The Tiger Left the Cereal Box in Santiago — Epoche A2
In a supermarket in Santiago, the frosted flakes box has no tiger on it. In Buenos Aires, the same cereal, in the same box, still has him: orange, striped, smiling, one paw raised. Two boxes, one product, one animal missing. A law took him. Since June 2016, Chile has printed a black octagon on the front of packages that are high in sugar, salt, saturated fat or calories. The octagon has the shape of a stop sign. The words inside are plain: ALTO EN AZÚCARES, high in sugars; ALTO EN SODIO, high in salt. That much is only information. The rest is not information. A package that carries one of those octagons: cannot be advertised to children under fourteen; cannot be sold in schools; cannot use a cartoon character, a mascot or a free toy to sell itself. The third line is the one that removed the tiger. He was not a decoration. He was the advertisement, standing in the aisle at a child's eye level. The law treats him as one. So a warning label here does more than tell a shopper something they could have worked out from the back of the box. It changes what the box is allowed to do to the person looking at it.