Steak-Umms: Food For The Broke Pretends To Be Woke.
This thread has been gaining a lot of popularity on Twitter, recently:
why are so many young people flocking to brands on social media for love, guidance, and attention? I’ll tell you why. they’re isolated from real communities, working service jobs they hate while barely making ends meat, and are living w/ unchecked personal/mental health problems
they’re crushed by student loan debt, disenfranchised by past generations, and are dreading the future of our world every day from mass media addiction and the struggle to not just be happy, but to survive this chaotic time with every problem happening at once under a microscope
they grew up through the dawn of internet culture and have had mass advertising drilled into their media consumption, now they’re being resold their childhoods by remakes, sequels, spinoffs, and other cheap nostalgia, making them more cynical to growth or authenticity
they often don’t have parents to talk to because they say stuff like “you don’t know how good you have it,” and they don’t have mentors to talk to because most of them have no concept for growing up in this strange time, which perpetuates the feeling of helplessness/loneliness
they have full access to social media and the information highway, but they feel more alone and insecure than ever. being behind a screen 24/7 has made them numb to everything, anxious and depressed about everything, and vitriolic or closed off toward anyone different from them
young people today have it the best and the worst. there’s so much to process and very few trusted, accessible outlets to process it all through. so they go to memes. they go to obscure or absurdist humor. they go to frozen meat companies on twitter. end rant
Wise words, but who was behind them? Bernie Sanders? Ocasio Cortez?
No, of course not. It was Steak-Umms, the company behind frozen beef sandwiches.
I’d really like to believe that someone in the Steak-Umms PR department had a “Network” style meltdown and tweeted all this before putting a gun in their mouth and blowing their brains all over the shop floor, in the process making at least one batch of the product 30% more nutritious and perhaps inadvertently sparking an outbreak of CJD that would finally, mercifully bring about the end of America and, as a consequence, the world.
I’d like to think that, but I’m pretty sure this is just another in a long string of nakedly cynical PR moves by major companies. Because I get it — I get the temptation to think “Wow, Steak-Umms really understands me and knows what I’m going through, maybe I should support them by buying their frozen offal products!” But that’s exactly the point. “Woke” twitter threads ultimately make a company seem likeable, and we buy things from companies we like. It couldn’t be simpler for Steak-Umms, or Nike, or whichever corporation has just pretended to have a moral compass in the ten minutes I’ve been writing this. Just make it sound like you care and young people, for all the reasons cited by Steak-Umms, will feel a glimmer of validation and increase your bottom line.
In case it weren’t obvious enough, the Steak-Umms thread ends with the company slogan, and even includes a pun in the first Tweet about millenials struggling to make ends “meat.” The fact that Steak-Umms also struggles to make both ends meat is a joke that’s gone woefully underused in responses, but let’s be clear: Steak-Umms isn’t a caring, warm-hearted company. In the last ten years they aggressively sued a tiny, two-store franchise called “Steak ’Em Up!” for copyright infringement.
What the Steak-Umms thread really shows is how easily understandable the problems facing the modern generation are, and how singly the political class, still riddled with Baby Boomers, is failing to address them. The problems many young people face can literally be coherently laid out by frozen beef offcuts, and yet nobody in power is doing anything about them. That’s how fucked we are in 2018. And if anyone is about to say “why don’t the young people solve their own problems?”, it’s because the older generations have hoarded all the wealth and power until there isn’t much millennials can do — all they have left for comfort is memories of childhood, which are now being packaged and sold back to them to keep them poor and docile while the ruling classes search desperately for a way to cheat death and remain rich and powerful forever. Orwell said that the future was a boot stamping on a human face for all eternity, but it’s more likely to be the dessicated, thousand-year-old, cybernetically enhanced husk of Rupert Murdoch, rocketing away from the dying earth as the zombified masses left behind have yet another episode of The Flinstones beamed directly into their unseeing eyeballs, oblivious to the fact that the air has finally caught fire and the end is upon them.
We can only hope that, in a grand irony, the secret to immortality lies in the preservative-saturated foods which the poor are forced to consume. Like Steak-Umms.
Even if the will to rise up was present in the under-35s (and it’s not), they wouldn’t find the time for revolution because they all have two jobs to work.
If all of this weren’t bad enough, millenials now don’t just have to contend with childhood cartoons being sold back to them — they’re having sympathy for their plight covertly sold to them by a company that makes something legally described as “chopped and formed emulsified meat product.”
Steak-Umms may not be the hero we need right now, but it’s sure as shit the one we deserve. And if we keep up our sad, Pavlovian responses to companies pretending to be sympathetic, we’re never going to deserve any better.