But I Love "Chef"

The other day I was discussing my love for the accordian with a few of my co-workers. That led me to think about a Chef Boyardee commerical from a few months back - with the mom and little girl at the grocery store. If you haven't seen it, the mom says she's not buying the girl anymore Chef Boyardee and the girl says sadly, "But I love Chef." The can of Chef Boyardee then falls of the shelf, and to the girl's eventual bliss, follows her all the way home.

Well, I'm sucker for that little girl loving "Chef" so much, but the reason I was thinking about the commercial is because the coolest accordian song plays while the can is making the long journey from the grocery store the girl's house. I got so nostalgic for the commercial that I looked all over the internet to see if I could find it. I didn't have any luck, but I did find that some folks to had some VERY strong feelings about it.

The following story [from the workout diaries] just about killed me:

Exhibit #3,584,962 proving I might be sort of weird

This post about Chef Boyardee at the Donut made me think about something that's been bugging me for a while.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I HATE Chef Boyardee. It makes me gag. If I'm going to eat processed pasta, it's Spaghettios all the way.

That aside, you know that commercial? The one where the mom and the little girl are in the grocery store? No? Well, the plot goes a little something like this: Mom and Girl walking the processed pasta aisle at the supermarket, and Girl picks up a can of Chef Boyardee. Mom says, "No, honey, we've had Chef every night this week." Girl says, "But I love Chef." Being a obedient girl, though, she puts the can back on the shelf. After they have walked away, the can rolls off the shelf and follows them through the store...then into the parking lot and down the highway, and eventually into their house. Cut to the inside of the house, where Girl is sitting on the floor in the family/living room doing...something, and Mom calls from the kitchen, "What do you want for dinner?" Just then, the stalker can of "Chef" rolls into Girl's leg, she picks up the can, looks at it, and smiles knowingly. End of commercial.

Now, I have a few problems with this.

1. "We've had Chef every night this week." Seriously? Who's running that house? Because I'm telling you...it must be a cold week in hell if I serve canned pasta every night for a week. Sure, I work all day, I'm not even all that fond of cooking, and Noah does have a deep and abiding love for Spaghettios...but EVERY NIGHT? Sure, it's got all those vitamins injected into it, so it's sort of quasi-healthy. But...every night?! Besides which, that mom doesn't have the sort of figure one would associate with someone who eats canned spaghetti regularly.

2. "Chef." "Chef?" I do not know a single person who calls Chef Boyardee "Chef". If it's nicknamed at all, we shorten to the type of mushy pasta that's actually in the can--"ravioli", "spaghetti", etc. Is this like UPS's moronic plan to make everyone call them "brown"? Because I hate that too.

3. "What do you want for dinner?" Okay, you were just at the grocery store, lady. That was probably a question you wanted to cover there. Didn't you go in with some kind of plan? At the very least, something looked good while you were there. Surely you bought ingredients that you could throw together into some semblance of a meal. Though maybe I'm projecting here...this is a woman who had "Chef" every night that week, after all.

4. The cliffhanger ending. So many unanswered questions. Okay, Girl's smiling at the can of "Chef", so presumably she is going to suggest to her decision-impaired mother that they should have Chef Boyardee again. Um, didn't Mom put the kibosh on that plan while they were at the store? That's going to go over well. Not. Especially since they didn't actually BUY the "Chef". This is how I like to imagine the resulting conversation would go:

Girl brings can of pasta into kitchen.

"How about this?"
Mom sighs. "No, I already told you at the sto--Wait! Where did you get that?! We didn't buy any! Did you steal it?!"
"Um, no...it just bumped into my leg just now." Tears well up in her eyes.
"It bumped into your leg? From where?"
"In the living room. I don't know...it was just there."
"What, it just followed us home all by itself, eh?! Don't lie to me!"

After that, Girl probably bursts into tears, and Mom sends her to her room to think about why it's wrong to steal a can of craptastic pasta from the supermarket. (If everyone stole "Chef", you see, the grocers would lose money and then have to raise their prices to compensate, and therefore it hurts us all.) And despite being completely innocent, Girl goes to her room as she's told, spending a miserable evening crying and wondering if she's crazy. The neighbors hear the yelling and the crying, call CPS...well, maybe I've gone a bit too far here.

At the very least, Girl has some serious 'splaining to do.