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Sit down, shut up, and eat your damn fruit.

In a recent Yahoo News article (”Stores Use Fresh Produce to Lure Shoppers” - AP), I read the following:

Trying to entice shoppers, produce companies are putting freshly sliced fruit into fun packages for kids and packaging carrot and celery sticks to fit in a car cup-holder.

….serving packages…have pictures of kids on them. The products will be in supermarkets this year; Sunkist [a leading company trying this scheme] is working on a version for grown-ups.

I was firstly disgusted to see how quickly the produce companies are jumping on the “Fight Obesity Bandwagon,” but I was even more disgusted to see the marketing scheme. Sure, there are marketing schemes for everything when you walk into supermarkets or anywhere else, but just because a child of mine likes seeing a picture on the front of some average, run-of-the-mill fruit cup, does not mean he or she is going to have it bought for them. Said child can sit down and shut up in ye olde shopping cart.

Just as disgusting is the fact that there needs to be a separate version–and I’m guessing separate price, too–for adults. What the hell? Fruit is fruit. Fruit in a cup is fruit in a cup. A picture of children on a cup isn’t going to deter me, as an adult, to eat what’s inside. Do the marketing experts really think we’re that idiotic? I’m assuming so. Of course, I know they have prior evidence of such idiotic consumer behavior to back up their thinking.

Rick Harris, who I have fondly labeled a dumbass, says, “The kids love them. They open them up just like they would a package of potato chips, but there’s no fat in them, and it’s all healthy.”

Most kids don’t dislike fruits and vegetables; it’s just that parents won’t be, well, parents. It’s not about what size cup the fruit has come in (size truly doesn’t matter!), or what picture is on the front of that cup, it still has to do with taste. That is, after all, one of the essential elements of food–yes, even healthy food.

Maybe parents need to just stop buying junk food only and find a balance. Then maybe they wouldn’t have to worry so much about their lard-butt children. Junk food isn’t bad in moderation. So long as your child is eating healthily as well and working that ball of energy that all children should have, then nothing in life is truly wrong.

Funny thing is this marketing scheme hasn’t worked on the kids, really, because the kids are not the ones with the dollars in their hands. It worked on the parents, however, because apparently adults are weak-minded in this day and age. The parents thought, “Eureka! They’ve created something that my children will finally eat that’s healthy too! Nothing like paying out of my ass for this minutely-sized cup of fruit!” All of this, and the children would have likely eaten the fruit in the first place, so long as it was bite-sized enough for their mouths (it’s not brain science, parents, really).

Rick the Dumbass Harris, closes with, “Everyone’s talking about superfoods. This is like the super-snack food.” Oh please. Couldn’t he just cut to the chase and say, “We stuck some fruit in a cup and hope you’re stupid enough to buy it.” Oh, that’s right. We’re supposed to make consumers feel intelligent.

Superfoods? Could there be a more idiotic statement on the planet? Oh, yes, he’s not a politician [yet]. Rather, could he make a dumber statement, being himself? No, I don’t believe so.

These so-called Superfoods have been around since the dawn of time–they’re usually referred to as fruits–and they were Superfoods until everyone got greedy and started wanting faster, year-round turnouts (resulting in too-early harvests), no bug problems (thus the use of sometimes-dangerous pesticides), and no wait periods between harvesting and planting (thus totally raping crop areas to where we now have few natural minerals in our crop soils). So are these somehow-preserved fruit bits Super? I don’t think so, Ricky. What would be more super–outside of having Rick Harris off the Sunkist management team, so we wouldn’t have to hear his bullshit anymore–is to have non-preserved-to-hell-and-back fruit for our kids, so they don’t glow in the dark when the light is turned off.

But the Dumbassdom doesn’t stop there. Helen Mont-Ferguson, nutrition director for Boston’s public schools, says younger children have trouble peeling or eating whole fruit by themselves.

Can we say No shit, Sherlock? That’s where parents and teachers and older children are supposed to step up to the plate and do it for small children and teach adolescent children how to do it for themselves. But no, instead of being responsible adults and taking the time out of our oh-so-busy and important lives, we would all rather have companies like the Sunkist Corporation create highly-priced, pre-cut fruits that are preserved to the gill for our children to eat.

Put that into perspective. We’d rather spend hundreds more a year to give our children semi-healthy food that we didn’t have to prepare (and, oh, I don’t know, be parental about) than we would to take ten to twenty minutes out of our day for our children and to save money, something that everyone always seems to need more of. Yes, this all makes a lot of sense.

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