hunter. He wrote a treatise on Contract Law. If I'd read it, I might have passed his class. Also, I might have a better handle on how to interpret the contract sent to me by Nancy Vale.

The letter agreement, from November 1985, is the contract for Michael Vale to continue portraying Sam Breakstone. It is signed by Michael and Geers Gross Advertising, as agent for Kraft Dairy Group. It came at a time when the Sam Breakstone campaign was winding down and the Dunkin' Donuts' "Time To Make The Donuts" campaign had already taken off.

It's an amazing look into how advertisers and entertainers work together, and just how much Sam Breakstone was worth. I have retouched a few details to protect Nancy Vale's privacy. Before you go knocking on doors, she hasn't lived at the address in the contract for some decades.

Michael apparently received $100,000.00. This entitled Geers Gross to demand a minimum amount of work, but he got that $100,000.00 even if they had him do less ... including nothing.

Most of the work he was required to do is on this page. He had to do four days of work shooting three commercials, and would be paid $2,500.00 per day for anything above that. There's some language about reuse of commercials which I ... do not understand.

He was obliged to do radio commercials. If they exceeded his base, he received $1,000.00 per commercial. Reuse of commercials was extra and didn't count towards his base.

He had to sit for two days of still photography. Additional days were paid at $2,500.00 each above his minimum. The pictures could be used for for magazines and POP. What is POP? Point of Purchase. It means a big cardboard cut-out of him in the supermarket. Once his $100,000.00 minimum was reached, Geers Gross had to pay up to $4,000.00 every three months to put his photograph in a magazine ad.

Once they met his minimum, personal appearances cost $3,000.00 each. If Kraft wanted Michael Vale to show up somewhere, they had to hand him three thousand dollars.

Publicity appearances cost $2,500.00. What's the difference between a personal appearance and a publicity appearance? Really. I'm asking you. I have no idea.

Michael was paid $750.00 a day to travel. It had to be by first class, include hotel and meals for two plus $200.00 a day walking around money.

The balance of page three and the start of the next involves apportioning the monies to comply with Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Actors requirements. Michael Vale was a member of more than one union, and they were required to follow union rules. That included sending money directly to the unions' pension funds.

Probably the coolest thing on this page is that the letter references standard clauses in the final contract like force majeure and morals. If a war broke out, preventing Kraft from shooting commercials, they wouldn't be liable under the contract. If Mr. Vale tweeted insensitive things about the Japanese tsunami victims, they could fire him.

Being under contract as a commercial actor is fairly rare. Usually, actors are hired for one commercial at a time. The fact that Mr. Vale was under contract at all shows just how seriously invested Kraft was in the character he brought to life. This would be the top tier of payment for a commercial actor (except for celebrity endorsement deals). So, is it more or less money than you thought.

If Geer Gross wanted to shoot four days of commercials in Los Angeles, the costs just for one actor were:

$1,500.00 - Two Travel Days
$2,000.00 - Two First Class Tickets
$1,000.00 - Four Nights Hotel Accommodations
$800.00 - Four Nights Meals
$800.00 - Per Diem
$10,000.00 - Four Day Commercial Shoot
$3,000.00 - Meet and Greet with Kraft Executives

TOTAL: $19,100.00 for six days.

According to this inflation calculator, Michael Vale's $100,000.00 minimum would be $208,147.20 today and the above total would be almost exactly forty thousand dollars. In fairness, Michael Vale split that money with his agents, managers, unions, the United States of America, and the State of New York. How much of each dollar earned he actually kept is unknown.

Was Michael Vale fairly compensated? Was he overcompensated? And is it even possible to calculate how much money Kraft made due to his efforts? Can you believe that number is still growing? Kraft is still making money today because of the brand image he helped build decades ago.

This is the first time this contract has seen the light of day in twenty-six years. Copy, link, share.

Finding Time To Hide The Donuts

2011-06-11T22:36:00.000-04:00

Michael Vale memorably played Sam Breakstone. But he achieved a kind of cultural immortality with another advertising icon - Dunkin' Donuts' Fred the Baker.

His character had a name?

For fifteen years, from 1982 to 1997, Dunkin' Donuts sold a brand image based on their dedication to making fresh donuts every morning. No matter how tiring, Dunkin' Donuts' employees were fulfilling their responsibilities to millions of Americans. That's not me talking, that's Ron Berger, the ad exec who cast Vale, speaking in a 2005 interview with CNN. Fred the Baker and his catchphrase, time to make the donuts, "was a symbol of the routine of having to get up and fulfill a responsibility."

That's what doughnuts were: a staple of breakfast so important that Dunkin' Donuts saw it as a responsibility to make them fresh every morning.

That campaign ended in 1997. Fourteen years later, Dunkin' Donuts is still a strong restaurant chain. But have you noticed something about their commercials?

Check out the front page of their website. Across the top reads links to coffee, menu, restaurants, etc. Here's the coffee page. Here's the menu page. Quick question. On any of those pages so far, have you seen a picture of even one damn doughnut?

In fact, here's the list of their menu items from their own website, exactly as they appear:

Blueberry Waffle Breakfast Sandwich

Breakfast Sandwiches

Chicken Salad Sandwich

Doughnuts are tenth on the list. Tenth.

Here's the Dunkin' Donuts Twitter feed. Read down them and find one post that explicitly mentions doughnuts.

This is a typical Dunkin' Donuts commercial today:

Rachel Ray has recorded several spots for Dunkin' Donuts since 2007. Guess how many involved actual doughnuts. Also, Michelle Malkin accused her and Dunkin' Donuts of sending a message that they were pro-terrorist.

The reason is fairly obvious. Trends and reliable scientific surveys over the last twenty years have shown that Americans are, very slowly, becoming more health conscious. Corporations have responded by following the dollars and emphasizing the healthfulness of their products. Sometimes this means actually offering better food; sometimes it means just obscuring how bad their food really is.

My Id says this is a fine breakfast.
My Superego actually kind of wants it, too.

And doughnuts are pretty bad. One glazed doughnut from Dunkin' has 260 calories, 14 grams of fat and almost no vitamins or minerals. About half the calories in the doughnut come from fat. Surprisingly, though, Dunkin' makes Men's Health's list of worst breakfasts for a simple bagel with cream cheese (510 calories and 78 grams of carbs make it equal to about two doughnuts, although with half the fat. But, and this is the important part, this menu item appears to be healthier than doughnuts. In fairness, Dunkin' also had Men Health's number one healthful breakfast sandwich.

So, the brand image of a company with donuts in its name is being remade to exclude the doughnuts. Dunkin' does run a small contest each year to design a new doughnut, but they've actually come out and admitted that their advertising is shifting towards anything that isn't a doughnut.

Are they lying? Are they inviting consumers to delude themselves? Are they just following market trends and offering consumers exactly what they want: the appearance of health without the bother of actually changing one's diet?

One thing is certain: It could be worse. You could be eating at Denny's.

Finding The Best Place On The Web For Critical Thinking

2011-06-09T22:44:00.002-04:00

If you get a chance, stop in here:

"James Randi Educational Foundation"

Seriously, how can you not trust this face?

The forums at the JREF are where you'll find the most careful thinkers on the internet. Skepticism doesn't mean denial of the magical. It means certainty that what you assume, hope for, and wish into being is actually real.

And Skepticism doesn't have a platform or even much unity. People who consider themselves skeptics come down differently on all sorts of issues - from libertarianism to extraterrestrials. All they have in common is a dedication to careful thought.

There's not much going on over there in the way of discussions about marketing, let alone food marketing. But there's so much going on in terms of good, logical inquiry that it can only help my cause.

After all, the JREF and Finding Sam Breakstone want the same thing: for people to really understand the world in which they live.

Check them out. The JREF Forum.

Have you already been there? What did you think?

Finding Like-Minded Souls

2011-06-08T21:49:00.001-04:00

When you type "marketing" and "blog" into the internet, you don't get a whole lot of good news. Most of the links are about how to drive traffic to your site (pay for it) or how to increase your search engine ranking (pay for it or pay somebody to game the system). A few sites out there are for marketing professionals to trade information ... mostly about whether any of them will hire any of the rest of them.

But it's the very rare site that helps consumers learn what corporations are doing - fair and unfair - to get their money That's why I wanted to take a moment to recognize Consumerist.Com.

The Consumerist is the professionally-written blog owned by the Consumers Union, the parent company of Consumer Reports. It's dedicated to exposing the underside of consumer culture, customer service, and corporate malfeasance. See how I used all those words that start with C? I'm like that.

The Consumerist killed it again a couple days ago by unearthing the original Ronald McDonald ads. Here's the first one ever, from 1963:

The amazing thing is just how naked the objective of the ad is: appeal directly to children and promise them fun. The reality is that the corporation and its franchisees takes money from adults in exchange for food. Ronald McDonald isn't even selling a lie. He's selling an irrelevant lie. He's selling something that his stores don't carry to people who don't have any of their own money.

By comparison, Kraft's Sam Breakstone campaign looks positively philanthropic.

What do you think about the ethics of marketing to children? Do you think the Ronald McDonald of today is any better? Or is he just more subtle?

Finding A Way Back

2011-06-06T22:21:00.125-04:00

Sam Breakstone, as I have sadly discovered, was not real. He did, however, exist. He was a creation of Kraft Foods. That may give him an edge on us. Fictitious people, unlike living ones, have the great advantage of having a purpose. They were born for a reason by someone who wanted them.

The question is whether Kraft will reveal any of that.

The answer is: they already did.

In 1977, an article appeared in The New York Times announcing the start of the Sam Breakstone campaign. The article is hidden behind a pay wall now which, seriously, is a whole other thing, but my point is that Nancy Vale kept a copy.

Below, a scan of the actual newspaper clipping:

The article, "That Sam Breakstone: What A Meanie," was published January 31, 1977. What was I doing on January 31, 1977? Just hanging out in first grade, waiting patiently for Smokey and the Bandit to be released in four months.

According to the article, Kraft reorganized its dairy companies in 1976, working it out so that they didn't compete against each other. The marketing agency for Breakstone's, Richard K. Manoff, Inc., created a campaign that took on the competition in the 35% of the country in which Breakstone's sour cream and cottage cheese were sold.

I asked the internet for a picture of Richard Manoff
and it gave me Richard Mulligan and Dinah Manoff. Enjoy.

Richard Manoff is an interesting guy. He owned a successful ad agency, but in 1965, he served on the US delegation to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (that would have been at the behest of Lyndon Johnson). He became so taken with the idea of using marketing methods to improve public health around the world, that he formed Manoff International (now The Manoff Group) to consult on using mass marketing to raise awareness of public health issues. In 1985, he wrote a book, Social Marketing, about how to use modern marketing to help third world nations educate their citizens. He was instrumental in getting Bolivians to accept iodized salt.

Richard Manoff is still alive and, the internet claims, still working today at 94 years of age.

We know that by the 1980s, Geers Gross was handling the Sam Breakstone campaign. I don't know when or why that switch occurred.

Yeah, like that happened.

The article says, "[T]he Manoff gang has invented a meanie named Sam Breakstone of whom they say, 'But if Sam Breakstone weren't so mean ... his cottage cheese [or sour cream] wouldn't be so good.'" The article uses the word "invent," leading to the inference that the ad agency knew that Sam Breakstone was not based on a real person. Another valid inference is that the author of the article used "invent" even though nobody at the agency said it. Newspapers aren't infallible. The New York Times doubly so.

However, in the very next sentence, the article describes Sam Breakstone as "a man who founded his company in 1882." This leads to the inference that the ad agency thought he was real, or at least was happy to leave some confusion on the issue. Breakstone didn't found anything, and Breakstone Brothers wasn't founded until 1897.

The first commercials were done on Sullivan Street between Houston and Prince in New York City, just about here:

View Larger Map

The Times calls the turn-of-the-century storefront a "mythical milieu." Aside from being annoyingly alliterate, it points to the mad men knowing they were creating a falsehood.

It may not be a great article, as Breakstone is then described as "dog-kickingly mean." In fact, it was the dog who harassed him. Although, I'd love to see a commercial with a guy just walking around, kicking dogs.

Irwin Warren

The ad agency reveals its thinking behind the concept. "The positioning ... is that these are the highest quality dairy products from a manufacturer who has been around for a long time." They're right. That is the positioning. It's also not really true. The Breakstone's name has been around for a long time (less than they think, but still long). The company has changed hands again and again. There's also no evidence that the way their products are made now (or in 1977) has anything to do with how they were made in 1900. Nor is there evidence that Breakstone's products are of a quality different from their competitors. And there's no reason to think that the ad agency or Kraft believed otherwise.

The creative director of the campaign was Irwin Warren. Sadly, Warren passed away in December 2010. He was 71. Warren wrote ads for Major League Baseball and Volkswagen. He also created at least the American version of the Taster's Choice couple.

The article ends by speculating that Sam Breakstone might become as big as Mr. Whipple. Sweetly, someone in actor Michael Vale's family noted that with a hand-written exclamation mark.

Finding Out If Anyone At Kraft Can Cook

2011-06-05T23:27:00.006-04:00

In Finding Sam Breakstone's Favorite Recipes, we started to open up a recipe booklet created by Kraft in 1981. Now, let's try some. Let's try them virtually.

This was the
front page

This was pages 2 and 3. You see how it works

The first recipe is for Cottage Cheese Dip. I made it .... sort of. I didn't have any scallions, so I used cilantro. And I didn't have lemon juice, so I used lime. Also, I should point out that I used Friendship cottage cheese because it was on sale.
Even so, it didn't taste bad exactly. There was just very little point to it. Dipping something in cottage cheese is unnerving. Still, if you ever want to make cottage cheese southwestern style, I highly recommend adding cilantro and lime. Throw in some grilled corn while you're at it.

The second recipe is for a straightforward sour cream dip. There's really no reason to add in the mayonnaise and I didn't. I've really never seen anybody make this type of thing fresh, though. I usually just dump in a packet of ranch mix. Who owns Hidden Valley?

Mrs. Breakstone's Tuna Salad is a confusing recipe. I wasn't entirely aware of the existence of a Mrs. Breakstone. I'm glad Sam settled down. At any rate, Kraft wants you to combine tuna fish and cottage cheese. I couldn't do it because it just sounds terrible. I mean, really awful. Although, apparently, there are some people who are into it.

Sour Cream Ambrosia is a classic. If anything, the recipe is too conservative. Throw in marshmallows, cherries and some dessert spices like nutmeg. It's just good.

Sweet And Sour Cream Dressing sounds like it might be good. I can't make it myself because somebody in my house is allergic to nuts. If anyone wants to try this and report back, I will be: a) grateful; and b) amazed.

Creamy Cucumber Mold is just ... They want me to gelatinize cottage cheese. There are some lines I will not cross.

Now we're into side dishes, and I just realized that Kraft wanted me to serve ambrosia as an appetizer. The first side, Sam's Corny Casserole, seems okay. I would never put in the cottage cheese. Is it just me? I wouldn't eat cottage cheese in any dish that's name didn't include "And Cottage Cheese." What is that? Melon and cottage cheese? Perfect, hand it over.
Zucchini Baskets sounds like something I might try. It doesn't have cottage cheese in it.

Sam's Fiesta Platter is the first recipe that doesn't have a Breakstone's product in it, although they strongly imply that you should use this Kraft product. It's really just a way to tell you about two more sour cream dips for your nachos: Avocado and Chile. In both cases, it seems much easier to just mash up an avocado or throw on some sliced chilies.

The less said about the Blue Cheese Squares, the better. I have yet to curse on this blog and I'd prefer to keep it that way.

The Hot 'N Creamy Potato Salad is interesting. First, I do prefer to have sour cream instead of mayonnaise in my potato salad. Second, this is the first main recipe that is necessarily unkosher. That's a strange decision for Kraft to have made. If nothing else is true of the Breakstone family, this certainly is: they were Jewish. And their first success came from serving the Jewish families of Brooklyn and the lower east side. (It's not my fault people a hundred and ten years ago shopped by religion.) I don't think bacon made up a large part of their diet, in that I believe that many of the Breakstone family lived their entire lives without ever tasting it.

Cucumber 'N Onion Salad is a fine recipe. I like it much better without the sour cream.

Tangy Chive Potatoes is ... a baked potato with sour cream on it. Things are starting to spin out of control. "Hey, try some sour cream on your potato!" just doesn't seem like a recipe to me.

Saucy Broccoli wants me to mix cottage cheese into my broccoli which ... no. Also, there's a sketch of hot coffee on this page. What does that have to do with anything?
Spinach Rice Bake is a rice casserole with cottage cheese in it. I'd try it. Once.

I like the Double Cheese Noodle Bake because it's basically noodle kuggel. Since it doesn't include eggs, sugar, or specify a broad egg noodle rather than, say, spaghetti, it is destined to be horrible. Did Kraft really think people in 1981 would flip out over any mention of ethnic cuisine? "This is a Jewish dish? Well, I'm just gonna take a hostage."

Main dishes: Lasagna Rolls. Kraft wants me to ruin my lasagna by substituting cottage cheese for ricotta. I won't compromise my grandmother's (Italian neighbor's) lasagna recipe like that.
Chicken Spaghetti Pie sounds okay until you look at the instructions. They seem to be skipping steps, such as exactly how to make a bechamel sauce. They don't even call it a bechamel sauce. They call it a white sauce. That offends me for reasons I am unable to explain.

The Tortilla Cups sound good. Look at the detail they go into on how to make a cup-shaped tortilla. If I wrote this recipe, it would say, "Buy cup-shaped tortillas."

Sour Cream Seafood Dinner disappointed me. I thought it would be this huge deal with five kinds of shellfish and corn and potatoes. Instead, it's "Pour a bechamel sauce over some fish you made." Also, they're still assuming I know: a) how to make a bechamel sauce; and b) that bechamel is what they mean when they say "white."

This is my favorite page. I love Mrs. Breakstone's Meatloaf. I love how they ruin it and make it unkosher at the same time with one ingredient. I love the sketch of Sam Breakstone. Is that his wife's meatloaf that he hates so much?

Thankfully, we're on to the desserts. And I'm being absolutely sincere here when I say that the Apple Nut Coffee Cake sounds delicious. I wish I had a piece (without nuts) right now.

The Sour Cream Frosted Squares sound okay. Can you spot the ingredient they forgot? There's no sugar in the frosting. I don't think this cookbook was fact checked.

Sam's Company Cheesecake has cottage cheese in it. Cottage cheese is not ricotta. Also, if you don't drain the whey from the cottage cheese before you make this, you're probably looking at something closer to cheese soup than cake.

We're coming to the end of the desserts. The Strawberries 'N Cream Pancake is something most people call breakfast these days, although they probably shouldn't. Also, what does Sam Breakstone have against the word "And"? Why is he always abbreviating it?

The Sour Cream Cake with Chocolate Sour Cream Frosting sounds surprisingly great. They finished strong.

Except for the very last page. Here, Sam Breakstone gives tips for using sour cream and cottage cheese. Sadly, all of his suggested uses include eating them. At no point does he say that they can remove stains or pick up pet hair.

Guess how many of his cottage cheese suggestions involve putting a scoop of cottage cheese on something, like I've been saying this entire article: five. Five.
But his very last suggestion may well prove that writing this cookbook drove Sam Breakstone absolutely insane:

"8. Stir cottage cheese into your favorite carrot-raisin salad."

Sam Breakstone thinks I have more than one carrot-raisin salad. He thinks I have so many that I've developed a favorite. And he wants me to destroy all my fondness for carrots and raisins by dumping in cottage cheese.

The question we are left with is whether anyone was meant to even take these recipes seriously. Is a bit of marketing fluff like this supposed to actually add value to the product? Or is it only supposed to appear to add value? "Buy X units and get this free cookbook" may be enough to sway a purchasing decision at the point of sale. Reinforcing the reality of Sam Breakstone helps the brand in all cases. But did Kraft or the authors even expect any more than that?

Reading these recipes closely, I'm inclined to believe that nobody was ever intended to read these recipes closely. It's just one more mote of marketing nonsense, floating through our world and obscuring the view.

Finding Sam Breakstone's Favorite Recipes

2011-06-05T00:34:00.003-04:00

Among the keepsakes sent by Nancy Vale comes a thin recipe book created by Kraft in 1981. It is 8 1/2" long by whatever a third of eleven is. It numbers 16 pages including the front and back cover. And despite coming out at about the height of Sam Breakstone's popularity, the booklet features sketches and not pictures of Michael Vale.

I looked into the value of this booklet as a collectible. It is ... not very high. It's not that there are many Breakstone's recipe booklets out there. It's just that there are thousands of booklets that were published by just about every brand, appliance maker, and association. These include: Carnation; Ocean Spray; Amana Freezers; Reynolds Wrap; and the Mutual Citrus Products Company.

Some, like the Amana one, came with new appliances. Some might have been given out in stores as promotions, or obtained as a prize for buying certain items. The rarest can go for $15.00, but generally you're talking $3.00 to $6.50, even for something from World War II (Motto: This Time We Think It'll Take).

As a collectible, nobody's getting rich off Sam Breakstone's Favorite Recipes. As a look into the marketing mind of Kraft, though, it is priceless.

First the cover:

I love the color. But, then, I love brown.

Food photography is an art. There's a reason. Most food is mostly beige. When taking pictures of beige food, it's important to have lots of light and contrasting colors. Sam Breakstone doesn't roll that way. He likes his brown food on a field of brown. He likes to take non-brown foods like cherries and just wilt them into brownness by sheer force of New York willpower.

The second page gives us most of our information.

The great thing about this page is that almost everything is a lie. It didn't all start in 1882. Breakstone Brothers wasn't formed until 1897. There was no one, proud dairy store on the lover east side. There were multiple Breakstone's grocery and dairy locations run by different relatives right from the start. The order in which Breakstone's added products is wrong.

Oh, and the philosophy that they always kept in mind, "be demanding," never existed. The philosophy, if any, was, "Let's sell value-added milk products from our own factories."

Then they write this, "And as you see on T.V. today, Sam Breakstone's demanding spirit is what makes every Breakstone's product the best, highest quality and most delicious it can be." Your guess is as good as mine here. Are they saying Sam Breakstone existed? Or are they saying that some ephemeral spirit of demandingness has driven them to create quality products? Are they even saying their products are the highest quality possible? Or are they saying that this was the best quality they could eke out under the circumstances?

The entire thing is written as an cypher. It invites the reader to imagine whatever she wants, whatever makes her think well of the product.

The last line of copy is pure ghost-written fun house mirror marketing nonsense: "Bon appetite, as Sam Breakstone was never heard to say." What does it mean? Does it mean Breakstone didn't know french? Does it mean that he was kind of crabby and wouldn't say such a nice thing? Or does it mean that Kraft darn well knows Sam Breakstone did not exist?

No, that's Ghost Rider

Nowhere in the pamphlet is credit given for the marketing copy or the recipes themselves. It's a shame. I would have liked to meet the ghost writers. Was there a person in charge of recipes and another in charge of the front copy? Was it the same person? Was there a template of Kraft recipes from which to choose? Were any of these dishes fed to any living people before this thing was published just to, you know, see what happened.

Coming next, the recipes that Sam Breakstone was so proud of. Hint - they involve dairy.

___________
To my knowledge, this is the first time this particular booklet has been available to the internet. Please copy, link and share. For higher-quality scans, please contact the author.

Finding Out It's A Cookbook. (It's A Cookbook!)

2011-06-04T00:40:00.001-04:00

While going through Nancy Vale's files, I found this. And I thought, "What the hell is this thing?"

Tomorrow, we'll open this up and find out.

Subscribe to find out how a fictional character has a favorite anything, let alone recipes.

Finding A Color Picture

2011-06-02T21:07:00.002-04:00

As promised, below is a high-res color promotional still of Michael Vale as Sam Breakstone. It's probably from about 1985. To my knowledge, this picture doesn't exist anywhere else on the interwebs. So, please copy, paste and link freely. The still appears courtesy of Nancy Vale.

Great Moments In Inviting Consumers To Delude Themselves III

2011-05-31T22:20:00.002-04:00

Politicians in a democracy have a marketing problem.

They - the good ones, in any case - tend to genuinely want to participate in policy-making for the benefit of their nation. The problem is that their consumers, the voters, have little understanding of policy issues. This can be because the subject matter is arcane or because the correct answer simply cannot be known.

Consider, for example, the insane economics of taxation. Multiple textbooks have been written on the subject by all manner of very educated people. But the voter has no time for textbooks worth of economic theories. Add to that the fact that many taxes aren't designed to raise revenues for the government, so much as they are to reprice certain activities and, in doing so, influence behavior.

As an example, the US government wants to encourage people to invest their money. So, they create a capital gains tax (which is actually a tax break). People who keep their money in the market for a long enough time pay a lower percentage of the amount earned than from their other income.

This was all pretty straightforward until the market for consumer goods started to dry up in 2008. Then the government tried to use tax policy to encourage spending by sending everybody six hundred dollars.  We had a situation where US tax policy was simultaneously encouraging saving AND spending. (Incidentally, most people used the rebates to pay off consumer debt, making the whole thing a complete waste of time.)

The upshot is that the voting public doesn't understood any of this. I don't understand it. Many economists can't even agree whether they understand it. And nobody - politician, economist or voter - could reliably predict what the competing tax policies would do to the economy.

So, the politician who wants to talk about this stuff is pretty much out of luck.  Most people aren't going to understand him. But they like this ...

... even though it makes no sense, because any change in the way the US collects money at all is, technically, a tax of some sort. If the population increases by four people and you tax them, those are new taxes. If the population increases by four people and you don't tax them, that increases the relative burden on everybody else and those are still new taxes.

So politicians become products - branded and marketed to consumers like cars, or hotel chains or really patriotic ice cream. And George H.W. Bush says something that he doesn't even believe (he said as much when he ran against Reagan) to get elected President.

The politician himself is the brand and everything that comes from that politician has to reinforce that image. It's not a new concept. Joe McGinniss popularized it in 1968's The Selling of the President. The one who wins is the one that creates "a concise brand that everyone understands and relates to without much effort." The candidate has to sell trust, because he can't sell the issues. That's why voters hate adultery. They substitute it for any real examination of the candidate's character as a leader, because no one knows how he'll perform as a leader (let alone what long-term effect any of his policies would have).

Our winning Presidents have all invented themselves as brands:

From L to R: No New Taxes, Yes We Can, I'm Just Like You,
Check Me Out, and Look How Much I'm Not Richard Nixon

And that's what our losers have tended to fail at. The politician who does not define herself runs the risk of having the opposition do it for her.

Take Sarah Palin. Please.

Palin had actually built a fairly stable brand image of herself in Alaska. She played her cards close to the vest (literally, she never even bothered to inform her staff she was pregnant), took no nonsense, and did whatever the hell she wanted. That's exactly the brand of person Alaskans love. In 2007, she had a 93% approval rating.

Then she hit the national stage ... where nobody had ever heard of her. For arguable reasons, Palin stayed undefined in the voters' minds. For two whole weeks. That's how long it took Seth Meyers to write a cold open for Saturday Night Live that presented a concise message about Sarah Palin that everyone could understand without much effort: Sarah Palin lacks even basic self-awareness. It changed the debate, it robbed McCain of gravitas, and it may have swayed an election.

The smartest political operatives of 2008, God help us all.

But the third Great Moment In Inviting Consumers To Delude Themselves does not belong to Palin or Obama or Seth Meyers. It belongs to a man who ran for President long before anyone would ever admit that a candidate was being "marketed" at all. It belongs to this guy:

Pictured: Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Not Pictured: Wheelchair

There he is, FDR, standing proudly and waiving to the voters. You can get plenty of pictures of him standing. Here he is being propped up by his wife. Here he is leaning against a building. This is him being held up by the Secret Service.

He was always supported by something. And there was a reason: Franklin Roosevelt could not walk. He couldn't even stand.

GBS is also called Landry's Paralysis after
Joan Allen's character in The Bourne Identity

In 1921, at the age of 39, he was struck with a painful paralysis that moved up his legs, gradually affecting his arms and face. It gradually resolved, but left both legs paralyzed and his leg muscles severely atrophied. It was thought at the time to be polio, but was much more likely Guillain-Barré (learn more about it here).

Roosevelt developed strategies for appearing more able-bodied than he really was. He wore iron leg braces, held a cane with one hand and leaned all of his weight on someone, usually one of his sons, with the other. By swiveling his hips, he could make it look like a walk. Only four seconds of footage of him walking survive today.

FDR almost never allowed himself to be seen in public in a wheelchair. His braces were painted black and he wore long pants to hide them. His public appearances were carefully choreographed by the Secret Service to hide how he arrived at and left events. The press, as was the custom at the time, never mentioned his paralysis and photographers avoided taking pictures of him in his wheelchair. In fact, only two such pictures are known to exist.

Even with the Secret Service running interference, Roosevelt's paralysis wasn't exactly a well-kept secret. Dozens of doctors, nurses, physical therapists, and hydrotherapy employees knew. The entire White House press corps knew. His whole staff, a bunch of politicians he left in New York, and his political opponents (many of whom hated him) knew. Pretty much anyone who stood or sat next to him from 1921 on knew, as well.

In fact, everybody knew. In a 1934 story, Time Magazine accidentally blew his cover. Some of his detractors mentioned it. The fabulously-named William Gibbs McAdoo, Jr. may have publicly complained about FDR's ability to win an election as a cripple. And, as this thread reveals, most all Americans knew Roosevelt was impaired, they just didn't know the extent.

"Hey, I can walk! Vote for me!"

Still, the man helped found the March of Dimes to combat infantile paralysis. Anybody who wanted to know, could have. Instead, everybody in America - even people who despised him - ignored it. Even reporters who could have made money on such a story ignored it. Roosevelt won four terms in office and became the longest-serving President in US history.

And it is this that certifies this as a great moment in inviting consumers to delude themselves. Roosevelt not only got an entire nation to believe he could walk, he got them to believe that it somehow qualified him to run the whole country. He didn't lie exactly. He just created an atmosphere that allowed people to lie to themselves.

He was a marketing genius.

He even made smoking look cool.

Finding Grass

2011-05-30T00:12:00.001-04:00

Previously on Finding Sam Breakstone:

The sun produces energy in the form of sunlight. People need energy. People can't use sunlight. The sun is absolutely useless to the human race.

Luckily, there are some species that are a little more efficient than we are.

Almost all plants are capable of photosynthesis. The word itself means "making stuff from light." In scientific terms, the chemical reaction is described as:

6CO₂ + 6H₂O + Sunlight ® C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂

Plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air, mix it with water from the ground, expose the whole thing to sunlight and make sugar, which they keep, and oxygen, which they excrete.

How cool is that? Have you enjoyed breathing today? That's plant poop you're breathing. Is that a particularly sweet apple you're eating? A plant made it out of sunlight and air.

How much mass do plants create from thin air: 100,000,000,000,000 kilograms a year or 220 trillion pounds. And that's just counting the weight of the carbon, it doesn't even factor in all the water. In comparison, all of the people on earth total weigh 1 trillion pounds.

Plants eat sunlight using chlorophyll, which is green. Every green leaf is a solar cell. Incidentally, purple absorbs light even better than green. Some scientists think the world was once purple .

"I made this out of sunlight. Enjoy your brunch!"

Which brings us, naturally, to grass. No, the other kind.

Green grass - and there are thousands of species - is found just about everywhere. If there is land, there is most likely grass. In many habitats, it is the dominant vegetation. And there's good reason. Each blade of grass is its own plant - a single solar cell. Nothing is wasted on making bark or fruit or flowers. It's just a tiny panel turning sunlight into food.

There's just one problem. Green grass, of which there is a lot, is entirely inedible by humans. We cannot break down the cell walls. All of the nutrition in grass is completely unavailable to us.

To review: The sun is the source of all the energy in the world,. We can't eat sunlight. Green grass is relatively efficient at turning solar energy into food energy. We can't eat grass, either.

If only there were some way to convert green grass into something we can eat.

And if only it had something to do with the dairy industry ...

Next: What this all has to do with the dairy industry.

Nice grass. I'll take an eighth.

Finding Sol

2011-05-27T00:47:00.002-04:00

Consider the sun.

Now consider me. Now back to the sun, now back to me.

"I am the sun your sun could smell like."

The sun is basically a huge nuclear explosion. Very nearly all of the energy on earth comes from the sun. And it's a lot of energy. The sun produces 3.8 x 10²⁶ Joules per second of energy. Of that, the Earth gets 1.8 x 10¹⁷ Joules every second. Is that a lot? Think of it this way: The sun is transforming 8,000,000,000 pounds of material into energy every second. Of those eight billion pounds, Earth is getting four and a half - not four and a half billion. Four and a half pounds total..


Chili's: a day's worth of calories in hamburger form.

Does that not seem like much? Consider this: the total energy consumption of the entire human race - homes, cars, factories, farms, everything - is about 1/10,000 of that.

Does any of this relate to milk, or Breakstone's sour cream in any way? We can only hope.

The average adult needs about 2,000 calories a day. That's 8,368 Kilojoules every day. The earth is getting 180 trillion Kilojoules from the sun every second. If we could convert sunlight directly into food energy, we could feed 21.5 billion people a second. We could, using the sun's energy, feed every single person on planet earth for the entire day in a little less than a third of a second.

2.7 hours of this and nobody on earth
will have to eat for eighty years.

Unfortunately, people can't eat sunlight. In fact, except for production of Vitamin D, sunlight is completely useless as a source of energy for the human body. You could live just as well in a cave or, say, Scotland.

Our inability to eat the sun, though poetic, is hardly universal. What we need is a way to turn solar energy into available calories. Tomorrow: Grass.

Finding Skinny Bitches

2011-05-23T23:49:00.001-04:00

Jane Austin drank milk and she turned out okay.
I hear she looked a lot like Anne Hathaway.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a computer in possession of a good internet connection must be in want of a crazy person. Hence, you get dark corners of the web where this is considered normal.

One of the strangest areas of disagreement on the net involves dairy. There are those who absolutely love milk and those who absolutely hate it. Depending on what you read, milk either strengthens the immune system or "damages the human immune system."

The one fact that all anti-milk campaigns keep coming back to was well-stated in the popular amateur diet book, Skinny Bitch:

We are the only species on the planet that drinks milk as adults. We are also the only species on the planet that drinks the milk of another species.

They're not entirely right. There are certain birds and feral animals that have been documented as stealing milk from nursing mothers. But they are mostly right, humans are the only mammals on earth who habitually drink milk into adulthood, and who drink the milk of other animals.

And if you don't really think about it, that sounds like a very bad thing. If we are the one exception, chances are we're doing something wrong. You never hear about lions being in and out of the hospital with intestinal bleeding, or southern wright whales complaining of arthritis and swollen joints.

Ow, my back!

But a couple of moments of reflection reveal some serious logical flaws in this argument:

We are the only mammals who consume the milk of other mammals, and into adulthood no less,
Thus, we are wrong.

Note the logical fallacies of: Appeal to Common Practice; Appeal to Popularity; Begging the Question (in a suppressed premise); Misleading Vividness; and a delightfully tart Red Herring.

They all add up to the same thing: The fact that only one group does something is not evidence that it is right or wrong. It is not evidence of anything.

Oh, everybody's getting married today?
Well, I hadn't planned on it, but ...

The question is whether milk is healthy for human adults. The answer cannot lie in how other species feel about milk, or in how alone we are in using dairy. It can only be found by examining what milk does for the human body.

There are, of course, plenty of things that would fit in the "Skinny Bitch" quote that show how illogical their argument is:

We are the only species on the planet that has ever gone to the moon on purpose.
We are the only species on the planet that tries to predict the weather a week in advance.
We are the only species on the planet that can write diet books without first receiving a formal education in nutrition.

Would the authors of "Skinny Bitch" say that we shouldn't be going to the moon, predicting weather, or writing diet books without an adequate grounding in human physiology?

The truth is that there is a good evolutionary reason why cow's milk is a growing part of the human diet - and why fermented milk products like sour cream and cheese are even more important.

Subscribe to the blog to learn how milk saved the world.

Finding The Last Sam Breakstone, The Real One

2011-05-23T00:29:00.001-04:00

In these two posts, I combed the historical data to find five men and one girl who's still in law school who are not Sam Breakstone. Only three remain:

Sam Breakstone #7 doesn't have much going for him. We have no records of his parents at all. He was born about 1885 somewhere, as we all were. His death is not recorded. He married a woman who may have been named Rebecca in 1907. They had one son, Stanley, born May 10, 1908 in Chicago. Stanley did not go on to marry or have children. He died as a baby on June 27, 1909. And that's all we know about this Sam Breakstone. Let's hope his small family is resting in peace.

Senator Joe McCarthy was also born in 1908.
Why is it that all the wrong people die in infancy?

That's where he was born.
Are those signs in Yiddish?

Sam Breakstone #8 is born in 1898 in Manhattan. He was married in 1918 in New York and died in 1981 in Vermont. He had two girls in the 1920's. Both of them got married but there are no records of any children or their deaths.

Sam's relations are interesting. He was the son of a Morris Breakstone, born in 1870. Morris Breakstone features heavily in the beginnings of Breakstone Brothers, but this seems to be a different person. His genealogy cannot be made to connect to Joseph and Isaac Breakstone. This Sam just floats alone through time. Perhaps he was a distant relative who got some work from Breakstone Brothers based on his name. He couldn't have been that important to the organization because so little is known of him.

I am beginning to suspect that Sam may be too common a name for my tastes.

Sam Breakstone #9 is our very last suspect. Right out of the gate, he's got a lot to recommend him.

First of all, he was born in New York in 1884, making him old enough to have participated in the early workings of the Breakstone's dairy distributorships in the late 1890's and been a meaningful contributor in the first two decades of the 1900's.

Second, he is the son of Judah (Julius) Breakstone. Julius was born in Lithuania, like all close Breakstone relatives. In fact, he was Joe and Isaac's cousin. Sam was the 1st cousins once removed of Joe and Isaac Breakstone.

We know that, in 1904, a Samuel Breakstone and Abraham Levine began a small dairy company. About that Sam, we know he had a sister, Sarah. Sam #9 has a sister Sarah, and he would have been a good working age, 20, when such a concern was started.

Was this Sam Breakstone in competition with his cousins? Was he running a satellite store, as several Breakstones did? Was it eventually folding in to the entire Breakstone's operation? Or was his a separate business that opened and eventually closed on its own?

These questions are, for now unanswered. No one has yet been able to tell how Breakstone and Levine fit into the story of Breakstone Brothers.

Still, he's our best Breakstone yet. But which one of these fine eight men and one woman was the inspiration for that character of Sam Breakstone as marketed by Kraft Foods?

The answer after this ...

Jon Lovitz as Michael Vale on season 23 of Saturday Night Live.

And now the moment of revelation. According to unofficial Breakstone's historian Jeff Marx, the real Sam Breakstone was ...

None of them.

According to Rabbi Marx's research, Sam Breakstone was entirely made up by Kraft and their marketing agency. He represented no person or amalgam of people who ever lived. No stories survive in the family of any man similar to him. No stories survive of any Breakstone being obsessed with his product to such a degree. Instead, the Breakstones were pragmatists who worked to control as much of the production of dairy items as possible, and to distribute products as efficiently as possible, in order to make the most money. Sam Breakstone tinkering in his kitchen is completely fictitious.

In contrast, Queen Amidala is 78% real.

Knowing that there was no Sam Breakstone is hardly the end of this inquiry. It's important to learn how Kraft created the Breakstone character, why they felt so confident inventing history, and how they managed to be so successful. Knowing Sam Breakstone didn't exist is the first step Knowing how a fictional spokesperson is born is the next. Knowing what informs the choices we make about what we eat is the goal.

Finding Time

2011-05-21T23:49:00.000-04:00

This has been a busy weekend, if you figure in my naps.

In two previous installments, we examined some of the possible candidates who could have been the real Sam Breakstone. You can read Part One here, and Part Two here. Tomorrow night, we'll examine the last two individuals who might be the real Sam Breakstone and we'll hear the final pronouncement of the unofficial genealogist of the Breakstone family as to which of our eight contestants it really is.

Until tomorrow night, why not go back and read about how this all began those many long three weeks ago.

Or, you could enjoy a television commercial for a food product where the brand message was a little off, in that the mad men who wrote this commercial seem never to have met an actual, fully functioning, human female before.

Three speeds. Can be bolted to a horse saddle.

In the 1960's, Post sold a cereal called Size 8. This ad, written by D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, appears to make the following assumptions about their target audience:

Women around a size 8, really, really want to stay that size.
Bigger women should just go find another cereal.
Real women with, like, kids and jobs and things suck and shouldn't use our product
Women do not care how cereal tastes
Women do not care how anything tastes so long as it guarantees some level of weight loss.
Men should stay away from this cereal, as should all children not on hormone replacement therapy
Nothing about this product matters, women will buy it because of the pretty packaging.
There is a sexual innuendo in this ad about how much women like Size 8, I just don't know what it is.

Enjoy the commercial and learn how not to create a brand identity.

Finding A Good Production Still - Do Over

2011-05-20T17:07:00.092-04:00

Among the documents that Nancy Vale sent, is this great still photo of Michael Vale as Sam Breakstone.

The picture is undated, but judging by the materials it was sent with, is probably circa 1985.

The original is in color. That's coming as soon as I figure out how to do that. I assume I need some sort of equipment.

Note the anachronisms that mark this as marketing for a product. The microphone is most likely a Calrad 500C, circa the 1950's. They're supposedly terrible for sound. They "pill" style followed the success of the RCA 77, which could never be confused with the Calrad 500. As one website puts it, "These are great for photos, display, prop or loading in a modern element and using on-stage." In fact, at least one website has devoted a page to finding Calrad 500C's on TV and in print.

Kim Basinger is pretending to sing in front of one in this poster from The Marrying Man. There's a year in their life I bet they wish they could take back.

So, Breakstone is behind a microphone invented roughly seventy years after he is supposed to have started in the dairy industry in 1882; years after both Joseph and Isaac Breakstone had passed away.

Also note that Breakstone is holding a plastic container of cottage cheese.

This type of polyethylene container did not come into use until the 1970's. It was the modern product at the time the photo was taken.

Breakstone's hat is a men's straw boater. They were worn (unironically) from the 1890's to the 1920's.

That's some bad hat, Harry.

One more thing bothers me about the picture: the head of lettuce. They are implying a connection between freshness of the produce and a milk product that is, by its very nature, partially spoiled. They are also implying that Sam Breakstone sold vegetables. There is little truth to the associations that the marketers are asking us to make.

In all, Sam Breakstone stands before us, representing the goodness of the past, as he passes on the Breakstone's products to a new generation.

Even so, one thing remains clear, this is the highest resolution image of Kraft Foods's Sam Breakstone currently available on the internet. And that makes me a real journalist.

Follow, link, share and stay tuned.

Finding Mail

2011-05-19T23:32:00.001-04:00

In a previous post, I reported on my interview with Nancy Vale, the widow of Sam Breakstone himself, Michael Vale.

He was much better known for the
Dunkin' Donuts commercials.

Mrs. Vale ended that conversation with the promise to look around her house and send me some stuff from the Breakstone's campaign.

You laugh. Today in the mail, I received a package of stuff from the Breakstone's campaign. Included was a color headshot of Vale as Sam Breakstone, which I have to figure out how to scan. Also included was his contract with Geers Gross, signed by Michael and the advertising agency.

I will be reviewing these documents and publishing them as the law and respect for Mr. and Mrs. Vale allow.

In the meanwhile, let me publicly thank Nancy Vale for not only helping to keep the memory of her husband alive, but for helping to ensure that his contributions to our understanding of commercial marketing, branding, and long-term brand identity are fully recognized. I think it will result in smarter consumers, increased honesty in commercial communications, and, ultimately, higher quality products.

Now, who's with me!

This blog never has and never will push any commercial advertising on the reader. However, the Armenia Tree Project is a charitable organization supported by Nancy Vale, and by Michael during his life. Watch a short video here and please give generously.

Finding Porn Robots and Scott Lyon

2011-05-18T22:21:00.002-04:00

The unthinkable has happened! Finding Sam Breakstone has been discovered by two of the biggest forces on the internet: 1) robots in a personal services industry; and 2) a person in the robot services industry.

The last post, Finding Charlie's Angels, told the story of how Technorati's marketing department had sold my email address to CBS, along with 30,000 of my closest entertainment blogging friends.

For the first time ever, I got comments!

The first was from a wonderful robot named London Escorts. It wrote:

Finding Charlie's Angels with some social media marketing for the Breakstone's brand. We will send all submitted posts to ABC to review and potentially be included in a widely-released Technocratic conversational media ad slated to receive over 11 million impressions.

By London escorts on Finding Charlie's Angels at 9:51 AM

This is what my prostitutes look like.
Also, my prostitutes are UNICEF ambassadors.

What I appreciate is exactly how little the robot tried. Because when sending tens of thousands of these things, why make it even look like English? Just hope that one in ten bloggers lets it go up without moderation for a day or two - long enough for Google to count the links and up your search ranking. Maybe, somebody actually clicks the link and decides that the one thing his night was missing was a prostitute with bad teeth who sounds like Eliza Doolittle.

So, this is how the robot composed the message: "[Title of the blog post] with some [word 10 through end of sentence]. [Twenty-nine words from some random sentence]."

But here's the interesting part - the robot cares a great deal about spelling. It auto-corrected and took out things that it thought weren't words. It changed "Technorati" to "technocratic." And I ask you, who but a robot would think people were talking about technocracy? That's like Woody Allen thinking he overheard something anti-Semitic.

The robot also dropped the acronym CMAD, which Technorati thinks means Conversational Media Ad. I can't tell if the robot didn't think it was a word or if it didn't like the fact that it was in parentheses. Maybe the sex robot just thought it was redundant. Robots hate redundancy, sex robots doubly so.

"And Tom Christie said, 'No, JEW?'
Not 'Did you?'...JEW eat? JEW?"

In any case, if you're in Europe and you absolutely have to spend four thousand dollars in half an hour, please give the wonderful women at London Escorts a call. Their sex robots are standing by.

The second comment was much more pleasant, if decidedly less busty.

I spent time in my post talking about the sender of the Technorati email, Scott Lyon. His position is "Blogger Outreach Manager," which I interpreted as a man who sells Technorati's email lists to marketers. I also complained that it didn't look like Scott Lyon thought about me much, because of how poorly tailored his email was.

It turns out I was wrong. Scott Lyon left a comment:

Hey Sam,

Scott here, the offending emailer, from Technorati Media.

My apologies for your receipt of the message about the new tv series and I appreciate your response considering the nature and subjects covered in your blog. We are working on ways and finding tools to better help us connect bloggers with opportunities (some with compensation, depending on what they are) and "news" that they find relevant. It's big challenge, but we're working on it.

A big part of my position is not marketing for clients, but to also promote blogs, bloggers and blogging. I love all the different POVs and connecting them to opportunities they might be interested in.

Sorry I missed the mark with you and good luck with your blog's mission and content.
Best,

Scott

First of all please allow me to just say, Best. Comment. Ever.

This comment is just about the smoothest and most professional communication I've ever seen. I have no idea if it was written by Scott or someone on his team, but whomever they are they completely mastered diplomacy. We should send him to negotiate with the North Koreans.

Look at what he does:

He apologizes.
He compliments my blog (assuming "appreciate" is a compliment and not just a synonym for "acknowledge").
He wishes me luck.
He promises to try to tailor his pitches more carefully.

He made me feel good about Technorati and excited to hear from him again. As far as marketing his own employer, this is an absolute home run.

Lest we get carried away, here's what Scott didn't do:

Deny that he sent me an ad for ABC
Deny that part of his job includes selling email lists for money
Offer me money. (He kind of hinted that I don't have the clout.)

He called me Sam. That's weird. I haven't exactly hidden my true Jordon Davis identity.

He also called the act of matching bloggers to his customers, "connecting them with opportunities." That is some serious corporate-speak right there.

In any case: Scott Lyon, I accept your apology. I understand that we live in the real world. I am glad you are good at your job.

And I have just a couple questions:

This is Scott. And I'm not lyon.

What exactly is ABC's deal with Technorati? What services is Technorati contracted to provide? Did ABC pay a flat fee, or is there some scale for payment based on your success? Are there different packages and levels of exposure that marketers can buy from Technorati

It would be absolutely great if you could forward me a copy of Technorati's contract with ABC. If not that, would you please send your blank form contract? If you won't, would you please explain exactly who in your company refused the request - legal, VP of sales, etc.?

And if you had time for a quick phone interview about yourself and how you came to your current job, that would be amazing as well. My only goal is to learn how modern marketing works. And you are on the cutting edge.

Last, just as a general warning to anyone who might read this. Please be careful what you write. If Scott Lyon saw this blog, he's watching the entire internet.

Imagine how many times he's seen David After Dentist.

Finding Charlie's Angels

2011-05-17T20:32:00.001-04:00

In a previous post, I looked at some of the social media marketing for the Breakstone's brand. Social media marketing, in general, is just sad. It never occurred to me that I would get a chance to become part of the sadness.

You ask for miracles, I give you ABC.

Today, I got an email titled "Blogger Outreach" from Technorati. It's nice of them, I thought, to keep in touch with their 30,242nd ranked blog. (I'm 3,949th in Entertainment, so fingers crossed.)

This is pretty accurate.

The email, however was on behalf of ABC. The real ABC. It said:

We have a first look at ABC's newly announced dramas, Once Upon a Time and Charlie's Angels, just for Technorati blogger partners!

Let's see their blog tackle sour cream.

ABC just announced this morning that they will be picking up Charlie's Angels, a big, loud, fun take on the 1970's smash hit series, and Once Upon A Time, a modern day fairytale from two of Lost's master storytellers for their fall line up. They wanted to provide our entertainment bloggers with exclusive videos for you to report on and discuss the shows and stars.

Download the Once Upon A Time video now at: Once Upon A Time

Download the Charlie's Angels video now at: Charlie's Angels

Get More Exposure To Your Blog Via ABC

Once you've published your post, please submit your post at: http://bit.ly/kYSnMG

We will send all submitted posts to ABC to review and potentially be included in a widely-released Technorati conversational media ad (CMAD) slated to receive over 11 million impressions to Entertainment related sites across our advertising network. (View examples at http://technoratimedia.com/portfolio).

It's great additional exposure for your blog and writing!

The official Once Upon a Time and Charlie's Angels press releases follow for more details and information on the series.

Looking forward to reading your posts about Once Upon A Time and Charlie's Angels!

Scott Lyon
Blogger Outreach Manager
Technorati Media

Holy heck!

First of all, I disabled the links to the videos. I didn't want to give the network any free help with their search engine rankings. Don't be too disturbed. The links are NOT to the full pilot episodes, but just to two minute commercials. They're both available on YouTube if you have to see them. Incidentally, I was promised that these were "exclusive videos." They're exclusive to everyone with an internet connection.

But let's look at what really happened. ABC paid Technorati for access to its email list. They did give me a chance to unsubscribe, but look how Technorati phrases it:

If you do not want to receive any more newsletters, visit here to unsubscribe. [link disabled]

Technorati calls this a newsletter. To me, it looks like an ad.

So, ABC paid Technorati real money. What are they offering to pay me?

Exposure for my blog.
A chance to have my quote included in an internet ad.
Great additional exposure for my blog and my writing.

That's fine. I like exposure. And I like writing. But what do I have to do to get the "exposure" and the "additional exposure"? Can I say bad things about the shows?

ABC hopes I don't. In fact, they do more than hope. Included in the email were long and short descriptions of the shows with cast lists and producer credits. Here's the one for Once Upon A Time.

Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz (Lost, Tron: Legacy) invite you to a bold new vision of the world where fairytales and the modern day are about to collide.

Just click [ctrl}[+] if you want to read
their nonsense. Otherwise, enjoy this
picture of Jennifer Morrison.

Anna Swan (Jennifer Morrison) knows how to take care of herself. She's a 28-year old bail bonds collector who's been on her own ever since she was abandoned as a baby. But when the son she gave up years ago finds her, everything will change. Henry (Jared Gilmore) is 10 years old now and in desperate need of Anna's help. Henry believes that Anna actually comes from an alternate world... and is Prince Charming (Josh Dallas) and Snow White's (Ginnifer Goodwin) missing daughter. According to his book of fairytales, they sent her away to protect her from the Evil Queen's (Lana Parilla) curse, which trapped the fairytale world forever, frozen in time. Of course Anna doesn't believe a word, but when she brings Henry back to Storybrooke, she
finds herself drawn to this unusual boy and his strange New England town. Concerned for Henry, she decides to stay for a while, but she soon suspects that Storybrooke is more than it seems. It's a place where magic has been forgotten, but is still powerfully close... where fairytale characters are alive, even though they don't remember who they once were--including the Evil Queen who is now Henry's foster mother. The epic battle for the future of all worlds is beginning, but for good to win, Anna will have to accept her destiny and fight like hell.

Brace yourself for a modern fable with thrilling twists and hints of darkness. Brimming with wonder, and filled with the magic of our most beloved fairytales, Once Upon A Time is a fitting follow up to Lost from two master storytellers.

SHORT:

Welcome to a world where fairytales are real. Anna Swan is like any other 28 year old, until she discovers she's a lost princess destined to save her world from darkness. Experience the passion project of executive producers/creators Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz (Lost, Tron). Once Upon A Time is a thrilling twist of our most beloved stories.

CAST
Robert Carlyle - Rumplestiltskin
Josh Dallas - Prince Charming/John Doe
James Dornan
Jared Gilmore - Henry
Ginnifer Goodwin - Snow White/Sister Mary Margret Blanchard
Jennifer Morrison - Emma Swan
Lana Parilla - Evil Queen/Regina
Raphael Sbarge - Archie/Jiminy Cricket

So, ABC wants me to blog about their shows and gives me the words I should say to do it. For free. Because that's the price the market has set for access to my audience.

And the hurtful thing is that nobody at any stage thought to actually look at my blog, or even to question why I checked the "Television" box when describing my site on Technorati. If they had, they'd have noticed that Finding Sam Breakstone is about stripping away the marketing and the branding from the products being sold. It's just not the perfect fit for ABC's needs. But since the marginal cost of the email to me was free, they weren't actually releasing any exclusive content, and they weren't obligating themselves to listen to me, there was no reason to even think about such things.

Last, allow me to mention Scott Lyon. He's the Technorati employee who describes himself as the "Blogger Outreach Manager." He is not. He's a marketer. "Outreach" means "selling your email address for money which we keep." It doesn't make him bad. It's how the world works. He has a list of tech-savvy people and others will pay money for it.

The question is: How many bloggers will take ABC up on their offer? How many will repeat ABC's marketing department's words as their own? And how many will be compensated fairly for it?

Now back to looking for Sam Breakstone.

----------------

P.S. Once Upon A Time looks horrible. I didn't watch Charlie's Angels, but it stars Minka Kelly, so it's probably great.

P.P.S. Television Without Pity says they're both terrible.

Finding More Sam Breakstones

2011-05-16T23:23:00.002-04:00

Previously on Finding Sam Breakstone, we had examined three candidates and looked at a picture of Dianna Agron from Glee. And now the thrilling conclusion:

Babe Ruth died in 1948, too.
Did Breakstone ever see him play?
How the hell should I know?

Sam Breakstone #4 was born in 1903 in New York City and died in 1948 in New York City. His father, Jacob, was born in Poland in 1864. There are no records of this Jacob Breakstone's family. Sam #4 never married and had no children. Records for his four siblings are incomplete.

Is this our Sam Breakstone?

Pros:

He lived his life in New York City
And that's about it.

Cons:

He doesn't seem to be related to the rest of the family.
His birth in 1903 is too late to have had a meaningful impact on the beginnings of the Breakstone Bros. brand.
Dying at only 45, he seems to have passed too young to have made a lasting impact on the history of value-added dairy.

Chance of being our Sam Breakstone: 0.031%

He missed out on inventing sour cream, but he got to
see the trial of Leopold and Loeb. So ... fair trade, I guess.

Samuel Breakstone #5 was born in Poland in 1874. His father Selig, though, was a Lithuanian Breakstone. In fact, Selig was the younger brother of Nisaniel. That may not mean much to you, but that makes this Samuel Breakstone the first cousin of Breakstone Bros. founders, Joseph and Isaac. Samuel emigrated in 1885, at the age of 11, although it's unknown who took him over. By 1891, he was in Chicago. He married in Chicago in 1908 and died there in 1955.

Pros:

He's the first cousin of the founders of Breakstone's.
It is almost certain that Sam #5 worked for his cousin's growing businesses as a young teen. Thy were notorious for hiring relatives.
Breakstone's did have products in Chicago by 1920.

Cons:

Sam left New York before the Breakstone Bros. started distributing dairy.
He left for Chicago almost thirty years before Breakstone's had products there.
Even then, Breakstone's contracted with existing dairies to make their products, and did not have their own factory in the midwest.

This Sam may have worked in the dry goods shops of his cousins. He may even have distributed Breakstone's in the midwest. But he didn't create any recipes or products.

Chance of being our Sam Breakstone: 17.5%

And now, for the sake of completeness,

Also born in 1987 - Ellen Page.
So, yeah, she's pretty young.

Sam Breakstone #6 was born Samantha Allyne Breakstone in 1987. Not 1887 ... 1987. She's currently 24 and in law school and I seriously think this is her. She is the daughter of Jay Breakstone, son of Allen, son of Bernard, son of Hyman, son of Abraham, who was brother of Nisaniel, the father of Joseph and Isaac. That makes her the 1st cousin, four times removed, from the founders of Breakstone Bros.

Pros:

Her great-great-great-great grandfather was just the regular grandfather of Joe and Isaac Breakstone.
How cool is that?

Cons:

She was born long after the Sam Breakstone commercials ended.
She didn't return my Facebook friend request.

Chance of being our Sam Breakstone: 0.0% but close to 3,500% in our hearts.

We've gone through six Sam Breakstones so far. Only two remain. Subscribe to the RSS feed, get the emails, listen over short-wave, just stay tuned for tomorrow's thrilling conclusion which I realize I promised you at the top of this article but it turns out I was just stringing things along!