The Stuff of Life

Paul Lukas’ life changed forever the moment four years ago when he walked into a New York shoe store and saw “that gizmo they use to measure your shoe size.”

“A near perfect combination of industrial and aesthetic,” the chrome and black metal Brannock Device captured his imagination. “I thought: This is a gorgeous object,” says Lukas. Beyond that, he realized it was a universal object. “There’s not a single person in our culture whose foot hasn’t been in one.”

Lukas offers the Brannock Device as the ultimate testament to his current life’s work: inconspicuous consumption. That’s also the punning title of his new book, published by Crown and subtitled “An Obsessive Look at the Stuff We Take for Granted, from the Everyday to the Obscure.”

He defines inconspicuous consumption as “paying attention to the details of consumer culture, about noticing certain aspects of products and services we might otherwise overlook, things that are either so obscure that we never see them or so ubiquitous that we’ve essentially stopped seeing them.”

For instance, he contemplates the strings on Animal Crackers boxes and discovers they were put there as a marketing ploy in the 1920s when it was thought children would hang boxes as ornaments on Christmas trees. Writing short-takes on 105 different consumer products and services, he muses on the whys and wherefores of sauerkraut juice, Band-Aids, Hydrox versus Oreos, the changemaker he used to call a “ka-chunker,” embalming fluid, dental floss, one-slice toasters, garlic presses, bowling pins and tampons.

To Lukas, consumer products speak volumes. “Consumerism, because it’s such an intensely personal experience, does offer insight into one’s identity. People say: ‘I’m a Coke person.’ Or: ‘I’m a Pepsi person.’ They concede part of their identity to these products.”

After encountering the Brannock, Lukas told friends about it and saw light bulbs of recognition above their heads as they recalled the first time they had their feet measured as children. Invented in 1926, the Brannock embodies, Lukas says, “a potent combination of primal and nostalgic.” A lifelong bachelor in upstate New York, Charles Brannock, who died in 1992, was “married only to his invention.”

Realizing that he was onto something, Lukas found himself propelled onto a crash course of considering and writing about gadgets, foods, services and plain-out weird products. He has become a practical scholar about not only the products themselves but their packaging, marketing, history and lore. As he says of one product, Blind Robins Smoked Ocean Herring, whose package sports a two-color illustration of a blindfolded, red-breasted bird: “Fortunately, this product doesn’t have to be consumed to be enjoyed. As is so often the case, the real pleasure lies in the package design.”

It all started as a lark. First, Lukas, who once worked as a book editor, published a zine about fascinating consumer products. An editor of New York Press then saw a copy of the homemade magazine and engaged Lukas to write a column.

Later, Lukas moved as a contributor to New York magazine where he wrote a column until earlier this year when a new editor dropped it. Lukas still writes regularly for cyberspace outlets and appears on Thursdays on CNN’s “Biz Buzz,” where he brings items that delight him, such as Hostess Cup Cakes.

His favorite thing about eating the dessert was “removing the cakes from the cardboard base on which they sat and then running my finger along the piece of cardboard, thereby salvaging the pastry residue.” He calls this the “finger swipe.” He discovered, however, that the cardboard base was replaced several years ago with a plastic tray. The change occurred apparently because the spongy cakes were getting smashed during distribution. But no one at Hostess could explain to him, he writes, “why the other Hostess goodies, which boast similar squishiness factors” still have the cardboard. He writes, “My advice to those of you who think Twinkie residue is finger-lickin’ good is to get it while you can.”

Lukas, 33, takes a boyish delight in assessing products. “There were market niches that I never knew existed; problems that I didn’t know were problems.” One favorite is ‘kraut juice, a natural laxative derived from fermented cabbage. “By any name,” says Lukas, “the stuff is rank.”

But he says his product review is not about the derisive identification of kitsch items. “I don’t really have an agenda except to get people to think.”

He delights in his little discoveries. Consider a television ad for M&Ms;, showing a green M&M; female character responding to a male character’s question: Are the rumors true? The popular culture rumor, Lukas says, is that green M&Ms; are an aphrodisiac. The ad never addresses it directly.

“It’s very post-modern, if you’re into that kind of thing: A popular culture rumor about a product filters itself back into an ad campaign.”

More often, he says, a company attempts to impose behavior and language onto consumers. As an example, he cites Wendy’s fast-food campaign for “Biggie” French fries. When Lukas walks into a Wendy’s, he will ask for a large French fries. The counter person will say: Want a Biggie? Lukas replies: Just the biggest one you’ve got. “It’s this ‘Wendy’s-speak’ that irks me.”

A friend once described Lukas as having “a minutiae fetish,” and, says Lukas whose one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment is a cluttered museum of his studies, “that’s not too far off.’

His own consumer demographics are rather uncomplicated: college-educated in political science at the State University of New York at Binghamton; single; two cats; no children.

After four years of his obsession, he is swamped with products being sent to him by friends and marketers. From all this he says he has learned: “The American Dream--that anyone can sell anything to anybody as long as the price is right--is still alive and well. We are all too eager or willing to buy in, at either end of the equation, as buyer or seller, or sometimes as both.”