It’s National Eat Your Vegetables Day.
We don’t have this day to celebrate how we all do this already; we have this day because a huge number of us won’t/can’t/don’t put any vegetable matter into their mouths and stomachs if they can avoid it.
And it’s been this way for a long time: before I spent a large portion of my week trying to make greens palatable to my young people, I was a youngster trying to weasel his way out of lima beans and cooked carrots, just as my parents’ generation had done in their childhoods.
We’ve all been there.
And food producers have tried a lot of things to get us to embrace the vegetables anyway, including one with a name that probably didn’t do the effort any good.
The company here was American Kitchen Foods, Inc., and it tried a kind of divide-and-conquer approach to getting more kids to eat their vegetables.
Because a kid who will turn their nose up at a Brussels sprout might also shovel in French fries, made of potatoes, at their favorite fast food place.
The company decided to make French fry-like versions of all the veggies that American kids were routinely pushing away at the dinner table.
They mashed up the vegetables into pastes and then shaped the goo into fry forms.
But the real eye-opener wasn’t the recipe; it was the name.
The company sold its fry-shaped peas, for example, under the brand name “I Hate Peas.”
As in I hate peas, but maybe I’ll like these fries instead.
They also had “I Hate Beets,” “I Hate Corn,” “I Hate Carrots,” “I Hate Spinach,” and “I Hate Green Beans.”
The package called these fries “the new way to get vegetable goodness.”
Kids said oh, this is just vegetables and then by and large didn’t eat it.
It’s a funny thing that when you name your product after the thing kids say when they don’t want to consume it… they still don’t want to consume it.
This weekend in Washington state, it’s Sumner’s Rhubarb Days Festival.
Sumner calls itself the Rhubarb Pie Capital of the World, which means there will be plenty of chances to stuff yourself while listening to live music or checking out the other parts of the street fair.
Plus there will be an appearance by the mascot of the minor league baseball team the Tacoma Rainiers, Rhubarb the Reindeer.
Funky Fries and other foods that flopped (CNN)
If you love this show as much as kids don’t love certain veggies, then back us on Patreon today