I doubt it'll resonate with non-furry readers, but I drew this picture out of frustration with the New Year's annual salad/diet frenzy. It's a fat cow-person eating a salad.

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5039555/

For those of you who don't know, it's a reference to a meme going around with the theme, "I'm gonna get that bitch a ________, bitches love _______!" The idea is that a jerky man typically makes a sexist assumption. Only in my drawing, and in most of these advertisements, it's women being sexist and marketing to themselves.

"This bitch gonna eat a salad, bitches love salad (because it keeps them from being fat)!"

"I'm so fucking excited to eat this cherry tomato!!!!!!"

The last woman has just heard a very funny joke regarding the buttocks.

As someone who belongs to a CSA and really likes salad, sometimes I do get that excited over it. I am also a huge dork.

In the comments at Hairpin there are two links to images of black women shopping:

http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/7092/gettyisnuts.jpg

http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/2325/gettyisreallynuts.jpg

Classic.

Let's remember why they stock photos would be purchased... they wouldn't be used to advertise salad. They would probably be used for print and web articles related to "healthy living" and so on. So, not advertising. But accompanying images to text of some sort.

Living on salad makes you constantly hungry, (I've tried) because there is not enough fat to sate you - which makes you crave sweets. And too much sugar makes you fat. It's quite cynical to promote fat-free foods like salad to women. I bet the models would be happier eating a steak which of course is very unfeminine. Women don't need nutrition! Think of the animals, not yourself!

I have to be honest, as a not particularly feminine individual who also happens to be sort of a health nut, I am pretty into salad. I would agree that the lack of men featured is problematic, but I think the promotion of healthy eating is not exactly a bad thing. I would rather see happy, healthy women eating salad than angry, emaciated women modeling expensive underwear. This may be somewhat irrelevant to the subject at hand, but still, I feel it's worth pointing out.

Maybe the most successful bit of advertising that I've ever personally run into was on a kind of cubbyhole/bookshelf storage unit organizer. The packaging had an anonymous blurb, like it was a book, that read "Now that I am finally organized I can enjoy the finer things in life." Whoever dreamed that sentence up has really got my number.

There is some primal part of my brain that truly believes this. My life is so busy and I never feel very on top of things or as organized as I wish I was and there is a deep belief that if I could just get organized, then indeed I would start to enjoy the finer things in life.

And it is in a similar way that I am reading these women laughing with salad images. I think that they are so common and effective (even though absurd when viewed critically) not so much because they work on the level of the usual diet advertising. Just like I think "if I could only get organized, then I will be able to enjoy the finer things in life" I think that many people have a similar imagination of themselves projected into the future about food. It's the idea that we all know that we should be eating healthier, and we all sincerely want to start eating healthier, and we imagine that if we were just start being the kind of person who ate lots of bright leafy greens and pretty chopped veggies, then yes indeed our life would be different.

Now that I am finally organized I can enjoy the finer things in life :: Now that I eat salads regularly life is really joyous.

I love salad and I have since I was really young. It's damn tasty. Then again, I cover it with salt and vinegarette whenever possible. So much for health benefits!

The third pic is my favourite, at least the others look like the woman might be laughing at television/conversation while just happening to be eating a salad. That woman looks as if she has been driven insane with the ecstasy of salad.

Isn't the real laugh thread here the 'laughing alone while eating' concept? Promoting healthy eating is good, promoting insanely laughing while eating alone is creepy. Yogurt commercials do this too - although its usually smiling not laughing - and chocolate commercials practically depict women having masturbatory moments while eating chocolate (also creepy).

I LOVES me some salads, but still don't laugh when I eat them alone. That said, my main beef (pun intended) with these pics is that they depict horribly dry and unimaginative salads that appear to have NO dressing (and one woman is eating iceberg lettuce!).

Bwah-hahahah! I almost sent this in, too.

I, too, am a BIG DORK, belong to a CSA, and love me my salads.
BUT.
Do you see guys jonesing and twitching and having virtual gigglefests over salad? No, you do not.

That is just weird.

I ALWAYS THOUGHT OF THIS! I am so glad someone has pointed this out.

Don't forget the male counterpart:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/men-laughing-alone-with-fruit-salad

It does seem rather peculiar that these apparently generic women find their salads the funniest things in their possession. I guess the really strange thing is the lack of a visible reason for laughing. If they were all in a group having a laugh then it would make some sense, but they're all depicted as without company besides the cameraperson. Ladies #1 and #2 clearly appear to be having a giggle about what's on the end of their fork, as if it never occured to them that green vegetables were edible or something. Ladies #4-6 all look like they might be sitting across from someone off-camera to whom they are laughing, but why isn't the other person in the picture? #3's dramatic 'hanging nibble' makes no sense at all; you can't laugh and eat things at the same time, not without making a mess, which I doubt she'd want sitting on a white sofa like that. She's not even using that perfectly good fork she's supplied herself with.

I hope you find some humour in this little rant, but these pictures really don't make any sense. Are we supposed to focus on the woman, or what she's eating? If they're supposed to promote the enjoyment of salads (leafy, pasta or otherwise) why don't they show people enjoying them together? At the very least you'd have some idea of what they're laughing about.

At first I thought this was just weird and funny, but then I saw this post at another website:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/men-laughing-alone-with-fruit-salad

and I just got irritated.
The women are all young, thin, and beautiful. The men are all over the place though. Young, old, fat, thin, and average looking to attractive.

Tossed salad always cracks me up!

I wish these images didn't always draw such a dichotomy--like "I'm being so bad, because potato chips taste good but are bad" versus "I'm being good, because dry salad is full of veggies that taste bad but are good." Yes, vegetables are healthy, but they're not a punishment, and fatty things aren't always a calorie wasteland. I love brussels sprouts roasted with bacon, shallow-fried Japanese eggplant, banh mi with mayo and pickled carrots and daikon...food should be nourishing _and_ tasty, and drawing these lines only convinces people to have more and more screwed-up attitudes toward what and how they eat.

thedailywh.at posted a link to these photos in early january then posted a follow up link to a photo series of men with fruit salad on january 5th. http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/men-laughing-alone-with-fruit-salad (sorry, don't know how to hyperlink here.)

so fruit = masculine health, lettuce = feminine health?

are you sure that not at least two of these ladies aren't laughing but choking on their food?

Once in a while I order a salad and my boyfriend orders his steak because that's what we crave in that particular moment. There should be as many pictures of men eating salads as there are of women, and they should look just as happy. It's not about not eating anything else, but about a meal which sometimes is really all you need. The same applies to steak etc of course. But I'm sick and tired of being stared at and insulted just because my salad order is thought to prove my self-hatred as a women. It's incredibly frustrating.

with regard to the "over-expressiveness" of the women depicted in these pictures: yes, i think the idea is that their laughter implies them being in the company of friends or other loved ones. But if you introduce someone else into the picture, the focus would shift away from the salad. Personally, I prefer good ol' regular food porn over this lot ;)

Images with proper sense can really make difference in marketing, just a pop up trade show display and one sense-less image on it, can not do the wonder!

Oddly, after seeing these, I feel like opening a bag of chips now. Coincidence?

I thought we do need salad so we don't turn into tubby Americans?

eating salad IS fun!

What bothers me most about these kinds of happy salad images is the exclusion of fat women, and the exclusion of males.  There is an upsetting stereotype that real men eat mostly meat, because salad isn't considered macho.  There is also a discriminatory stereotype that fat women are miserable, depressed people who only eat junk food and greasy fast food.  

If we are depicted at all doing healthy things, it is usually to show that we are making good progress toward becoming skinny people, and it is always implied that we were previously behaving otherwise, in ways that cause us to deserve ridicule and disgust.  When we are shown doing healthy things, there is always the implication that we are doing so only because we are striving toward a certain aesthetic ideal, and that the way we are doing so is by not being as lazy and gluttonous as we are otherwise assumed to be.   As a happy, fat vegan with an active lifestyle, I look at these images and feel alienated by not being represented, just as surely as when I am wrongly represented, every time I see a comedic fat character in a sitcom who is depicted as being a lazy, uneducated, gluttonous, couch potato lacking self-control, and eating a diet that consists entirely of Twinkies and cheeseburgers. These kinds of images aren't really as empowering as they want us to think they are.  They are just reinforcing the usual stereotypes.

If you type "man" and "salad" into Google image search you get a bunch of men laughing alone with salad too.  I'm surprised nothing much more questionable popped up with my "man salad" search actually.

http://www.visualphotos.com/image/2x4141391/model_released_woman_eating_fruit_salad

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