The Tease of Things I Don't Need

What's Eating You?

I'm not a big fan of yogurt. Intentionally ingesting bacteria, much less in some culture medium that tries to deliver taste elements of dairy and a lemony acidity that tells me something's gone off and is no longer safe to eat, isn't high on my list of activities. That inappropriate combination of flavors is a big part of why (East) Indian food hasn't been a big hit with me. I don't even need the flies to scare me off.

(Yes, I know that some of what's sold as yogurt doesn't contain live cultures, but it's close enough.)

I wonder if whatever funky cheese and questionable dairy products in ancient times made for similarly off-putting flavor combinations leading to some of the original Jewish kosher laws, or if that was simply history's first recorded bit of OCD? Could it have just as easily have been "Thou shalt not allow thy string beans to toucheth thy mashed potatoes?"

Well, that's not what I'm here to write about today.

Among the commercials we're bombarded with are the second generation (at least) of commercials for DanActive -- apparently a drink so visually abhorrent that they dare only show it in opaque bottles -- a yogurt drink with live cultures, including a strain of bacteria they came up with, the "fancifully" named L. casei Immunitas™.

Much as with Monsanto and their genetically-engineered seeds, Dannon has patented a unique lifeform and is setting it loose in the bowels of its customers. How carefully it's been engineered so as not to persist into the larger environment and cross-culture is unknown, at least to us.

The first wave of commercials featured an unnaturally groomed family milling about the family breakfast table while an oblivious patriarch read the news of a health breakthrough available in only one product. Meanwhile, the creepy remainder of the family exchange sly, knowing smiles as they know that not only have their new prokaryotic overlords arrived, the rest of them have already accepted them into their bodies. The teenage daughter at the table - who also appears to be the spokesperson for their new microscopic masters - is so heavily made up in pancake that her face borders on being a mask. Are those even the eyes of a human being regarding her "father" with such sinister glee?

It all reminds me of a minor but marginally entertaining film from 1985: The Stuff.

This was something Michael Moriarity starred in, hitting theaters the same year that he was in Pale Rider. Chances are we can guess which film he'd want to highlight on his resume for that year, but as I recall The Stuff was an entertaining enough B movie -- and how many times does one get to see Garrett Morris in a movie? Here he played "Chocolate Chip" Charlie W. Hobbs, who as best I recall was on the same trail as the lead character because he was trying to figure out how tubs of a yogurt-like substance were proving so addictive that they were cutting deeply into his company's cookie sales.

In The Stuff we find out that the product - which was actually a colony of bacteria from somewhere deep beneath the Earth - had been digested by some miners who find it bubbling up through a crack in the ground, who then became hosts for the colony and went about setting up to market itself.

The movie's tagline was "Are you eating it, or is it eating you?"

Tying this all together, oddly enough, with The Stand, which on a whim I started to reread the 1990 expanded version's re-release of a couple days ago, Crypt Leak concluded the initial email on this (thanks to him for digging a little into Dannon's plot) with lines one could easily give to a tall, gray-haired man with taped glasses to shout as he marched through the streets of a dying city:
"The Dannon Man is coming!
Beware the Fanciful Man!
The Danone Man is here!"

(...and he's coming for you, Larry!*)



* I know, I know, that bit's from the teleplay, but Larry does have some early fearful imaginings about the monster shouter.