Blessed by the Potato

Financial literacy month is upon us, and I have another stretched metaphor for you.

Bitches Get Riches had this post in the summer on learning to cook for yourself, which will help kick this off. Even if you don’t become good at cooking or build a large repertoire, out of necessity most people are going to learn to cook a few things at some point in their lives. Parents will teach kids what is and is is not food – often one of the first things they teach them after “hey, I’m Daddy. Say ‘Daddy’.”

So then you’re well prepared for when this horrific ad appears in your feed:

You’ll just know, because you have some measure of food literacy, that this is not a recipe you should attempt. And that any smiles you’ll be enjoying will be at your own expense for attempting to pass this off as food. Or you’d just know that if, for shits and giggles, you did make it to throw up on your Instagram, that you’d never give it to a kid as “food” and never, ever, ever give it to a kid calling it “pizza”. That ketchup and barely melted cheese on a piece of bread is an abomination and is in no way a pizza, let alone one deserving of a made up -acular adjective, and that even if you used pizza sauce a) you wouldn’t put it on a piece of wonder bread and b) you’d at least leave it in there long enough for the cheese to bubble you monster. (Wayfare notes that ketchup and cheese is kind of like a grilled cheese sandwich and this might not be so horrific if they passed if off as that instead of pizza, which I would still not eat)

Anyway, this is pretty clearly the sort of ad you would instantly know is just a bad idea because of food literacy. If you never really bothered to learn about what makes food good (or what makes pizza the High Food of the Special Day rather than something other than a slice of bread with sauce and barely melted “white cheese”), you might get taken in by this perfectly legal ad. And indeed, though all would instantly recognize the moral repugnancy of the act, there is no actual law against calling a piece of bread with ketchup on it “pizza”. Though perhaps there should be, consumers are completely unprotected against predatory recipes such as this, and attempting to protect them would be a big regulatory hassle¹

And of course, so it is for financial matters. Except that’s not something we all learn proficiency with. If you saw an ad for a monstrous mash-up product like a market-linked GIC, it might look neat, the ad copy might even sway you into putting some of that in your children’s portfolios. And you might even call it a “good investment”, never knowing what true pizza, I mean investments, taste like without developing your financial literacy.

Looking for a place to start? I’ve got a reading list here.

1. And even then, you might end up with protections such as nutrition labels and ingredient lists that help protect against some form of abuses but will not solve all the problems and sometimes require their own, different form of literacy to parse.