A little more than a week in Phoenix and the junk mail starts pouring in. Here in the States, November is rush season for grocery stores as they try to capitalize on the Thanksgiving holiday.Yesterday I received several weekly sales circulars from the retail stores in the area. Let’s review them, shall we?
First off we have the grocery store across the street, Fresh & Easy:
Looks good! It looks a little plastic-y and I realize that the glisten and deep brown color was probably achieved with a bottle of baby oil and a blowtorch, but it still looks nice and juicy. I’m not so sure about serving a turkey on top of Concord grapes, though. I think cranberries would have made a little more sense. Regardless, I would be quite happy plopping this sucker in the middle of my Thanksgiving day table.
Next up, we have the more popular Safeway:
Now we’re talking! That is a beautiful bird! You can see the seasonings just dancing across the top of that crisp skin. These food stylists definitely earned their paycheck. I also suspect the saturation was bumped up in Photoshop to give it that otherworldly, rich tone. Again with the grapes, though! Not only that, but raw apples have been added to the mix. It’s definitely picture filler, but how about something more practical like roasted carrots and onions maybe? If someone sat a turkey like that in front of me, the grapes and apples would just be getting in my way. I still can’t say anything bad about the bird itself, though, and that’s the product they’re trying to sell. Looks delicious.
Finally, we have Fry’s Mercado:
OMG!!! KILL IT!!! KILL IT!!!
I have the exact same complexion in the Winter. Definitely no food stylists or Photoshop trickery here. In fact, there’s ten to one odds that the neck and plastic bag of giblets are still stuffed in there somewhere. It looks like they threw a turkey carcass on top of a mixed salad, shoved rosemary up its ass-end and snapped a Polaroid. Note how the other ads try their best to hide the ass-cavity while this one actually accentuates it. This ad also reminds me of the most unpleasant aspect of cooking a turkey: dealing with the cold, raw, dead carcass. No grapes here and the carrot/onion mix I mentioned earlier are present, but I’m just not warming up to the whole raw-ness of the situation. Even assuming this is a pre-cooking shot, I can’t say I would ever roast a turkey on a board covered in lettuce. At the end of the day, two things were accomplished: more people decided instead to have ham and a salad bar was contaminated.
Sometimes there is such a thing as too much truth in advertizing.
From Pen to Pan 
Oh no! That last shot is frightening! I noticed the same thing in the contrast between Lowes Foods and Compare Foods flyers in our mail box. I wonder how much is a cost/cheapness thing and how much is a cultural thing… Compare Foods often features strange meat cuts in their flyers I wouldn’t expect in an ad. But, then again, if you cook a turkey, this is what you have to deal with and it IS NOT appetizing. at. all. Especially if you brine that sucker. It looks even worse after a day soaking in salt water.
I guess if you don’t want to cook, there’s always Denny’s
Not cook on Thanksgiving? That’s sacrilege!
at least the retail store that chose the raw dead animal is not trying 2 pretend. they r not playing games…this is what i hear them saying as they put that in their flyer: “you want a fucken dead bird? well, here ya go. dead as a doornail.” ….no jokes, tricks, just a mound of ….dead bird. yummy – holly