Food without balls? Vegan veggie diet the only option?

Can grocery store shelves get any worse than during the Christmas season?

They can during a Soccer World Cup season.

For two reasons:
1) The round, black and white traditional soccer ball image gets slapped onto everything short of fresh veggies and fruit.
2) There are no presents for you or me, only a big shiny object for a team. And they have to work really hard for it.

Even egg cartons, a form of packaging which seems to defy all the rules of marketing by resisting any and all attempts to modify it, have a German flag print.

Egg cartons!

Booze and Balls go together, obviously, so the soccer balls and the flag print on beer are a non topic. Similarly for barbeque sauces during a summer event.

Familiarization of the youngest in society with their future favorite pastime seems to start ever earlier. The soccer industrial complex makes cereal producers crunch their numbers and add a ball. On the package, not inside - we think - because even hard core soccer moms will launch into a lawsuit with the ferocity of their favorite soccer star if kiddo swallows plastic instead of cereal.

Brand name produce tends to have the full on FIFA licensed  World Cup 2014 logo, off brand items go with the generic ball & flag.

What if we wanted to eat only food without soccer trappings? We decided to find out.

The cookies, chocolate and cereal aisle is almost off limits. There is an "old ladies" brand of chocolate without soccer decoration. But the taste....

The hard liquor shelf continues to display mostly unmodified labels on the bottles, though there are a few hand-written World Cup Special offer price tags. Do they count? We let that go, no hard liquor for us anyway.

Soft drinks are covered in logos, only the off brand mineral water is unchanged, maybe because it is so cheap that one extra ink change would double the product price.

Pet food is refreshingly soccer ball and FIFA logo free.

Possibly for the last time in human soccer history. Hey, marketeers, you, hint!

Yoghurt, oh balls.

Chicken wings and drumsticks? Ballsy.

And invariably, a weird image of headless chicken bumping into an old, forgotten soccer ball comes to mind and is banished with some effort.

The fresh fruit and veggies corner is a balls-free zone. Let us hope no genetic engineers are laboring in their labs to add stripes of national flags to peaches and apples or black splotches to tomatoes. Right, the latter can be added at home using any old hammer.

The packaged cheese aisle next. Damn it, do they have their little flags year round? Why do we educated consumers not recall if the French and Italian cheeses always come with the flags?

Canned and glass jar foods, no balls, rejoice!  Wait, there are more barbeque sauces with the soccer emblem. Could it be that the cans and jars without the Cup logo are simply several years old, past their Best Before date? 

Just as we approach the open space which funnels us towards the beeps of the cash registers, there she is.

The lady with the World Cup 2014 sausage. Yes, yes, we know, sausage fest and all, but this one is real.

A World Cup 2014 Special Sausage. The German national colors do not lend themselves very well to tasty food creations, being "Black, Red, and Gold". Gold, by the way, is generally rendered as yellow on prints.

The World Cup 2014 Special Sausage, in our case, turns out to be an apple & cheese & pork body parts creation.

Not all that special.

And thus a wonderful if unintended reflection on the World Cup itself.