Sometimes, you learn new stuff at the most unexpected locations. Take yesterday, while driving back home and enjoying Ian Curtis’s morose voice, I was delivered a valuable life lesson as soon as I clapped my eyes on one of the billboards that adorn our roadside.

Only mothers eat baked beans. Yup. For the rest of us they are pretty much out of bounds.

Well, it’s either that or the marketing people who came up with the tagline for this particular brand of beans are stuck sometime in the early 20th century.

Upon reflection, something tells me that it’s likely to be the latter. How else do you explain a hilariously out-of-date commercial bearing the legend “Mom, buy 2 and get 1 free”?

In a world where we struggle to overcome that old belief that the most worthy occupation for a woman involves kitchen utensils and dusters, what exactly is the purpose behind adding ‘mom’ to the tagline?

Are the people behind the campaign so hopelessly out of touch with the times? Are they implying that it is the woman in a household who must necessarily carry out the shopping?

Or maybe they want us to believe that the men – and the women who aren’t mothers, for that matter – are too hapless to plan their household budget wisely? Whatever it is, I find the tagline patronising and insulting. Not just to mothers, but pretty much to everyone.

Would I find a similar billboard targetting daddies, or any other market segment besides mothers, equally offensive? No. Because unlike with mothers, we aren’t fighting against years of cultural prejudice teaching us that a man’s place is in the kitchen.