Aunt Jemima 🥞

I usually buy the. 5 lb boxes of Aunt Jemima pancake mix at Wally World as it’s relatively inexpensive and makes better pancakes then the Wally World brand and the box tends to hold up better when camping. I like to buy in bulk, as it saves money and is less garbage to get rid of – and fewer trees wasted.

I had heard a while back that they were replacing the Aunt Jemima banding with Pearl Milling Company branding. Honestly, I don’t care if the pancakes are still good. I eat the pancakes, the fire doesn’t care what the label reads when it becomes trash and I burn it. I know some people in Syracuse were offended when they thought their beloved characters – the black state fair pancake maker – was removed from the box for purposes of political correctness.

Maybe Aunt Jemima has a good innocent back story, the wholesome legend or maybe it’s a throwback to the era of reconstruction when dumb hick looking illustrations of African Americans were used to sell the output of massive industrial factories. But probably that debate is irrelevant to the marketers of the brand. They wanted to sell their product as a more high end pancake mix, and the Pearl Milling Company name combined with eventual changes to the packaging.

Ultimately, packaging and branding is just trash. Something that might catch your eye at the store but is soon to be tossed in a burning barrel, buried in a landfill or maybe bailed up and sent to China in hope of being re-pulped and used as low grade filler in future cardboard boxes.