“There’s no way they’ll know,” the voice of chef Omar Miller is heard as he smiles creepily at the camera to the sounds of dramatically tense music. “No one will know. No one is going to figure it out. There is no way they will know, they won’t know, how will they know? How? How??”. Amal’a and Abal’, Omar Miller – What are you hiding? Is this a corpse? Maybe you’re a man-eating alien like we’ve always suspected? Wait wait wait, are Soso & Sons’ burgers made of humans?!
Oh, no. This is not Omar Miller’s secret. The real thing that “they won’t know” is that he serves his family – Sheeran Keder and their three children, Moon, Ray and Lucy – vegan hot dogs. The secret is that his family doesn’t know it’s not real meat. They won’t know, how will they know? how?? Ha ha, Omar Miller is lying to his family. Buy “hot dogs”!
The advertisement is based on a viral sound that has been running for the past two years on TikTok called “Nobody’s gonna know”. It originated in a video uploaded by the user @cgleason22, who published the sound in March 2020 with the caption “I’m debating with myself about whether or not I should open a fake account just to comment on my own videos,” and became a sound that shows life’s little cheats, for example a girl who smuggles alcohol into the pool In a tube of sun cream or a pizza chef who steals a pass and blurs his tracks. The dramatic music in the background, by the way, was taken from the tense moments before the explosion in the trashy reality show “Bad Girls Club”.
Beyond the obvious theft from Tiktok and the uncomfortable practice of ads that drag in the presenter’s family, its very basic concept is flawed. Its main message, in case you were too focused on Miller’s creepy stare, is that the new vegan hot dogs are so good that no one will be able to tell if they are their meat hot dogs or not. It’s not really flattering to the “real” Tirat Zvi hot dogs, but more than that, it uses a stinking practice that the vegetarians have suffered the most from – lies on a plate.
I’m not vegan, but I know a thing or two about being picky about what goes on my plate. I was a picky eater of the worst kind. In fact, hot dogs were one of the only five foods I was willing to eat. Over the years they tried to work on me more than once, always with good intentions. But I was stubborn. I’ll never forget the time my mom sent me to school with a sandwich that contained 25 percent fat Symphony cream cheese, instead of my regular cheese, 30 percent Napoleon. “He wouldn’t know, how could he know?”, she must have asked herself. I have known. Oh how I knew. I still remember the gag reflex. And this experience cost me a few years of actively avoiding food I don’t know. My mother achieved the opposite goal.
All my friends on the natural-vegetarian scale have experienced something similar in one way or another. Someone who didn’t bother to say that the dish actually contained meat, milk or animal products, maybe some bastard aunt who tried to replace the tofu with fuzzy pieces of chicken, maybe a lazy salesman with crappy hair. Their shock at trying to sneak a Trojan horse into their diet was always great, and justified.
Omer Miller (Photo: Ilya Melnikov)
However, since the Tirat Zvi campaign came out, I’ve already seen one or another food influencer (I can’t remember who, maybe it’s a good thing) who used Miller’s sound to lie to her partner, and replace the cream in the pasta with vegan cream. Now look, I’m not a puritan and I don’t want to blow things out of proportion – no one died, maybe he really didn’t know and it’s all in all a pretty minor event. But for those who know how it feels to be lied to in order for you to eat, it only does harm, and builds veganism as a dirty secret that the only way to get people on its side is by deception and breach of trust.
This is how you don’t win people over to the struggle, and for the moment there will be no mistake – the blame is not on vegans, and maybe not even on Tirat Zvi. They’re just trying to sell hot dogs, vegan or not, and they don’t really care about one agenda or another. The responsibility for this nonsense lies mainly with the advertising company that created this crooked message – which completely misses the target audience – and with Omar Miller himself, a chef who is supposed to care about the food, and in the end “lies” to his family in the advertisement. If you really think this is the way to go, why don’t you try this exercise at your next restaurant, ya hot dog? of course not. Because there he will surely be caught lying. But as a message in an advertisement? who cares. There’s no way they’ll know.