Choosy Moms Choose Jif (person)

"Choosy Moms Choose Jif" was a long-standing ad campaign for Jif peanut butter, one of the two leading peanut butter brands in the United States. Each advertisement featured a devoted mother, generally idolized by her friends as a "supermom", who shockingly claims that all peanut butter brands taste alike. After her friends wave a bottle of jif under her nose, she (who has apparently lived most of her life as a homemaker without ever having contact with one of the two main brands of American peanut butter) admits that Jif does smell and taste more like "fresh roasted peanuts", and therefore decides to choose Jif. The campaign was persistent and lasted for the better part of two decades, and became a proto-meme of sorts: the late David Foster Wallace used "Choosy Moms" as a rock band name in his novel Infinite Jest.

These commercials seem quaint now. Some of my readers who are a decade or so younger than me might not realize there was a time when there was only two big brands of peanut butter in the United States, and that each was an identical mixture of peanuts, hydrogenated oil and sugar. There was Adams Peanut Butter, but it was a speciality item. And you couldn't walk into a local grocery store and get almond butter or sunflower butter. What did people with peanut allergies do in the 1980s? We didn't really have peanut allergies in the 1980s, either. Given so little actual differences in products, the protofoodies of yesteryear had to base their decisions on things like this, an ad campaign that denied the rather obvious fact that all peanut butter was the same.

A second issue that this advertising campaign raises is that it publicly states a tacit belief, which I am thankful for. Often, when investigating the culture around me, there are underlying thoughts and beliefs that I notice, but are hard to find concrete examples of. One of these is the belief or expectation that women are more selective, more likely to make fine distinctions, and more capable of rejecting things based on subtle differences. But while making large generalizations about untold cultural expectations are difficult, sometimes a specific example can be found. The "Choosy Moms Choose Jif" campaign is one such example. Because the commercials target women's fears of not being selective enough: by failing to make a distinction between two products, the woman's status of a paragon of taste is threatened. This is even more obvious because, as mentioned, there was little to no actual difference between peanut butter brands at the time. The style of selectivity must be maintained, even while the substance of selectivity is absent.