Box Vox

packaging as content

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December 1, 2011

The Entenmann’s Box as Metaphor

Antenmanns-PlayingCards

The Entenmann’s box with the see-through window is sometimes used as a metaphor. Usually this has to do with ideas about tranparency. The Wacky Pack “Antenmann’s” parody sticker (on the left) compared the Entenmann’s see-through window to a window on an ant farm. The shrink-wrapped Entenmann’s box on the right is an advertising promotion: a deck of Entenmann’s box-shaped playing cards. Strange for playing cards to have a see-through window. If you’re playing cards, you generally want the hand you’re dealt to be for your eyes only. (See also: Wacky Packages and Playing Card Packs.)

1. Consumer
A 1996 remembrance by Wendy Wasserstein, about Martha Entenmann’s life is entitled, “She Saw Through Us.” By “us” she means Entenmann’s consumers so the metaphor is about Martha Entenmann’s early insight into our consumer behavior—that we customers were as transparent to her as the “see-through convertible bakery box top” that she invented.

2. Coffin
A character in F. Paul Wilson’s, The Tomb, while eating crumb cake, talks about wanting to be interred in an Entenmann’s box:

I’ve decided that after I’m cremated I want my ashes buried in an Entenmann’s box. Or if I’m not cremated, it should be a white, glass-topped coffin with blue lettering on the side.” He held up the cake box. “Just like this. Either way, I want to be interred on a grassy slope overlooking the Entenmann’s plant in Bay Shore.”

Another example of Entenmann’s box as coffin was found in these comments on a blog post about burying a pet parakeet:

I buried my budgie, Petey, in an empty Entenmann’s box . . . the cellophane window allowed for excellent viewing at the wake that we held for the neighborhood kids.

… Naturally, one would use the Entenmann’s box after consoling oneself with some tasty brownies, chocolate chip cookies, and/or cinnamon rolls.

3. “Believers” (and non-believers)
A sermon by Harold C. Warlick, Jr. entitled “People See Through Us” uses the same basic metaphor a Wendy Wasserstein—the “transparency” of people. Here, however, it is not about what Martha Entenmann sees in us, but how we look in God’s eyes…

Martha Entenmann invented the see-through cake box. Suddenly all manner of baked goods from pies to doughnuts began to arrive in see-through boxes with a proud blue Entenmann banner stamped on them. This caused those Entenmann baked goods to fill the shelves from New York to Miami.

As soon as the Christian church was organized as an institution, the letters and epistles of Paul and the epistle of James began to hammer home a message people did not want to hear. All believers and congregations are see-through to the world.  People see through us. They really do! There is a see-through box top that covers every congregation and every believer.

from Sermons on the Second Readings

Interestingly, the Entenmann’s box also plays a role in Foreskin’s Lament, Shalom Auslander’s novel of Orthodox Jewish life…

(The Entenmann’s box as “literature-of-last-resort” after the fold…)

About the religious prohibitions he had growing up, Auslander writes:

It was forbidden to watch TV, it was forbidden to write, it was forbidden to draw, it was forbidden to color. It was forbidden to play with trains because they used electricity. It was forbidden to play with Legos because it was considered building. It was forbidden to play with Silly Putty because if you pressed it against a newspaper it would transfer some of the ink to itself, and so it was considered printing. All that you were permitted to do was eat, sleep, and read, but no matter how many books I took out of the library on Friday afternoon, I was finished with them all by Friday night, and by Saturday afternoon I was slumped over the kitchen table, reading the side of the Entenmann’s doughnut box for the ten thousandth time. The history of Entenmann’s, the price per pound of Entenmann’s, the ingredients of Entenmann’s; I knew more about Entenmann’s doughnuts than most of the Entenmann’s themselves.

It might appear from the entry above, that the Entenmann’s box was not a metaphor for anything at all, but a paragraph later the narrator speculates about becoming an Entenmann:

I wondered what it would be like to be an Entenmann. Their house probably smelled like cookies. Saturday mornings, we Entenmanns would all jump out of our beds and race down to the kitchen, where we’d spend all morning dipping doughnuts in huge vats of frosting made of partially hydrogenated vegetable shortening, sugar, niacin, thiamin mononitrate, ribaflavin, folic acid, water, cocoa, nonfat milk, high-fructose corn syrup, dextrose and polysorbate 60.

So I’m thinking that, here, the Entenmann’s box represents a window into a better, less religiously observant family life.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

 

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