This picture is of a package of Cascadian Farms broccoli. Look carefully. Then try not to scream in horror.
Here’s a close-up. They look so happy. And green. And decapitated.
WTF, BROCCOLI? [Bread & Honey] (Thanks, Ryan!)
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That is creepy.
@yashichi8bit: Nothing to worry about, it’s just a “Serving Suggestion”.
@yashichi8bit:
OO OO OO does the real broccoli come with the faces also!
@yashichi8bit:
Agreed Creepy.
@yashichi8bit: so obviously a deliberate and hilarious “trick” done by whatever graphic designer was working on this. Conversely, someone needed stock broccoli and failed to notice the faces.
@alexawesome: That’s half the fun of doing graphic work, hiding subliminal messanging in it! My personal favorite is “POE” or “OPE”
@fogmaster: Explain more, you have me intrigued now!
@Git Em SteveDave loves this guy–>: [www.eeggs.com] perhaps?
@christoj879: [www.youknow-forkids.com] there’s a picture.
@christoj879: Thank you. I thought it was something that appeared in many things, like the Caltech Alum theme of putting “DEI” everywhere, like in the movie “Real Genius”. Or the Dr. who branded his alma-maters initials inside patients [www.thesmokinggun.com] .
Good God!
In before the ‘This site is really going downhill’ posts.
@quagmire0: This site is not sinking. This site is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!
J/K, but I really hate this comment system.
I count 4. Anybody else?
@Hedgy2136: I saw 5…
/insert soylent green joke here
@NikkiSweet: I definitely see 4, not sure about the 5th. The three in the inset, one directly above the rightmost face from the inset, and maaaybe another directly below. Are those the ones you see?
@Carencey: The 3 in the inset, the one below the inset and if you look just above the upside down broccoli to the right of the inset, there’s another face.
@NikkiSweet: I count 5, although the 5th (bottom right one) is vague.
Is this proof of elves?
@NikkiSweet: Good catch. I see ‘em all now.
@Hedgy2136: Consumerist…more like Highlights magazine
@platoreborn: *moment of nostalgia and longing for colored pencils*
@platoreborn: I still love Highlights… my daughter decorated my entire room in stickers from Highlights magazine.
It’s people!!!!
@Go4EVA: Soylent Borccoli?
@valarmorghulis: Yours is actually Soylent Swedish Chef. Bork bork bork.
@Dr Steve Brule: Mmmm… I can taste the Falukorv!
What makes this food unacceptable (current tag for this story is “unacceptable food”)? Do the broccoli actually have the faces on it, or is just a funny photo edit?
@Dobernala: It’s broccoli.
@92BuickLeSabre: I happen to really like broccoli! Ditto brussels sprouts.
Funny anecdote- My younger brother *loved* brussels sprouts for years, having been mislead to believe that they were “green meatballs”.
When he found out what they “really” were, he refused to touch them ever again.
Also- I refused to eat ketchup until I was 23. Demanded that my food be served without it, etc etc. After losing a bet I caved and had some on a burger. Turns out it’s not that bad.
@Hanzo: You know what’s totally disgusting on burgers/in general? Thousand island dressing. Blech.
@Hanzo: Yeh but it’s really not that good either. I hate ketchup, I worked as a BK manager for 10 years and b4 that as an hourly employee for 4 years and while the ketchup in the bottles and pumps did not go bad, it did separate the tomato part from the oil and it smelled so strong that I have really not eaten ketchup since I started working at BK. And while I no longer work there, my desire to eat ketchup ever again has really not returned.
@gc3160 – that homo that u know: Ketchup doesn’t typically have oil in it. Vinegar, yes, Oil, no.
@Hanzo: I once told the kids I baby-sat that they were green, plant-testicles. After they ate them. Imagine the uproar.
Curiously, their Mom didn’t hook me up for any return engagements.
@Dobernala: having several packages of this particular broccoli in my freezer i can verify that it is in fact NOT people, and is perfectly tasty broccoli.
@Ajh: The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.
LMAO. I had a hard time finding the face in the original picture!
@Finine: Yup- the scan sucks!
Damn, that’s disturbing. One more reason for my nieces and nephews to refuse to eat broccoli.
Them: Noooo, there are people on my food!
Me: Well, appreciate their sacrifice and eat up. Smiles make everything taste better.
Oh god broccoli is people. I knew it, I just knew it.
There is NO way that is not photoshopped…
@TessWoodpecker: Good work, Sherlock!
@homerjay: LOL. Thanks.
@TessWoodpecker: You say Photoshopped, I say work of God…
God, Jesus, Moses & Mary are all the people :p
@TessWoodpecker: The deadliest vegetable is also the the deadliest game of all.
Thanks Meg, That’ll make salads all the more terrifying to eat.
reminds me of the pizza in Nightmare on Elm Street 4
We now know the precursor to Soylent Green.
@STrRedWolf: Soylent Green indeed.
Dammit…beat me to the Soylent Green joke…
@ShizaMinelli: I was wondering how many posts I was going to read without a soylent green reference. hahaha
I bet this is some “easter egg” of the manufacturers, like, the faces are the founders of the company, or some farmers or something.
Hidden Photoshop shout out FTW….
@MercuryPDX: I really hope the guy who did this sees that his work isn’t going unappreciated. I think if your job is designing frozen vegetable bags this would be the highlight of your year.
That’s effin’ freaky! I don’t want to look at it, but I can’t help but to keep searching for more heads.
Why the hell are they so happy?! ARGH!
@Maglet: They’re so happy because since they “are” the broccoli, they don’t have to eat the broccoli.
This picture offends me.
Brilliant. This could once again make broccoli “cool” enough to eat.
I wanted to make a joke about ‘heads of broccoli,’ but it doesn’t work. Why couldn’t they have hidden the heads in lettuce?!
I’ve been broccoli-blocked.
I rather not look closely at my hot dog packaging.
You think that’s scary?
My money has the devil in it! And look at my grilled cheese sandwich! Just LOOK at it!
@shepd: How do these people know what the devil’s face looks like?
@shepd: I was far more disturbed by the owner of the sandwich.
@shepd: I thought that looked like Marilyn Monroe on the toasted cheese. Hmmm….maybe she was hungry and decided to come back as warm , toasty bread and yummy melted cheese
@shepd:
There’s a dollar with Bush on it?? :O
A package designer had some fun photoshopping in friends’ faces.
@ElizabethD:
Exactly what I was thinking. Just their way of “signing” their artwork! It is still a little creepy!
@ElizabethD: Agreed. A little creepy, but kind of a funny easter egg when you think about it.
@ElizabethD: Yeah, totally. In fact I think this is awesome. If real.
@ElizabethD: I think it’s neat too! It reminds me of turn-of-the-century murals in public buildings where the border of the mural is usually some kind of trompe l’oil painted frame, and they put faces and characters and things in the frame/border as well.
They renovated one of the buildings at my college that had a bunch of these and did restoration work on the murals. In addition to restoring all the original crazy hidden items, they added some more modern ones, like Kermit the Frog.
Sometimes you find these in newspapers … 2-point white text hidden in a 2-point black border line is shockingly readable.
@Eyebrows McGee:
That is totally cool “Eyebrows”! I work with graphic designers at a college, and now I’m plotting opportunities to slip a few extremely subtle and amusing visual easter eggs into things we produce. Bwahahahahahaaaa! (evil Halloween laugh) It’s on, suckas!
@Eyebrows McGee:
Seriously? That is really cool about the murals.
Where do you find this in the newspaper??
This broccoli picture is VERY weird.
@HogwartsAlum: I used to work for a newspaper so I got used to finding them in my own paper.
It’s a little bush-league so you don’t really see it in major metro dailies, but sometimes in locals!
And yeah, seriously about the murals! I tried to find some pictures, but failed. But if you’re ever on the campus of Notre Dame, they’re in the entrance hallway of the main building. I was on campus when they restored them, so I read a lot about it, and they were comparing them to ones from the same time period in Chicago, etc. … which of course I then went to see in Chicago as well. It’s too bad I can’t find pictures online!
@ElizabethD: It’s funny, but if it’s an employee, he/she is so fired, and if it’s an independent contractor, they’re about to get sued for a gazillion dollars.
An old advertising technique using subliminal images airbrushed into ads to induce you to buy a product. Supposedly it is based on Freudian theory, and appeals to the unconscious mind. It is true. It happens in ads all the time. Women’s and men’s magazines are loaded with these. If you look with a magnifying glass, you’ll see them in the ice cubes in whiskey ads, etc. A book written many years ago called Subliminal Seduction by a fellow named Keyes, I think, elaborates on this in much detail. If you don’t think this is a real advertising technique… think again.
@bklynrickel: Subliminal advertising doesn’t work. The whole field is based on a hoax perpetrated in 1957. See:
[www.snopes.com]
Not so sure about that.
@Orv: Of course, whether or not it works has no bearing on whether or not it’s used. Advertising is a desperate field with many desperate people clutching at any straw to get that infinitesimal edge over the competition.
Agreed. I think they are convinced it works. That’s why, for instance, it’s in the broccoli.
Creeeeeeeeepy!! I will never look at broccoli the same way again!
PETA’s already on the case!
Maybe they decided to include some of their staff’s likenesses on the packaging this way. A little inside joke, if you will.
I make a ton of banner ads for my company. When I was playing Portal I started Photoshopping in “the cake is a lie” into some of the backgrounds.
No one ever looks at those things.
Soylent Broccoli is made out of people! IT’S MADE OUT OF PEOPLE!
It’s broccoli. It was terrifying before I saw the souls of the damned contained therein.
Where’s Waldo?
Why are they happy about being eaten?
It reminds me of the happy pig at a BBQ place, why the hell is a pig so happy about BBQ? I mean a happy pig at a kosher place maybe….
/pointless comment
wow, slow news day?
i have this broccoli, but there are no faces:(
I found this on the packaging too:
Soylent Green is made of people!!! It’s people!!!
@CrazyMann:
Soylent People is made of broccoli.
i find this awesome. a perfectly wholesome and harmless way to fuck with people’s heads.
I used to design packaging for a major supermarket label, as well as a long stint with an advertising company that had major food labels in their client list. We (the designers) did stuff like this all the time. Our pictures and our names, we would hide them in the packaging design. Its absolutely amazing that whomever saw this…actually saw it. I mean…seriously…it almost (yeah, almost) never gets noticed. Except that one time. Then youre fired.
Wow, I just saw this earlier today in one of my Livejournal groups!
Must be a slow consumer news day.
Gotta say though, how many people looked at that package design before it made it to store shelves and never saw the little faces. Somewhere a graphic designer is laughing their butt off.
And that’s why you steam it before eating. I’m going to start calling those raw foods people cannibals.
/obligatory
I’m going to the store tonight to buy a package of that broccoli. i will report back later to confirm if it is real. This will probably bother me forever until I find out for sure.
That explains why broccoli tastes like crap…tiny decapitated heads.
“Now enriched with Soylent Green”
I know, a couple other posters beat me to the joke, but I had to do it.
I used to reference subliminal imaging in advertising as a joke, but then I read a pretty good book on it (read: not hysterical) and now that I think to look for it there really is more of it going on than you’d think there is… not dealing with the whole phallic object/mouth school of subliminals that most people get hepped up about, but little things like this: happy faces make the broccoli subliminally friendlier to your subconscious. Or something.
Would have been funnier if Waldo was one of the faces hidden in there.
I keep telling the wife we shouldn’t eat it!!!!
the advertising/designers dept probably thought they’d leave their mark on what they created. standard practice for artists, not creepy or bad. Anyway, whoever spotted this had a lot of free time, didn’t they?
SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!! IT’S PEOPLE!!
Can anyone tell who they are? Is one of them Louis Anderson?
@LindaCachai: Hey…I think you’re right.
Too much negativity around here. This makes me more eager to bite into some ‘ccoli spears. YUM
hm… I have Cascadian Farm broccoli in my freezer, but no faces on mine.
I just checked the package in our freezer. The label design must be a little different because I couldn’t get the background details of the label pictured to match with what we have. I went over every little floret anyways, no creepy demon people observed.