Dramatized? Personified?

It was never cool when I was a kid to personify your foods. No faces on cakes, no building little stick men with the broccoli and baby carrots, peas for eyes. There were no raisin-ants crawling along my peanut butter-celery logs. These things just didn't happen and no, I still don't care for such tomfoolery.

Saw an ad on tv the other day. Some dieting cuisine frozen food selection company shows a couple of chefs working all non-chalant-like in the kitchen, claiming the company asked them to "spice things up a bit." There they are, throwin' spices and seasonings all over these great looking dishes frying up in what look like woks. It's rather convincing that they're especially using herbs and such pulled straight off the plants. Fresh. Good. Special, just for those dieting, frozen-dinner-eating couch potatoes stuck on channel 5 pre-dinner hour.

At the bottom of car ads, where they race along mountain roads filled with debris, expertly executing tight, fast maneuvers to avoid it all while staying on the road...in rain and sleet - well, they all have some fine print at the bottom in faint, washed out lettering, "Professional driver on a closed course. Do not attempt." We're all familiar.

I never expected to see such a disclaimer for a frozen food ad. Yep, there it was, same lettering style: "Dramatization."

So they're dramatizing the ad. Big deal, right? Here's the question of the day then - which part are they dramatizing? The chefs are not really chefs? I can deal with that. The food's not really food? I could likely handle that, too. I hear cereal companies use white glue for shooting box-front pictures of their products, simply for perfection's sake. That's alright. Or is it that they're dramatizing how the food is actually made?

Really, how does one dramatize food for a tv ad? Now, dramatizing an eggplant wrestling some mozzarella for the Firsties into the fry-vat might be entertaining. Might. Not likely, but it sure beats guessing about the "dramatization."

I don't like food. It's nothing new, not really, but factual none the less. I don't care how much they dramatize it. They can't be more catering than Mother was all those years, nor demanding enough to match or better Father. But I'll tell ya, seeing that there's actually a disclaimer on the food ads? That's a guaranteed deterrent.

How about you? Do you enjoy personified/dramatized foods?