DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.11| HAGEMANN, WAGNER: LUNCHABLES_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 77 the question he asks his mother upon looking into the brown paper bag,“Are you mad at me?”, indicates that conflicts within the family may be acted out ma­nipulatively by rationing out disliked foods. Both the probably problematic family relationships and the nagging son are, however, presented as ironic and comedic by the female voice-over narrator and the whole setup of the spot. The status of‘successful son’ and‘good mother’ achieved in the Lunchables ad by buying and con­suming the advertised product points to the func­tion of characters appearing in(food) commercials to serve as role models for the recipients in making their choices as buyers and consumers. This becomes evident in another commercial from the 1990s, this time for the Ferrero brand’s Kinder Surprise. In just a few quick shots, interactions within a well-off sub­urban family are presented as particularly witty, cre­ative, and harmonious. 13 When the daughter asks her mother, who is about to go grocery shopping in her BMW convertible, to bring her“something exciting, something to play with, and chocolate!”, the son, overhearing her, takes the opportunity to offer him­self as a shopping consultant who recommends buy­ing Kinder Surprise to his mother on the way to the supermarket. The daughter’s wish for excitement, a plaything, and chocolate will be fulfilled, as is shown in three inserts, by buying Kinder Surprise, which con­sists of a small toy that cannot be seen beforehand placed inside a plastic capsule placed inside a choc­olate egg. While in the Lunchables commercial, it is the mother who, from off-camera, presents the solu­tion to the food task posed to her, here, it is the son who even collects a fee for his advice in the form of his own Kinder Surprise. To satisfy children’s needs and wants in relationships of feeding and upbring­ing and to achieve positions idealised in society and neoliberalism, like that of the smart businessperson, which require resources that are basically finite and, depending on social class, differently available, like time, money, recognition, or health, both commercials offer an(ostensibly) efficient and timesaving solution that looks particularly attractive in view of custom­ers’ potentially scarce resources and is associated with a fantasised positive experience. This way, ads targeting conditions of precarity can recommend seemingly simple solutions without having to repre­sent, that is expressly address, those conditions. At the same time, questions about the complex condi­tions for‘success’ in parent-child relationships or for attaining prestigious social positions are answered in an under-complex way that potentially undermines parental care work in that the‘knowledge’ provided consists, first and foremost, of specific, recommend­ed consumer decisions. Our assumption is that food advertisemens are im­portant producers of meaning, charging foods, their purchasing, provision, and consumption with seman­tic significance and thereby implicitly addressing class relations. These meanings can be, and in fact are, received by customers, which is why we con­sider their analysis and discussion to be a resource for class-political self-empowerment. Specifically, in­terventions can start out from where food market­ing has informed food and nutrition-related speech, thinking, emotion, and action in the social or famil­ial milieus of one’s own childhood and youth and, for example, has promulgated variably applicable but also semantically diffuse‘valorising vocabulary’ like‘fresh’. 14 This, of course, first applies to products 13 To watch the ad on YouTube see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hjUVShDhCY&ab_channel=schollek(accessed 28 July 2023). 14 See, e.g., Erasco’s canned“noodle pot”(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtO2lNZPICE&ab_channel=VhsChorizo) or Dr. Oetker’s Die Ofenfrische frozen pizza(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1x6eG2CkfI&ab_channel=StephanCooper)(both accessed 28 July 2023). We know from our own experience the relevance of describing meals as‘fresh’ when served, regardless of how they were pre­pared. Beyond valorising the meal, the attribution of‘freshness’ can be understood as an act of symbolic‘refreshment’ of the social relations between the persons involved in the meal, e.g., mother and son. Depending on the context, though, it can also be indicative of feelings of shame on the part of the food-providing parent, if there is a sense that the meal prepared is not socially accepted.