@gwens*4saleitems* wrote:
Cream of Wheat is fine to list as long as it's not expired.
*They* already took "Uncle" off of Uncle Ben's products.
*They* removed the Indian maiden off of the Land-O-Lakes carton.
*They've* also rewrote the jingle for Rice-A-Roni, it's no longer referred to as the San Francisco treat.
I'm surprised that Betty Crocker is still a household name.
Strange, isn't it?
The man on the Cream of Wheat box was Frank L. White (1867-1938), a U.S. citizen who had immigrated here from Barbados, and was a master chef when he posed for the photo and became the "public face" of the cereal.
The man on Uncle Ben's Rice was Frank Brown, a Chicago maître d'hôtel in the 1940s.
They were real people. Maybe now, in this day and age, we think there are better images to use. Maybe those two men would even agree with that. But I hate to see them dismissed as mere cartoons when they surely did not see themselves that way.
The Land O'Lakes "Indian Maiden" -- Mia -- was redesigned in 1954 by Ojibwe artist Patrick DesJarlait, who fought hard to be recognized as a commercial and animation artist in a filed dominated by Whites. According to his daughter: "With the redesign, my father made Mia’s Native American connections more specific. He changed the beadwork designs on her dress by adding floral motifs that are common in Ojibwe art. He added two points of wooded shoreline to the lake that had often been depicted in the image’s background. It was a place any Red Lake [Minnesota] tribal citizen would recognize as the Narrows, where Lower Red Lake and Upper Red Lake meet." She compared removing the Indian Maiden to other theft of things meaningful to her people: "Mia, the stereotype that wasn’t, leaves behind a landscape voided of identity and history. For those of us who are American Indian, it’s a history that is all too familiar."
Evidently Betty Crocker is safe because she is White. After all, it is only images of non-Whites that are removed from commerce in the name of diversity.
As for Rice-a-Roni, it has always been manufactured in San Leandro, anyhow! (I think the company does not want the association with San Francisco, although there was official denial that such is the case.)
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