Vox Claims Nabisco's New Animal Crackers Box Ignores 'Ethics, Exploitation and Corporate Greed'

Brittany M. Hughes | August 29, 2018
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Vox is getting ripped apart online for a new full-length article they published decrying Nabisco’s continued overlooking of the pitfalls of exploitation and corporate greed on their newly-redesigned Animal Crackers’ packaging.

Did you get all that? Yeah, well, neither did any one else.

Since it’s my job to thumb through left-wing nonsense and make sense of it for my readers, I’ll save you the time it takes to read this garbage and sum up: the writer argues that Mondelez, Nabisco’s parent company, was essentially virtue-signaling when it recently agreed to change its famous 100-year-old artwork on the Barnum’s Animals Crackers box. (Remember all those cartoon animals sitting in cages like at a circus? They’re free to roam around the fictional savanna now like a motley crew of wildlife looking to settle a score with a particular American dentist.) 

In her long-winded dissertation, Daisy Alioto argues Mondelez was willing to throw the original box’s designer, Sydney S. Stern – an artist who was also Alioto’s great-great uncle – under the bus to appease PETA’s animal rights complaints while “[doing] little to dismantle the elements of capitalism that exploit animals, people, and the environment.” 

The only reason her uncle even designed the box in the first place, Alioto claims, is because he was a poor man struggling to take care of his children after his wife died, and ended up taking a job at Nabisco to make ends meet. Forced to dance for his corporate puppet masters, Stern designed the now-iconic original Animal Crackers box in the 1920s – “art” Alioto says the company is more than willing to blame for outdated values about animals while ignoring the underlying corporate greed that oppressed families like Stern’s in the first place. (She then somehow ties in a controversial work of modern art objectifying a young teenage girl.)

Now, it’s fine for people to be concerned about animal welfare. It’s also fine for someone to be peeved when their long-dead predecessor’s iconic 100-year-old drawing gets blamed for the oppression of cartoon wildlife. I would be, too.

But at the end of the day, whether you're a hemp-wearing, Bernie-worshipping socialist or a corporate CEO in a diamond-studded suit doing backstrokes in a pool full of Benjamins, it’s a freaking box of animal crackers.

Kids bite their heads off and think it’s hilarious. Hundreds of them get swept up off countless preschool classroom and daycare floors every day. Infants gum them into paste and leave them in mushy smears down the side of their high chair at Applebee’s. Parents find dusty piles of them under couches and refrigerators on moving day. That’s the extent of any normal person’s knowledge of or concern for animal crackers – whether they have enough of them in their purse to hold their toddler over until naptime so they can finally have a solid 20-minute run at Target.

But to those on the far-left desperate to out-intellect their own activists, these simple, semi-animal-shaped wafers have somehow become the epicenter of a national debate on the convergence of animal welfare, socioeconomic equality and the fundamental role of art.

And this is why we can’t have nice things.

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