Generic food

I remember generic food. Back in the ‘80s, there was a special section in the grocery stores — shelves faced with white labels, plain black lettering. “Raisan Bran” or “Corn Flakes” in Helvetica Bold — nothing like the parodies of generic food that came later, like stacks of “Food” boxes and “Drink” in plastic jugs from Repo Man, or the “Generic Album” labeling that the punk band Flipper, and later Public Image Ltd., adopted for their music packaging.

There was nothing ironic about generic food. It wasn’t like the food tasted any different, or worse; it just was sold for less by certain companies that had done away with expensive things like advertising and attractive packaging. It wasn’t Government Surplus Cheese or anything like that. Not all boxes or bottles were white: yellow was the second most popular packaging color for generic stuff. Pasta shells and rice crispies looked slightly more appealing in yellow packaging, for some reason.

The presumption was that white labels and a boring font was way less expensive than fancy packaging. I’m not sure how a more interesting font would have added to packaging costs, but this was in older times: linotype labels and printing presses and all that. Fancy graphic designers weren’t commonly employed by puffed rice companies. Obviously though, white was less color-intensive to print than red, purple or blue.

San Francisco punk band Flipper went generic with their debut album.

It’s not that the generic food lacked any visible signifiers or markers. Its genericness actually said plenty, even without fancy labels: it said your family was taking shortcuts in grocery shopping, or tended to buy things in bulk because it was cheaper. Basically, you were the struggling middle class. Someone dangled generic food before you as a way to make ends meet, and many folks took the bait. I noticed, though, people tended to hide the generic label stuff in lower food cabinets, out of public line of sight. (We had one of those built-in “Lazy Susan” food cupboards that were popular in the ‘70s, hidden behind a faux-colonial wooden cabinet door. You rotated it to find the food item you needed. Sometimes you’d spin it too fast and some boxes or items would fall back into the darkness down behind the Lazy Susan, lost forever.)

In some ways, our generation — those who came up in the early ‘80s — was a lot like generic food. Doug Coupland came up with “Generation X” to describe us, and you can see how the term was meant to differentiate us, in a generic label kind of way, from “The Lost Generation,” “The Beat Generation,” “The ‘60s Generation” — those generations that had some actual cachet. We had no identity, you see. We lacked direction. We were an in-between group, not allowed to fully explore or enjoy the hedonism that was already waning with the ‘70s (washed away by AIDS and emerging Reagan conservatism). We had no overwhelming cause to embrace, nothing much to espouse. We lacked purpose, utility. (Well, at least most of us had jobs back then — or McJobs — to look forward to when we graduated. Before somebody moved all the cheese.)

In hard times, generic beer is the frugal man’s buzz.

Basically, we were ignored by society, which seems in stark contrast to the Gen Y kids of now and the ‘60s Baby Boomers who preceded us. Society wore out its kneepads trying to sell to the hippie kids, to co-opt them, target them as a market or demographic. And now, thanks to the attraction of new online media, society now tracks every fart and burble of Gen Y, as though blogging and tweeting somehow distinguishes them from every other generation, makes them special. We’ve seen this shell game before: pander to youth, then move on to the next batch of babies when the Gen Ys become a liability: too old to shift units, too jaded to juice the economy.

So we really were the Generic Generation, the ones who got the irony of missing out on all the big cultural shifts, the good times, but didn’t find the irony particularly amusing. Laughter, for us, was an expense, and expenses were something we still believed in back then (before everything could be bought on credit). Anyway, It takes a lot to build up the kind of laugh that really defines a generation, and realizing that you’re disposable and superfluous and kind of lacking in purpose is not really a big knee slapper.