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Monday 8 December 2008

Culturally insensitive or crass exploitation of the world's indigenous people?

Has anyone seen this ad for burgers? The one about 'Whopper Virgins'? They invite indigenous people from various places to taste the two rival burgers - http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2008/dec/04/advertising-food

'What happens when you take remote villagers from Chiang Mai in Thailand who don't even know what a burger is because they don't even have a a word for it in their language and ask them to compare the Whopper versus the Big Mac in the world's purest taste test?'

Others are the Inuit from Greenland, and another one is equally pathetic and involves Transylvania farmers who are all lumped together and called, quite rudely, 'Whopper Virgins'.

In an age when we have the highest rates of literacy ever in the world and more and more people are being educated than ever before through technology, which can reach even the remotest of places, shouldn't we expect a little more cultural awareness from the educated populace of the world?

What else can you expect from the American companies who care for nothing unless it resembles the greenback? I guess it's all part of what some have called the 'Cocacolaisation of the world' - the idea that individual cultures are being eroded and being replacd by one set of huge conglomerates which express American capitalist values and nothing more.