A man walks into a Super Bowl party with a supermarket plastic tray of raw vegetables. His hostess gives him a brief, polite smile, then just looks sad: vegetables? At a Super Bowl party? Why, sir, why must you ruin football and America with your hippie bullshit?
Does this sound like a funny ad? Something you’d like to see? Well, too bad, because a Twitter campaign led by the Center for Science in the Public Interest led Taco Bell to remove it from the air. You can still watch it, though:
The CSPI were worried that the ad would make people not want to eat vegetables. Um, no shit, guys, it’s supposed to make people want to eat Taco Bell, which is like the opposite of vegetables.
This seems kind of like a pussy move to us, blaming Taco Bell for people not wanting to eat healthier food. Because you know what really makes people not want to eat vegetables? The fact that many of them, including the makers of this ad, equate “vegetables at a party” with those disgusting plastic trays of raw, crappy broccoli and cauliflower and carrots. Why doesn’t the CSPI try to eliminate those? They’re probably just a sinister plot by the meat industry to make people hate vegetables, anyway.
Taco Bell’s worst crime with this ad isn’t that they’re necessarily anti-veg, it’s that they’re not setting up a fair fight. (I mean, and the ad is dumb, but whatever, all ads are dumb.) You know what we’d like to see instead? Dude walks in with a tray of potato tacos from El Atacor. Hostess looks intrigued. She sets the potato tacos down next to the Taco Bell tacos, near a hidden camera. If Taco Bell tacos are really considered superior, which is doubtful, go ahead and make fun of vegetarians, you and your Chihuahuas won. (Also, though, get new friends.) But that plastic tray of rubbery raw broccoli? Gandhi himself would pick Taco Bell over that.
