About That New "Crisco" Song...

Country music star, Miranda Lambert, just released a new song called…. “Crisco.”

The music video has her dressed in full 70s style, complete with big curls, center-parted hair, rhinestone-studded jumpsuit and she’s in a kitchen that looks right out of the 60s.

As she sings, she mindlessly stirs an empty Tupperware bowl while periodically reaching for “ingredients” from her cabinet.

The lyrics themselves make no sense at all while repeating the lines “cookin’ with crisco” 6 times!

So what’s so significant about this?

Isn’t it just a silly little song to take us back to nostalgic times in the past when grandma cooked for us?

Except that the song serves as the perfect propaganda piece for reinvigorating a fake food originally created from a waste product and marketed through heavy-handed propaganda disguised as a healthy cookbook for moms.

Crisco doesn’t need—and, frankly, shouldn’t get—a revival.

The song eerily harkens back to those early days of Crisco advertising.

To launch their new product in 1911, Procter and Gamble hired a marketing firm to create a cookbook targeted towards women. The advertising campaign focused on claims that Crisco was healthier and more digestible than the animal fats it was replacing.

Of course this was entirely unsubstantiated.

In fact, cotton seeds, the raw material used to make Crisco, had never in history been a human food due to the heart toxin gossypol.

Theoretically, the hydrogenation process removed that yellow phenolic toxin.

After a sustained propaganda campaign for years, Crisco became a hit for the housewives.

More on the history of Crisco here:

Is This One Brand from 1911 the Reason for Fake Food Today?

And that’s one of the key components of propaganda—it plays into your emotions.

Most of us living today have memories of Grandma’s biscuits or dinner rolls made with Crisco. Or perhaps memories of a cake or pie. Crisco is still widely used in cakes and pie crusts today.

Are you surprised that with a revival of “Real Food” across America and people searching for ways to manage chronic illness, that suddenly the propaganda machine for Crisco is hard at work again?

Remember, propaganda works on your emotions.

It makes you feel that tug, or relatability.

Or, it works to make you angry, fired up over something. Then, it uses the energy of that emotion to propel you into some action.

Propaganda uses repetition. It works on our subconscious brains to make you familiar with something in a way that you don’t always recognize so that when you see the option in front of you, your brain automatically clicks with that which is familiar.

Lambert’s new song has it all; it has the visual throw-back to the 70s era which evokes nostalgia. It repeats “cookin’ with Crisco” multiple times to get that repetition into your subconscious mind, and it does all of this with a strong emotional appeal—both the appeal of nostalgia and the link back to a trusted country star who seems to be innocently singing to you about wholesome values: cookin’ and falling in love.

But don’t fall for it.

See it and know what it is.

And remember that for millions of years of natural history Crisco did not exist.

It’s your responsibility to peel away the layers of industrialization and institutionalized information to remember what is real.

Experience real food, not distorted waste products that are processed and called healthy.

You don’t have to fall for it, even if our grandparents did.