No Joke: I saw some a twitter post making fun of a new company trying to sell square patties and it’s bothered me for days.
Some of this is misdirected frustration over other things, but I am repulsed, not just by the gelatinous squares themselves, which others have noted resemble Soylent Greens or the protein bug bars from Snowpiercer, but I’m also frustrated by the idea, the possibility, the existence, of this concept.
I think partly it’s because the company has raised over $150,000 for something that feels like it should be an onion parody. The food looks disgusting, the videos are sloppy, the promoters spout non-sequiturs (“here’s a broccoli…but it could be a square!”) in vague, sinister foreign accents.
But one recent article about the food squares suggests that while the concept is silly and gross, they praise the sincerity of the creators, who tout everything about the squares from their flavor to their convenience to their eco-friendliness.
No doubt these freaks are sincere about making lots of money. Of “disrupting” the food delivery market. They have ambitions. But it’s hard to believe they don’t know how disgusting and pointless their food blobs are. The most charitable interpretation from the videos is that there “entrepreneurs” are so cluelessly jacked into a market mentality that they genuinely think that having an edible product is secondary or even tangential to its marketable characteristics: ease of delivery, standardization, scalability, etc.
But that’s not exactly how it’s framed in the videos. One has a dude showcasing his “favorite cooking methods” for the squares: microwaving them for 30 seconds or throwing them on a hot plate. Tim Heidecker’s “kitchen tips” were more involving than this.
The pretense that customers will both and enjoy and even prefer, say, a chicken flavored square to an actual chicken breast, is a bridge too far. These people have to know what they’re hawking is dogshit. And there’s something grating about the fact that they think you, the viewer of their promo videos, and the eventual buyer of their product, are so dumb that you’ll fall for or acquiesce to giving these squares a try or whatever.
I fear too that something like this benefits greatly from the Streisand Effect: that no matter how sharp the mockery of the product is on social media, mere brand recognition from a large portion of the online population could be proof of concept to some tech bros or “forward thinking” investors. Free publicity could mean the same thing as free money, and that’s incredibly depressing, especially to someone such as myself who is feeling the effects of isolation and anonymity.
Culture Time 