DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.11| HAGEMANN, WAGNER: LUNCHABLES_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 76vertising) and money(paid for the advertised product). The female voice-over says,“Making a schoollunch sandwich every day that children like, that’shard, even for the best of mothers. Not an easy task,really.” The text opens up the range of meaning ofthe domestic crisis shown to include problems facedby mothers in less privileged circumstances: lack ofresources, time stress, multiple workloads, and psychological pressure, among other things, can makeit difficult to provide one’s child with a balanced andappetising, socially accepted meal every day. Fittingly, what is shown on the image level omits the twomost important parameters needed to assess thechild’s disappointment: apart from a brief partialshot of her upper body, we are neither shown themother nor what the snack actually consists of. In thetwo 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 agoodbye smile from his son, is leaving the house ina suit and a sibling comes running from the garden,wet from the rain, we do not see what exactly annoysthe boy. Imagining what the probably‘boring’ schoolsnack is that is not to the child’s liking is left to theviewer, 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 ina concrete product. Now he looks straight into thecamera, which puts us as observers of the scene inthe position of the‘good mother’ who, for whateverreason, has turned her role as a provider of a‘good’school lunch into a consumer decision, hands overthe purchased product to her child without furtherado, and gets a“Thank you, Mummy!” in reward. Theboy leaves the house with a quick buoyant stride tothe same cheerful bouncing sound that accompaniesthe stacking and unstacking of crackers and slices ofcheese and ham shown before as a fun expression ofchildlike individuality. In the background we see thekitchen table, familiar from the other scenes, now forthe first time set for a meal and associating the child’sbeing fed potentially questionable instant food withreminiscences of family dinners, recontextualising itas‘loving’,‘homemade’, and‘motherly’. With, for thefirst time, no other family member(dog, father, sibling) in the picture, the intimacy of the mother-sonrelationship is maximised. In this visual enactment,the happy and well-cared-for child as the presumedobjective of maternal care work represents the mostimportant part of a repaired relationship. Outwardly,the problem here was a gustatory miscommunication, though, given the logic of the product, lack oftime 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 abysmalway, seems to be the real problem here, since sheapparently, for whatever reason, is unable to satisfactorily fulfil, with her competences and resources,the role of caring provider. We also learn that theingestion of turrets of fatty salty bites promises tolead to good school performance and a high socialstanding among classmates, although the greedylooks of the other children, who apparently still areequipped with‘ordinary’ school meals, remain somewhat ambivalent, some of them watching the boy andsome the food. The buying decision thus also holds apromise of social advancement along classical middle-class narratives of education and social prestige.It should only be noted, though, that the commercialfollows obvious models from a US context. One ad inparticular is identical in setting to the last detail ofthe family constellation,12but at the same time has,first, stronger references to probable food insecurityin the household shown(“Isn’t this your doggy bagfrom last night?”) and second, a son who more openly complains about perceived mistreatment by beinggiven what he sees as an inappropriate lunch packetthan his mutely frustrated German counterpart. Also,12To watch the ad on YouTube see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86Dk1I9cRmY#t=01m52s(accessed 28 July 2023).
