VOX: Just Uncaging Fake Animals On A Cracker Box Isn’t Enough. You Must Dismantle Capitalism.

Last week, we brought you the charming story of how People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals “freed” the animals bound in metal cages on the front cover of the “animal crackers” box. The absolutely, worthless victory was hailed as a “step forward” for the animal rights movement, even though children who consume animal crackers are still, technically, eating animals.

This week, we discover that the new “cage free” box is still “problematic,” according to left-leaning explainer site, Vox, because those cracker animals are still subject to the oppressive forces of capitalism that crush their pathetic, graham cracker heads under the boot of corporate profit.

No, really.

Daisy Alioto, apparently writing for Karl Marx, says that “the symbolic significance of changing the animal cracker box design does little to dismantle the elements of capitalism that exploit animals, people, and the environment.”

The box was meant to spark “joy,” Alioto says, acknowledging that she’s related to the box’s original designer. But in these dark, oppressive times, she is reminded of little other than the caged humans, subject to the whims of profiteering corporations, when she stares at the happy animals now freed from their paper prisons.

She instead compares her shame at knowing her family contributed to the oppression of graham cracker animals to the plight of the Metropolitan Museum of Art when it reconsidered an erotic painting of a young girl by the artist Balthus in light of changing notions of consent, and child exploitation. Because, of course, that’s precisely the comparison to make.

Fortunately, Mondelez, the company that makes animal crackers, seems uninterested in making any further changes to their box to depict their animals clad in drab green, and carrying around Little Red Books, free to share in the riches of a worker’s paradise, probably because zoo animals don’t seem to fare well under socialism.