On April 4, 1867, a small newspaper in Raleigh, North Carolina, announced a radical innovation in noodle design, and, behold, alphabet soup was born. “Instead of the usual cylindric and star shaped morsels of macaroni which have hitherto given body to our broth,” reported the Tri-Weekly Standard, “the letters of the alphabet have been substituted.” Touted as a “culinary novelty,” today, such expressions in food innovation might be said to mirror other, perhaps more contemporary, preoccupations. Like, say, social media. “Social media is all about conversation,” noted Pete Johnson, a senior product manager at Birds Eye, describing his company’s foray into potato snacks in the shape of smiley faces, asterisks, and octothorpes. “We’re constantly looking for ways to innovate and inspire consumers, and hope that Mashtags will get people talking around the table.” Perhaps. But the media aren’t buying it. “There’s a particularly smug form of schadenfreude I feel when a conglomerate like Birds Eye gets its pitch to ‘the youth’ wrong,” noted Holly Baxter at The Guardian. Time magazine’s Olivia Waxman concurred, calling it a groan-worthy social media gimmick, a food product made for people who would rather stay home and tweet than go out to eat.”
Mercifully, those who want something stronger to accompanytheir potato habit can turn to a new Scottish beer — also called #MashTag—whose name, flavor, hops content, malt level, and label were all crowdsourced by Twitter, proving that there may be strength in numbers, if not in actual ABCs.
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