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Worst Tagline Ever

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I know this latest wave of food-borne listeria is a tragic development that has taken lives and broken hearts. The situation is made slightly more awkward by the fact that primary agent of despair in this case is the cantaloupe, one of our funniest fruits.

You can get a debate on this, but in my view The Banana is (and always will be) the funniest fruit of all due to its prankish peel. The Kumquat comes in second on the strength of its unusual sound and spelling. And The Cantaloupe is third, partly because of that unexpected “u”, but also because it is firmly in the melon family, and all melons are comical.

They just are. If I have to explain it to you, you’ll never get it anyway, so what’s the use? Let’s just say that melons make people smile.

But one of the unfolding tragedies in this tale is the fate of the single melon producer responsible for the tainted fruit. Among other things, this story has given that company the worst possible advertising tagline, printed exactly this way in the Los Angeles Times:

“If it’s not Jensen Farms, it’s OK to eat,”
said Thomas R. Frieden, director of the CDC.

What a charming little jingle this would make.  Imagine being the marketing person who has to plan a comeback for Jensen Farms once this blows over. I recommend a re-branding that doesn’t include the name Jensen or the word cantaloupe. I would go for something that speaks to our greatest hopes and aspirations. Something optimistic and uplifting. How about “Stable Economy Melon Orchards”? Maybe not. At any rate, good luck to every Jensen family involved in agriculture, anywhere in the world.

When have you said ‘I think it’s something I ate’?

63 thoughts on “Worst Tagline Ever”

  1. Every year I do a Easter/Spring dinner for my best friend and her family. Teenager and I tend to pull out all the stops on this one w/ table decor and a fancy menu. This past year we made an Almond Joy cake… dark chocolate w/ coconut cream filling, milk chocolate icing and then lots and lots of fancy little paper flowers on florist wire; it looked like a beautiful little garden.

    By the next morning, I was pretty sick. At first I figured it was just a 24-hour bug but after a few days I decided to try the doctor. As we talked about my symptoms and when they started, I suddenly worried that maybe it was food poisoning. The teenager had not been sick, but she also had decided against cake at the last minute that night. And then it struck me that maybe I had poisoned my best friends as well! My doctor did not think it was food poisoning… just the flu, but the first thing I did when I got out to my car was call my friend. Everybody at her house was fine, thank goodness. So, it technically wasn’t anything I ate, but even after I started to feel better, I couldn’t bring myself to eat anymore of that cake!

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  3. When I can’t zip up my jeans. When I have a zit. When I need to pop a TUMS. When I vomit. Oh, wait … that’s when it’s something I drank.

    Good Morning everbuddy!!

    Melons always make me LOL, Dale. Except for JENSEN’S!!

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  4. Good morning to all,

    It might be something I drank. Maybe a little too much wine. It can be a little too much food right before bed. Too much food in my stomach at bed time is not a good thing. Otherwise, problems with what I eat are preaty rare.

    I live in a house where that is a lot attention paid to not eating bad food. My mother was a home economics major during a time when the danger from germs in food was a big part of that course of study. I am not the only one at my house who pays attention to potential problems from eating bad food. Every one of those news stories about bad food is closely followed around here, a little excessively some times, I think. I can’t remember having any problems with eating bad food.

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  5. The next morning after foolishly easting at Wall Drug 35 years ago. I have happily driven right by Wall every trip since, many such trips too. When I tired to talk to them about it, the cook drove me out of the business.

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    1. I remember now, that we used to make up Wall Drug bumper stickers after that. I am in too much pain this morning to type any more or be funny, so you can write them.

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      1. Clyde, I hope you get some relief from your pain soon. I haven’t seen any Wall Drug bumper stickers recently. I know that Wall Drug is still there because my wife stopped there this summer when on a vacation with my daughter and her children.

        Here’s a possible Wall Drug bumper sticker that might reflect your experience there:

        Visit Wall Drug for a Meal You Will Not Forget

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    2. Teenager and I stopped at Wall Drug this summer — been something I’ve wanted to do for years now. Unfortunately, the teenager had much higher expectations of what Wall Drug would be; she was definitely underwhelmed. It was exactly what I expected except the doughnuts were better than I was anticipating.

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  6. Off topic, but one of my fondest memories of The Morning Show involved Dr. Kyle growing cantaloupes with the DNA of cocker spaniels. The problem being that cantaloupes just sit in refrigerators until they go bad. With the DNA of a cocker spaniel, the cantaloupes would jump out of the refrigerators when you got home and hop around your legs, reminding you that they need to be eaten. Dale asked about those annoying seeds and Dr. Kyle said that he was working on replacing them with raspberry filling. As if that ad lib didn’t put Dr. Kyle off his game, Dale then asked if people wouldn’t be horrified to slice into a cantaloupe that was acting just like a cocker spaniel. There was a very obvious couple of seconds of silence and then Dr. Kyle said that he was working on that while barely stifling outright laughter. Obviously, Dale went just a bit off-script and caught Dr. Kyle off guard. Listening to it, I nearly drove into the ditch, I was laughing so hard.

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  8. Morning–

    Once in the spring after one of the kids’ soccer games. Grabbed a quick lunch with the family and then I was home and out in the field when… illness struck. Finished what I was doing, drove home (really fast! For a tractor…) and got sick. But then I felt better. Went back out and planted corn.

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  9. My husband is convinced he needs more vegetables than other people and swears he can feel the nutrients course through his body when he eats them. I am much healthier than he is when it comes to warding off bugs and viruses and I eat far fewer veggies than he does. It drives him crazy.

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  10. Most recent incident involved a slice of lemon meringue pie – or at least that’s my best guess. Went out to dinner with the family and that night started to feel a bit queasy. No one else did, just me. In the wee hours it became clear that I was not at all well. I am usually the healthiest in our house, and very rarely am reduced to not leaving my bed. Daughter was greatly concerned – she is not used to Mom not being up and about. In about 24 hours my body had done an excellent job of purging any potential sources for gut germs. At the time I didn’t associate it with the pie – I have had the same pie before and since at the same restaurant without incident. A couple weeks later there was an article in the paper about food service egg products as the traced source of some food borne illnesses. Aha, says Husband, and shares this with me – aha, says I, that explains why only I got sick (I was the only one to eat lemon meringue pie that night). Not exactly a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes, but it was comforting to know it was most likely a one-off incident with a single ingredient – not due to bad cooking practices or unclean conditions in the kitchen itself.

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      2. had an “a” amputated – was responding from work and had to remove all my cookies and such for some testing I was doing…lost the “a” in translation, I guess…

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  11. Three years ago, in extreme financial desperation, I opened my home to boarders. Specifically, I shared my home with Elizabeth and Klaus, a married couple (well, sort of . . . she kept running away, but would come back). The experiment promised many benefits at first, but then I encountered Elizabeth’s neuroses (one by one by one by one) until she and I couldn’t stand to be in the same room.

    She was such a clean freak that she would unpack my bags of recycling containers and scrub each can or bottle with hot water and soap, although I had already rinsed them thoroughly. Then she’d dry the cans and bottles in an ostentatious display of her contempt for my standards. When I once offered to share some soup I’d made, Elizabeth told me that I was so dirty she would not eat any food I’d touched.

    To answer Dale’s question: I have eaten mostly my own cooking for thirty years, and I have yet to make myself sick. After a few months of having boarders in my home I sure wished I could have served Elizabeth something vile enough to confirm her low opinion of me! But not really . . . the lady was an emotional time bomb held together with chewing gum and Post-It notes. The really really nice thing about her is that she’s gone.

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  12. Every time I ate at the Chinese restaurant, Shanghai, in Copenhagen, I’d have to take a taxi home because I’d have such pain in my lower back that I’d barely be able to walk. Their food was delicious, so I kept going back.I it took me years to make the connection between MSG in their food and my back problem.

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    1. Good sleuthing. I’ve got a Chinese cookbook–the first cookbook I ever bought–that starts almost every recipe with MSG. That was the norm several decades ago.

      The only two times I’ve been food poisoned recently was after eating at my favorite restaurant. And it is SUCH a favorite, that I will continue to go there and refuse to name it here in the annals of shame. The food is so good I hardly mind a bit of tummy trouble later!

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  13. I must have a cast-iron stomach. The only illness I can recall from taking in any food or drink has had to do with quantity, not quality, as mentioned above. My dad had stomach ulcers, though, and my sister has digestive problems… most of these are/were stress related, though.

    I wish I could remember as well as tgith some more of Dr. Kyle’s creations! Dale – do you have any of those old scripts around? He always brought out something excellent around Halloween…

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  14. Once when daughter was about 2 we were on a vacation in Wisconsin and we stayed at Siebkens Resort on Elkhart Lake. Siebkens is an old and gracious hotel and pretty fancy. We had just arrived and it had been a hot, long drive with many stops during which the car got really hot inside. My daughter had a sippy cup full of orange juice that we sort of forgot about and left in the car during our stops. While we were checking into the hotel our daughter, sippy cup in hand, hurled all over the lobby. I checked the sippy cup and found that the orange juice had spoiled. She was fine after voiding in the lobby, but talk about mother guilt!

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    1. I should add that my sister-in-law was more aghast that our daughter had vomited in Siebkens lobby than the fact that she had consumed rotten orange juice.

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    2. It’s amazing how fast and violently the body reacts to such things.

      Many years ago, sometime close to Halloween, we were carving pumpkins with a couple of friends at their house. When we finished we had lobster for dinner. Husband’s lobster apparently was tainted somehow. Within minutes of ingesting it, he was violently ill. Like your daughter, he was fine once he got it all out of his system, but he’s still leery about eating lobster.

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      1. I had the same problem with beer once…..
        Oh. And champagne once too. I don’t drink champagne anymore but I think our record still stands!

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      2. Eating lobster, cooked or plain, is only flirting with ptomaine,
        While an oyster often has a lot to say.
        And those clams we eat in chowder make the angels sing the louder
        For they know that they’ll be with us right away.

        From Some Little Bug, Sally Rogers, wasn’t it?

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  15. My Pain: Biking and relaxation exercises and Excedrin and time have given me some relief.
    The topic: my wife who lists Colitis as one of her seven major health issues, could answer this question by the hundredfold, if she could remember them all, some very memorable [I need a word that says “memorable” in a bad way like “infamous” says “famous” in a bad way].
    The only tale I will tell on her: I grew up overfed vegetable beef soup that was [memorable in a bad way]. My mother would start a pot in October and keep it going to May–well, that is our family exaggeration with a kernel of truth. Sandy grew up on her grandmother’s wonderful vegetable beef soup. (She lived as much with her grandmother as her parents.) I have refused to eat THE STUFF for the 46 years of our marriage. I told her to go ahead and make it, but I would eat something else, like stale moldy maggoty bread. She never made it. Last week she was talking about THE STUFF, so I said I would make it for her. That maybe if I put barley in it, I could stomach it. She thought that sounded good. Made it as blandly as possible, which is the general rule in our house. Soup meat, soup bone, salt, pepper, bay leaf, barley, onions, celery, carrots–all things she eats all the time. I served it up. She loved it. I forced down half a bowl. She got sick, but it could have been something else. We had it the next day, or she had it. She got sick.
    So there? THE STUFF is poisonous, as I always knew.

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    1. Glad you’re feeling better, Clyde. So sorry that both you and your wife have so many chronic health issues. Must be a royal pain in the back seat.

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  16. No experience with food-borne illness that I can recall…I’ve had some familiarity with alcohol-borne illness, but since I’ve become better educated in proper beverage-handling techniques as an adult, that hasn’t been an issue lately. Truth.

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    1. Now that I work in the lab at the health department I hear about all sorts of foodborne illness. My favorite story is from the lab before I started here. There was a potluck and the leftovers still in their crockpots were pushed into the walk in cooler. The next day the crock pots were plugged in but due to yet another power failure the food was served lukewarm rather than hot. Everyone who ate got sick, but being good scientists they cultured themselves and published. There are still folks who avoid potlucks even tho the problem was with the leftovers.

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  17. hi All – we’re pretty much cast iron also. one holiday season though, long long ago, we came to visit family in MN. the night before we left for home in VA, we ate out. Steve had a Monte Cristo (or Monte Crisco, more aptly) sandwich at a nice place in south Mpls. i began to hear his stomach rumbling and complaining about 2 a.m. we left at dawn and the drive was punctuated with many stops along the way. never has another MC passed his lips.
    i also saw “flu” much in the population of old women – my Mom and her friends – children of the depression who wouldn’t think of wasting a morsel of food. everything leftover was placed on the counter overnight and then into the fridge for days and weeks. i’d try to clean her fridge and throw anything that was approaching unrecognizable “DON’T THROW THAT!!!! I JUST PUT IT IN THERE YESTERDAY!!!!”.but she and her friends often got the “flu.”
    i miss those skits too, thgith – i wish i had a better memory – or wait! could Dale release a CD??

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  18. After reading more of your stories, I do now remember getting sick as a young child on black licorice – haven’t been able to eat the stuff since, but red is fine. It’s too bad, since licorice root shows up in a lot of very good looking medicinal teas… I think a lot of things people get sick on as kids stay with them in life-long food preferences.

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      1. I’ve tried the teas, and there’s something in there that reminds me of black licorice. Hmmm, maybe it’s mental…

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  19. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    Well, I am now up and around post-punctuation procedure. Love that preparation phase, especially.

    I have only had one food borne illness that I remember–in 1978 a fish sandwich from the Grand Rapids Hardees, quickly snagged on my way out of town for a trip to the Cities to scope out Graduate School. And as others have pointed out, you get sick pretty fast. At the end of the 4 hour trip I was clearly very ill. ‘Nuff said about that.

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  20. WOT–

    (and I coulda swore I started this three hours ago but don’t see it now… hmmm, wonder what blog I did write it on?)
    PJ, did you ever meet a pathologist named Bernd Scheithauer? He was mostly at Mayo Rochester.

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  21. the guy who took me to china to learn how to import products ate only at mcdonalds and burger king when given the option. i asked why and he remembered the time he got so sick in hong kong he had to do the quick spins for hours to keep the proper end toward the bowl. it was an alrternating thing. i asked him what he are and he said it was mcdonalds. then why do you now only want to eat at mcdonalds? he said it scared him to death that if it coud be that dangerous to eat mcdonalds where they have health standards to look to , that he didn’t want to think about some of those chinese kitchens.
    i tend to go the other way and while i travel i always look to introdce the local bacteria to my system with the logic that it is like the flu shot. a little gives you resistance to havoc being raised later. ice cubes and brushing your teeth are two great ways to get the bacteria from the water without drinking a glass of tap water in china or indonesia. or even europe. it does get you via the expresso in italy, i have a problem with digestion from the time i blew an ulcer and the snipped the nerve endings to stop acid production ( found out that was a stupid idea but it was all the rage in mid 80’s) i would eat. blow up big as a balloon and need a nap to get things digesting properly and then be able to continue on. now that happens if i am drinking or if it is a fried food or a super leafy meal. i did call the restraunt yesterday morning after my morning meal which had included cantalope and i told them i heard about it and the fact that i felt terrible at the moment concerned me. h wasnt te said the reaction to the bad melon would take longer so if i felt like crap from something it likelywasn’t the melon. im still here so they were right

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    1. The news reports say the incubation period for listeria can be a month or more, so we will check on you around Halloween just to make sure.

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      3. Actually I respect the guts and luck of it all–a mercantile empire in the Badlands.
        And always remember H. L. Mencken “Nobody went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”
        I think it is a miracle how seldom food-borne illness occurs in the food and restaurant industry.

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  23. I respect Wall Drug too. Shame on Sherrilee for making me say that! Who’dathunk free icewater would take off like that!

    Your typing is flawless tonight, C. Glad you got to feeling better.

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  24. WWOT But stumble on this quote, which has so many layers of irony in it considering who said it and how he ran his life:
    “A woman can take care of the family. It takes a man to provide structure, to provide stability.”
    Tom DeLay
    FUNNY.

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