I got the usual evening phone call. My girlfriend was heading homeward and strongly encouraged a chivalrous display in the form of migrating my buttocks from the warmth of the couch to the chilled wind of the train station. Not really a tempting invitation, but I’ve found that should I refuse to walk her home, the outside cold finds a way of icing over the reception she’ll give me when my girlfriend walks through the front door.
Console off. Controller down. Shoes on. Zipper up. Briskly stroll to the train station with the vane hope that muttering expletives under my breath generates heat. It doesn’t. Normally I distract my shins from the biting cold by reading the posters next to the platform. They almost exclusively advertise some sexy new club night guaranteed to leave your serotonin depleted and the inside wall of your mouth gnawed to scar pulp.
This time it was different. I wasn’t greeted with posters of glittering cleavage, nor was a skinny girl gobbling a lollypop with all the sexual subtlety of a vagrant masturbating on a bus. No, this time there was a
Doctor on the poster. I could tell he was one by the stethoscope jauntily slung around his neck. In his hand, like some masculine version of Eve, he held aloft an apple. The second untempting invitation I had had that evening. What intrigued me was the message. The humble apple wasn’t a mere fruit; it was labelled a super food, otherwise known as nature’s antidote to everything. If I ate an apple a day, I wouldn’t just be avoiding the doctor, my explosion of health would put them out of business with every bite. Finally, the power was back in the little guy’s hand. I could exact revenge for the vast sums of money I’d spent to hear the words “
drink plenty of fluids”.
Oh yes, these highly educated individuals who work up to twelve hours a day saving human life will feel my crisp consumer wrath. But this isn’t a case of big pharma versus little farmer. It’s more a case of how depressingly suicidal a species we are. We’ve apparently lost the impetus to look after ourselves to the point where we are resorting to elaborate means to con ourselves into being healthy. The same method that influenced you to sloth about your sofa, like an upturned bowl of flesh custard, is now being used to encourage your health.
Only it isn’t really. This ad campaign seems to appeal to the worst parts of us. The apple is tempting you into the sin of envy. It seems it’s more appetising to entice you to take those fat cat doctors down a peg than the common sense approach of not deep frying a bottle of bourbon and then smoking it. After all, who do these medical professionals think they are? They’re obviously superior to us, purely because they studied hard, sacrificing years of their life to cure us of the maladies we got from drinking hard and sacrificing years of our life to snorting whole turkeys and shooting up gravy.
Also, what is an apple without Steve Jobs doing in the world of advertising? Doesn’t the agricultural community realise commercials are reserved specifically for items that kill you slowly? We can’t have fruits being advertised without a pizza beneath them. The only pear on television should be the silicon pair jutting from the chest of a size zero super mum dispensing sugary carbonated drinks to fat children made of cake. Fair enough if they brought out caffeinated apples with guarana or a Royal Gala with electrolytes. Those I could imagine on a poster, but the regular kind? Where is the harm in those?
There is no harm and that’s a problem for consumers. Humanity is deeply infatuated with doing that which potentially kills us. I’m not talking about base-jumping or anything prefixed with Xtreme. I’m referring to the comforting taste of burnt throat, the satisfying pinch of vodka bruised kidneys, the bloating of a colon packed solid with red meat and the slow sugary waddle towards diabetes.
You would assume the desire to pursue healthy endeavours would be our default instinct. Yet time and time again we opt for the choice that leaves us wheezing and nauseous, sweating away the evidence of last night. If you’re like me, you’ll bitch and moan about paying $80 a month for a gym membership, then drop that amount at the bar without flinching. Like a mosquito hurling itself at a bug light, we have an appetite for self-destruction, not apples - with the one exception of the new Double-Bacon Granny Smith™.