Taking Claims With a Grain of (Bacon) Salt

Posted By elissa on Jan 9, 2011 | 2 comments

I’d like to introduce you to three rather… unique food products:

1. “Monkey Milk”
2. “Bacon Baby Infant Formula”
3. Canned Unicorn Meat

Now, in case you haven’t guessed by now (#3 is an especially obvious clue), all three products were fakes – they never existed outside of the imaginations of the merry pranksters who invented and publicized them. Nonetheless, they attracted the attention of quite a few people who, for various reason(s), assumed they were legit products and acted accordingly.

In other words, our (collective) penchant for taking non-credible claims at face value is the real story behind these faux-product stories.

Let’s start with “Monkey Milk”…

One of my brothers was working with me at the paper and he was very fond of Humbug as an art form… So one week when we had some space to fill he came up with the idea for Monkey Milk. He wrote the copy while our Graphic Designer and I came up with a logo and the ad.

We ran the ad and enjoyed the response from friends especially some who worked at some of the local health food stores. With their help we widened the believability of the product. We made hanging cards to place in store refrigerated selves saying “Sorry, the last bottle of Monkey Milk has been sold. A fresh shipment is on order” and using an ad trade with a local screen printer we made Monkey Milk T-shirts to put up for sale at shops around town and to pass out for folks to wear.

Folks started asking for it at the stores only to be told that the last bottle had been sold and that another order was on the way. Folks started calling the paper trying to find out how they could get in contact with The Monkey Ranch. These calls were always routed to my brother who would explain the that ads and payment arrived from a PO Box in Atlanta and we did not know how to get in touch with The Monkey Ranch…

A few months later my brother and I were at a local bar having a drink when the latest issue of the paper was being looked over by a group of folks at a nearby table. A woman at the table suddenly went “Yuck. Monkey Milk. That’s disgusting”. We had heard that kind of reaction before, but then a fella at the table spoke up and told her that he had had it before and that it wasn’t disgusting at all. In fact, he said it tasted great. As he promoted the virtues of Monkey Milk somebody else at the table jumped to his support and claimed that he too had it before and that it was OK. As the group decided that they all had to try it, we toasted each other to a job well done while trying to keep our laughter in check.

So no one ever saw a bottle of the stuff… yet “Monkey Milk” seemed real. After all, there were printed ads for it, not to mention store signs and t-shirts. Some people thought the concept was disgusting, but no one apparently questioned, let alone challenged, its existence. And that’s the real poser, since it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why “Monkey Milk” could never exist as a commercial product. Here are a few reasons off the top of my head:

• Primates (including humans) don’t produce enough surplus milk to make commercial exploitation feasible.
• Monkeys are extremely expensive to house, feed and maintain, let alone breed for milking purposes… and the bigger they are, the more expensive this would get.
• Monkeys are NOT docile creatures who would calmly submit to the kind of daily handling milking would require. And certain species are bigger, stronger and potentially more aggressive than humans – which would make “monkey wrangling” a pretty dangerous job.
• Monkeys carry endogenous viruses (such as herpes B) which can infect people – thus, monkey milk would be a potential vector for disease transmission. As such, it would have to be subjected to extensive research and safety testing before it could legally be brought to market.

There was no way for “Monkey Milk” to be a legit product, yet people believed otherwise, to the point that some (not in on the joke) actually claimed to have tried – and liked – it (and if that doesn’t make you reconsider product testimonials you’ve seen, I don’t know what will).

Moving on… to “Bacon Baby Infant Formula.” Admittedly, I “get” why some people fell for this one, as it was the brainchild (no pun intended) of the folks at J & D Foods, whose motto is “Everything Should Taste Like Bacon.” Although the company’s signature products – Bacon Salt and “Baconnaise” – are unremarkable, some of J & D’s other creations (like the short-lived bacon-flavored Jones Soda) are definitely out there.

Still, how can you read an announcement like this – posted just before April 1, no less – and not recognize that the company had its tongue planted firmly in its cheek?

This got our brains spinning. What about using bacon (which is 65% fat) to deliver these proteins and fats? we thought. Yet babies are not able to consume this most delicious of meats because they lack teeth and digestive systems that can break down solid foods.

So we consulted with pediatricians and began to experiment with drying and grinding bacon into a fine powder, then applying a patent-pending process to concentrate this powder into the most essential nutrients and ingredients for brain development. This potential infant superfood was then added to a test subject’s infant formula.

The results were absolutely impressive.  By the age of 4 months, our test subject started to exhibit some amazing abilities including walking and talking. By 6 months of age, she could read and memorize her early stage children’s books and showed an extreme level of coordination and balance – so much so that she was enrolled in gymnastics and ballet with children 5 years older than she was! At two years old, she read her first 300 page book, memorized the Declaration of Independence and (this is absolutely true) began composing her first symphony.

Seriously, people were taken in by this (like these folks here, here, here and here), so the company was forced to pull the plug on the joke within a few short days…

We would, however, like to apologize to members of the media who thought this was a real story. This included parenting magazines, a major news service and one very embarrassed reporter who called us asking for a comment for a childhood obesity story she was working on for a major network. We will work hard to regain your trust – and then will likely destroy that trust again next April.

I can only hazard a guess as to why so many failed to grasp that “Bacon Baby” formula was a joke. I imagine that they just didn’t read the full “product description” and reacted to the notion of bacon baby formula. I mean, c’mon… tales of walking/talking 4 month olds and two year olds reading 300 page books were dead giveaways. Anyone reading that far would get it immediately, so not-reading is really the only explanation that makes sense.

I say this because it’s too easy to assume that the folks who fell for these hoaxes were just dumb. This explanation fails because smart people can miss these things, too. 

Which brings us to fake #3: Canned Unicorn Meat.

Canned Unicorn Meat was a fake product created by the good folks at “ThinkGeek,” so it’s only fair to let them tell the story:

Recently we got the best-ever cease and desist letter. We’re no stranger to the genre, so what could possibly make this one stand out from the rest?

First, it’s 12 pages long and very well-researched (except on one point); it even includes screengrabs of the offending item from our site. And we know they’re not messing around because they invested in the best and brightest legal minds.

But what makes this cease and desist so very, very special is that it’s for a fake product we launched for April Fool’s day… Canned Unicorn Meat.

The very special but also very real letter is from the National Pork Board, who claims we’re infringing on the slogan “The Other White Meat”…

The press release ThinkGeek published in response to the Pork Board is a scream. It obviously never occurred to the suits that the whole thing was a parody – which meant ThinkGeek’s use of the “Other White Meat” slogan was legally protected.

Funny stuff, eh?

Indeed yes… but there’s a sting in these tales, so to speak. Sure, the claims made for these products  – like the products themselves – were silly… but in many ways, they weren’t that different than the claims made for actual products on the market… the same tactics used to sell fake products are also used to sell real ones. This is particularly true when it comes to the over-the-top claims made for weight loss, bodybuilding and health supplements, that are long on hype and hope and short on factual information. This is why people need to be more skeptical, and to take ALL supp product advertising claims with a grain of salt (bacon or otherwise). Claims that sound solid often turn out to be quite hollow, if you take the time to think them through.