The National Pork Board, the folks responsible for the slogan “Pork. The other white meat” are at it again. And they’ve really outdone themselves. It’s like they sat around a room going, “Let’s see if we can come up with something that’s actually worse.” And they have.

The new slogan is, wait for it, “Pork. Be inspired.”

Aside from the fact that the slogan is unoriginal, confusing, and, well, wholly uninspired, what the hell does it have to do with pork? It looks sort of like the “Intel Inside” logo. The new slogan will no doubt inspire many things: Laughter, derision, bewilderment, and regret come to mind.

According to The Pork Network, the slogan is the result of extensive market research. In fact, one might posit (and one surely is here) that a slogan that’s the result of going to committee is going to lack any sort of sense. It’s like, after 23 years of “the other white meat,” they looked around for a new slogan and decided maybe Apple was a good model. “Think different” worked for them, right? If nothing else, the NPB has made the “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner” people really look like geniuses.

“In my 15 years [at NPB] we have never had this type of segmentation study before,” said Ceci Snyder, National Pork Board’s vice president of domestic marketing, of the report that came to the conclusion that the target audience involves the 28 percent of U.S. households who eat 68 percent of all fresh pork consumed at home and 50 percent of fresh pork consumed away from home.

“They told us, cooking isn’t something I have to do, it’s something I like to do…but they want some fresh ideas,” she told The Pork Network. And those fresh ideas, goes the thinking, are embodied in “Be inspired.”

There’s the aspect of focusing on pork’s versatility in home cooking, and the “inspirational” aspect may focus on recipes. But it’s kind of a stretch in justifying the slogan.

The NPB has committed $25 million to a major media campaign around the slogan, including TV (network morning shows, and cable food channels) and print magazines such as “Everyday with Rachel Ray,” “Better Homes and Gardens” and “People.”

“Pork is our brand, and we want to be crystal clear what it stands for,” Snyder said. Then perhaps coming to the startling realization at that moment that “Be inspired” might not be crystal clear when it comes to pork, she added the explanation that pork is fresh, spontaneous, creative, tempting, delicious and inspired.

Then she probably wondered when anyone would ever again give her $25 million.

We have to admit, when we first saw Dunkin’ Donuts’ new menu item Sausage Pancake Bites (or, more accurately, Meat Munchkins), we thought it was a parody ad campaign along the lines of Jamba Juice’s Cheeseburger Smoothie. Sadly, it is not. It’s more along the lines of KFC’s Double Down devilry.

As Gothamist was quick to point out, each Meat Munchkin (a mini sausage link battered in some maple syrup-infused dough concoction and deep fried) has 100 calories and 7 grams of fat. That’s one “bite.” They come three to an order for $1.59. Six for $3.

Maybe they are going into business selling those stretchy waisted fat jeans?

In DD’s honor today we present rapper Slim Dunkin’s anti-Twitter anthem “Twitter That,” because as much as Slim wants gangsters to stop tweeting we just as fervently hope that Dunkin’ will go back to doing what it does best — getting accolades for ‘brilliant’ social marketing  — and stay away from poisoning America. Though you can now make a case that it’s equally good at that.

We were late to this sausage party and the voting has ended, but Woot has crowd-sourced a design for a new meat-themed shirt (above), and though only the extraordinarily droll design above has made the cut the leavings are certainly worth a gander.

Most of the designs are pretty stupid and feature either bacon or zombies (Woot mentioned the latter in its guidelines and the former, well, we’ve covered that, no?), but some, while not having the conceptual hook or humor of the winner, are nonetheless fine logos for imaginary steakhouses serving unicorn.

It’s the description of the winning design that really makes it though. It goes a little like this in a nutshell: After much hemming and hawing and focus-grouping, the beef council has determined that Americans’ biggest problem with beef is … branding. Hence, the new and simplified beef chart.

That’s right! Forget the subsets, the minutiae, the different cuts of meat. That’s so 1950s! From now on forget “It’s what’s for dinner,” forget “Where’s the beef,” HERE’S your new slogan: “MEAT. I’d eat that.”

According to a report from American Express the wealthiest Americans are gorging on more processed meat patties than ever. What the company refers to as the “ultra-affluent” spent nearly 25 percent more on fast food than they had the year before. Am-Ex defines the “ultra-affluent” as those who charge more than $7,000 a month on their credit cards. What? Did you expect the credit card company to call its best customers “bourgeois climbers”?

A new YouTube video introduces Jamba Juice’s newest product: the Cheeseburger Chill. The spot introducing the drink made from hamburgers is part Mad magazine parody, part lame attempt at hoax, as if the maker couldn’t decide which to go for.

One thing is certain though: Jamba Juice would like you to believe that drinking a smoothie made of a hamburger is the equivalent of ordering a smoothie from McDonald’s. Both are gross, but then so is Jamba Juice. So rather than point out the differences between its sugary fruit drinks and McDonald’s equally-sugary-but-cheaper fruit drinks, Jamba Juice takes a cheap shot. Now we’d never advocate anyone purchase anything from McDonald’s, not even a smoothie, but still, this desperate cloying attempt to be viral is avoiding the fact that Jamba Juice makes some unhealthy products itself (and swaddles them in the all-natural cloak). Take for example the “smoothie” with more sugar than two pints of Ben and Jerry’s Butter Pecan ice cream.

The best part of the video, beside watching a burger blended into smoothie turn into something that resembles Jamba Juice’s Moo-Powered Chocolate Smoothie, is how well the spot lampoons the absurdly smug suburbanite vibe of the smoothie shops themselves. That and the hip-hop break at the end of the video.

Do you live near Mooresville, N.C.? Have you seen (or more precisely smelled) the billboard that emits the smell of “cooking steak?” If so you need to let us know right now what this monstrosity smells like.

It can’t be good, can it?

We are all well aware of the role that the senses play in advertising, with shopping environments beginning to resemble nothing so much as they do a casino. But this roadside billboard on River Highway created by Charlotte-based ScentAir for Bloom grocery stores  takes the cake … er, rancid filet. Fragrance oil is blown by high-powered fans during prime commute times of 7 – 10 a.m. and 4 – 7 p.m.

We’ve a few problems with this. OK, more than a few. But for starters, do people really want to smell cooking steak making their hungover ways to work at 7 a.m.? Second, can drivers and passengers in the cars screaming by on the highway really get the full effect (the answer, we suppose, is hopefully not — though it seems likely that those stopping for gas will smell it and probably pick up a Slim Jim meat stylus in the convenience store).

Which brings us to another problem: Does artificial meat smell make anyone want to do anything besides throw up? Let us know.

Now, people, we don’t much like the show Lost, and scratch our heads and make the excuse that we have to leave to continue marinating a skirt steak or something whenever someone tries to expound on the virtues of the show to us. But today, we realize that you are probably feeling a little dazed, a little angry — like a woman who has just learned that her husband has a whole second family with an albino pygmy wife in Cincinnati or something. But we digress.

We’ve always kind of felt that JJ Abrams’ goal was just to mess with as many people’s heads as possible. That there were no “answers” to be had in his psuedo-mystic-spiritual-sci-fi-adventure mindfuck. And whether the whole thing was all just one character’s dream or all of the characters were dead and in purgatory or if Abrams just wanted to be super-cute and claim it’s not purgatory because that would be Judeo-Christian mythology and the show’s great spiritualism is something else so they were in a purgatory-like place, but not “Pugatory,” well, reader, we just don’t care.

But there is one thing we do care about. Pork. And barbecuing it. Wait, that is two things.

Regardless, as much as we would never allow Kraft barbecue sauce within a distance roughly outlined by a legal restraining order of any meat we had supervision over preparing, we were tickled by Target’s Lost-themed ad of a boar running through the jungle on the island advertising said sauce. And we can’t help but concur with the commenter on New York’s Vulture who said, “At least the ads had closure.”

Manhattan meat temple Maloney & Porcelli has devised an ingenious recession-proof way to continue eating white-tablecloth lunches on your company, while your company will merely believe you’re just buying glue sticks. Type the cost of your lunch into their Expense-a-Steak generator and the site will pull receipts from innocuous spots like Staples and taxi cabs that add up to the cost of your lunch and compile them into an easy to print PDF. This is the kind of meat innovation we like to see.

Remember those old Folgers commercials where they secretly replaced the real coffee at some swanky restaurant with decaf crystals and you are then amazed by the fact that the diner doesn’t slap the waiter, but instead marvels at how great tasting the shitty instant decaf is? (This perhaps had something to do with Folgers comping the meal.)

Well we are attempting something similar here at Chez Butcher this morning, except instead of replacing the fine French press coffee that usually gets our days started with some crappy instant crystal, we’ve substituted caffeinated beef jerky.

We feel the need to preface this by saying we are not making this product up. It’s called Perky Jerky and comes in a foil pouch that seems like it’s begging for you to mix its “invigorating” contents with vodka at some cheesy club. (We will save that experiment for another day, but man it’ll be great, and we will certainly have video: “This glitzy stretch outside the Gansevoort Hotel is home to the Meatpacking District’s swanky Provocateur, host to NYC’s finest Eurotrash and B&T visitors. We’ve secretly replaced the Red Bull in the Vodka Red Bulls with super-charged dried beef strips. Will it be rich enough for our special guests?”)

But, next time. Right now we are just testing the product, billed as the “world’s first all-natural performance enhancing meat snack” as a coffee replacement. (Did they have to qualify it as the “first all-natural performance enhancing meat snack” because one loaded with chemicals preceded it?) As far as jerky goes, it’s not at all bad. It’s soft and chewy but not at all tough. There is a nice peppery spice to it, but much too soy saucy for our taste. The guarana might add some zip to the heat on our tongue, or maybe we just got a clump of chili pepper extract.

But then, perhaps we ate it a bit too quickly, though.

There is a certain hotness swelling up in our face and eyes and we feel jittery a few minutes after polishing off the 2 oz. bag. Maybe some instructions on the proper dosage are in order? Or at least a paranoid housewife musing to herself: “That’s funny, Jim never has a second strip of jerky at home.”

When a link to htmlburger.com comes up above our gmail, we expect to see hamburgers. Not some shit about css code or whatever they are selling. Google Ad Words, you’ve failed us yet again.