design « Words in Action: The Blog

When last we visited, we left you at that scrumptious breakfast, but now the time has come for dins.

<click on any pic to enlarge>

Dang, I loves me some orange chicken!

What the package doesn’t tell you is that it’s 85% rice and just a few measly pieces of chicken. But the package pic seems to be saying it’s mostly or at least half orange chicken.

OK, time to open the wine, maybe a nice bottle of Bar Dog or Hogwash…

Now, we enjoy the ritual of slicing the foil and pulling out the cork (when we’re not just unscrewing the lid on Sheep Thrills). But sometimes the blade isn’t so sharp and we spend precious wine time getting that dang foil cut.

The solution is amazingly simple and hardly seems like it would add anything to the price of the bottle: a simple tear tab!

Interestingly, the only place we have found bottlers using the simple “tear tab” on a regular basis is Egypt. Yes, we’ve seen a few American examples, but verrrry few. But for some reason, a nice bottle of Pharaoh, Obelisk, Omar Khayam, Ayam, Grand Marquis or Zaman in Cairo typically comes with a convenient tear tab for the foil. (Yes, I’ve tried them all.) And we still get the pleasure of uncorking.

Next up: jars. Here’s a common and seemingly easy-to-fix problem. Note that the foil lid has only the slightest, if any tabs to peel it off. This is particularly annoying with smaller items like spice bottles.

C’mon packagers! How hard is it to put a bit of foil that we can get our fingers on?

And now <insert drum roll>,

Our nominee for the worst frozen food packaging of all time!

This looks pretty yummy, right? (I mean, if you like sliders.) The first, and main problem is…it’s a total fake out. The box promises you’ll get 6 mini-burgers, but in fact, you get one! Because it’s a single frozen unit in a plastic bag with only slight indentations between each one. And the cooking instructions tell you to cook it in the bag. So, in effect, you have to cook the whole package at the same time. It’s not a “six count”…it’s a one count!

Next problem. It’s late and you just don’t feel like cooking a healthful meal so you reach into the freezer for the package. Now try to figure out the cooking directions. Grrrr.

Here…we’ll help you out with a close up view

You can microwave. Or, you can, um, use the microwave…oh, but it’s really an oven method. And then there’s the, um, oven method.

Adding to the cooking problem is that the Kroger fiends have sprinkled the entire tray with cheese sprinkles. Lots of them. (shown here, uncooked). We can’t even imagine what it would be like to peel off the cooking bag from a tray of oozing cheese.