The campaign is brilliant, as advertising goes. It preserves the long history of the Honey Maid brand—now under the guidance of Mondelēz International, the multinational conglomerate that owns it—while putting that brand on the right side of history. And, as of this week, it also includes a whimsical new strain of commercial message: a plug-in called the “Wholesome Button” (available at the website wholesomize.it). Install the plug-in into your browser, go to a web page, click on the button … and, instantly, much of the text on the page is transformed into “wholesome” messages about love and acceptance and inclusivity and the current state of the American experiment.

The “Wholesome Button” did this, delightfully, to The Atlantic’s homepage:

It did this to The New York Times’:

It did this to Buzzfeed’s:

The plug-in works on any other web page, too. So if you wanted to Wholesomize, say, a white supremacist blog, you could do that. (The app ensures that all the converted links in a given page, this being #branding, will lead back to Honey Maid’s YouTube page—featuring the ads that celebrate wholesomeness of the societal, and also apparently the edible, variety.)

A plug-in that lets you turn any page on the Internet into an ad for Honey Maid graham crackers is, of course, ridiculous. It is also a totally perfect metaphor for the moment we’re in when it comes to the public’s relationship with the companies that sell us stuff. Because it’s not just Mondelēz and Honey Maid who have been defining the “wholesome” on behalf of the consumers. Many brands—or, more properly, many #brands—have been hard at work fashioning themselves not just as purveyors of products, but as arbiters of moral values. Recognizing that they’re operating during a time of great change, they’re figuring out how to sell one extremely appealing thing: a particular vision of life as it should be. A reassurance that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Honey Maid’s Internet-happifying plug-in is only the latest attempt to offer that assurance. Panera, until recently most famous for its recognition that the only thing better than broccoli cheddar soup is broccoli cheddar soup served in an enormous, hollowed-out hunk of sourdough, has recently been proclaiming that it sells “food as it should be.” T.J. Maxx, Marshall’s, and HomeGoods, in the lead-up to 2015’s holiday season, came out with a series of spots announcing that they would be closed on Thanksgiving, “because family time comes first.” (Implicit in the ads, of course, was the message that those stores would also very much be open for business again on Black Friday.)

These ads, on the whole, both streamline and amplify the moral logic of the consumer economy: We are what we eat, maybe, but we definitely are what we consume. They recognize that the stuff we buy—and the food we eat, be it Panera bread bowls or Honey Maid graham crackers or whatever else—are part of a larger context, and a larger conversation. At stake is not just “food as it should be,” but life. Campbell’s, recognizing that, has recently featured soup ads (revealing hashtag: #realreallife) starring two seemingly loving fathers and their adorable toddler. Kohl’s ads from the 2015 holiday season featured an interracial, same-sex couple. Mattel recently featured a boy, for the first time, in an ad for a Barbie doll. After the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges was announced last June, brands from American Airlines to Bravo to Jell-O to Target went out of their way to celebrate the landmark ruling. (So did Oreo, which had previously come out, so to speak, with a “pride cookie.”)