DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.11| HAGEMANN, WAGNER: LUNCHABLES_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 76 vertising) and money(paid for the advertised prod­uct). The female voice-over says,“Making a school lunch sandwich every day that children like, that’s hard, even for the best of mothers. Not an easy task, really.” The text opens up the range of meaning of the domestic crisis shown to include problems faced by mothers in less privileged circumstances: lack of resources, time stress, multiple workloads, and psy­chological pressure, among other things, can make it difficult to provide one’s child with a balanced and appetising, socially accepted meal every day. Fitting­ly, what is shown on the image level omits the two most important parameters needed to assess the child’s disappointment: apart from a brief partial shot of her upper body, we are neither shown the mother nor what the snack actually consists of. In the two following scenes, which again show the boy tak­ing an unhappy look into a typical German lunchbox, while the father, being the‘good’ parent who gets a goodbye smile from his son, is leaving the house in a suit and a sibling comes running from the garden, wet from the rain, we do not see what exactly annoys the boy. Imagining what the probably‘boring’ school snack is that is not to the child’s liking is left to the viewer, as is the fleshing out of the mother as a per­son with a body and a psyche. Introduced by“Luckily, there are now the new Kraft Lunchables”, the solu­tion offered shows the child taking much delight in a concrete product. Now he looks straight into the camera, which puts us as observers of the scene in the position of the‘good mother’ who, for whatever reason, has turned her role as a provider of a‘good’ school lunch into a consumer decision, hands over the purchased product to her child without further ado, and gets a“Thank you, Mummy!” in reward. The boy leaves the house with a quick buoyant stride to the same cheerful bouncing sound that accompanies the stacking and unstacking of crackers and slices of cheese and ham shown before as a fun expression of childlike individuality. In the background we see the kitchen table, familiar from the other scenes, now for the first time set for a meal and associating the child’s being fed potentially questionable instant food with reminiscences of family dinners, recontextualising it as‘loving’,‘homemade’, and‘motherly’. With, for the first time, no other family member(dog, father, sib­ling) in the picture, the intimacy of the mother-son relationship is maximised. In this visual enactment, the happy and well-cared-for child as the presumed objective of maternal care work represents the most important part of a repaired relationship. Outwardly, the problem here was a gustatory miscommunica­tion, though, given the logic of the product, lack of time and money would have been a much more like­ly cause, and one that diegetically calls for the qua­si-elimination of the mother, who, in some abysmal way, seems to be the real problem here, since she apparently, for whatever reason, is unable to satis­factorily fulfil, with her competences and resources, the role of caring provider. We also learn that the ingestion of turrets of fatty salty bites promises to lead to good school performance and a high social standing among classmates, although the greedy looks of the other children, who apparently still are equipped with‘ordinary’ school meals, remain some­what ambivalent, some of them watching the boy and some the food. The buying decision thus also holds a promise of social advancement along classical mid­dle-class narratives of education and social prestige. It should only be noted, though, that the commercial follows obvious models from a US context. One ad in particular is identical in setting to the last detail of the family constellation, 12 but at the same time has, first, stronger references to probable food insecurity in the household shown(“Isn’t this your doggy bag from last night?”) and second, a son who more open­ly complains about perceived mistreatment by being given what he sees as an inappropriate lunch packet than his mutely frustrated German counterpart. Also, 12 To watch the ad on YouTube see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86Dk1I9cRmY#t=01m52s(accessed 28 July 2023).