Marketing Animals - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Fig.2.
Stonyfield yogurt carton front center, photograph by author.
“M
y marketing spend is a rounding error
[compared with competitors]," he
says. "But you can go on Stonyfield's
web site (YoTube), and watch cows chewing their
cud”.
Gary Hirschberg, Stonyfield CEO (Reingold, 2012)
My Stonyfield yogurt carton depicts a pastoral
landscape identified as Wayside Farm, Vermont
(USA). The reproduced image wraps around a
white plastic cylinder. Its colors are polarized and
focal depths multiplied. A golden light bathes the
verdant pasture and grazing cows in sharpest
focus at the center. The curved plastic surface
foregrounds the cows spatially and graphically.
They are the closest figures in the ‘field’ to me. A
picturesque New England barn set in the forested
edge some distance back echoes the modeled
browns of their bodies. The words “Organic” and
“Plain” intrude into the landscape’s middle ground
and vertically frame the cows. The font is serifed
and traditional but playful. Floating above in a
hazy sky, the more stylized torso and head of a
cow peep winsomely between flat, primary yellow
and blue banners for ‘’Stonyfield” and “Organic”.
The same head reappears decapitated and
vertically centered in a margin left of the
landscape, bearing in its mouth an invitation for
“SF Rewards” – an incentive program for “our loyal
yogurt eaters" [i]. Aligned above is the product
bar code, and below are a list of bacterial
cultures attributed to it, a stipulation to “KEEP
REFRIGERATED” and two certifications: “Organic”
and “Gluten-Free”. A standardized chart
quantifying “Nutrition Facts” bounds the image to
the right. Text dominates the rear panel,
presenting the corporation’s story and
environmental ethic. A beaming 'mother' is
incorporated into the border for a bacon salad
recipe under the caption “Meg’s Recipe Box”. The
ingredient list is titled “Our Family Recipe”.
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Stonyfield’s package reproduces the living bodies
of cows through multiple levels of abstraction as:
representational figures in a pastoral landscape,
the iconic brand of a multi-national corporation,
a purchaser reward system, a codified market
commodity, a matrix for bacterial life, a food
product requiring artificial temperature control, a
regulated and certified object of consumption,
numbered grams of nutrients and percentages of
“daily values” for an idealized diet, and an
ingredient in a heteronormative ‘family meal’. In
this article I question the representational terms
and conditions of such abstractions. Their
idiomatic reformulations appear in pictures, words
and numbers. Their commingled figures produce
reductions and multiplications of the bodies of
cows in relation to the bodies of people, and of
both in relation to their environments. Material
bodies are both subjects and objects of the
abstractions, reduced by them to caricatures,
labels and calorie counts. They are also
multiplied, virtually, into new identities and
relations through entangled processes of
commodification and advertising. I question how
these representations proliferate reflexive identities
– self-advertisements – of their human
producers/consumers, which are then inscribed
back onto the cows, the people and their
environments. How do these representations
naturalize new identities and relations, which are
recursively rendered through a marketing spincycle?
My inquiry traces materialities and
virtualities of its subjects: the cows in a stony field,
the field and its stones (where are they?), and the
presumed but unpictured human viewer.
At issue are the material and virtual
embodiments, continually refigured, of animals
(including cows and people) and their
environments. How can the frames of
representation be opened so that a mutuality
is seen between these subjects/objects that are