Letter to President Obama #24 | Subject: Fruits and Vegetables

Letter to President Obama #24 | Subject: Fruits and Vegetables

Dear President Obama,

Like many Americans, I’m concerned about the prevalence of obesity, and I’ve been thinking about ways we could help our population get in shape. I’m going to focus on one part of the problem—too many Americans are eating unhealthy foods.

I think I know why this might be—shoddy marketing. What I mean is, whoever is doing the marketing for fruits is pretty good, but we need to fire the person responsible for marketing vegetables. The fruit branding campaign was a total success. If you mention the word fruit, many people will think of delicious, fresh food that smells really, really good. There are almost no negative connotations, except for one use of the word as a homophobic slur. (And that was almost certainly an attempt by a jealous vegetable—probably a cauliflower or something—to tarnish fruit’s good name.)

On the other hand, if you mention the word “vegetable” you’ll get all sorts of negative reactions. The first association I make is with hospital patients who are brain dead, or those in permanent comas. Now I don’t know about you, but when I think about the brain dead, I don’t get particularly hungry. Contrary to popular belief, I am not a zombie.

Another popular and less-than-flattering association occurs at the dinner table. Every night, all over America parents are telling their children to “eat your vegetables,” which is essentially the equivalent of saying, “Here, child, eat this thing you don’t like very much.”

We must ask ourselves, why do people make these associations and how can we avoid them? Well, to be frank, I think it is because people generally consider vegetables to be pretty boring—I mean, I work for a publishing house and we’ve published all sorts of fruit cookbooks like The Joy of Raspberries, The Joy of Peaches, and so on, but thus far, none of our cookbooks have featured vegetables.

The reason why should be pretty obvious. I mean, consider cauliflower. There’s no joy there, just general bewilderment about its unseemly shape and texture and a lingering association from high school about the wrestling coach and his nasty cauliflower ear. Let me tell you, The Bewilderment of Cauliflower wouldn’t sell, Mr. President. Neither would The Mundanity of Lettuce.

Thankfully, we’ve got a lot of vegetables that have a lot more zip to them, and our new vegetable marketing campaign just needs to feature these. Of course, this means that we’ll be highlighting some different vegetables than we have in the past. Clearly cauliflower and lettuce are out—but I’d also like to demote onions and Brussels sprouts.

I’d like to do so because I’d like to institute two commonsense general rules when it comes to food: (1) Food should not make you cry. (2) Food should not smell like shoes. I think these are rules everyone can agree on, yes?

With that said, onions clearly violate the first rule and Brussels sprouts violate the second.

Now I know that some people will say that Brussels sprouts smell good. These people are incorrect. That is, they process smell incorrectly. Their noses are broken; perhaps they were punched and did not know it. We shouldn’t condemn this misled portion of our population or look down upon them; instead, we should help them learn to smell correctly. (We could do this by running Public Service Announcements juxtaposing Brussels Sprouts with universally-agreed-upon images of evil—Stalin, math equations, and for the younger crowd, Voldemort.)

Even if we decide not to adopt my two rules, I think we should choose vegetables that are more inclusive. Onions and Brussels sprouts are anything but inclusive. You either love them or hate them. Needless to say, they are dividers, not uniters.

I think the chili pepper would be a good representative for vegetables. Even if you don’t like them, you can’t dislike them, as they are so colorful and feisty, like the Irish. In this respect, the Chilis restaurant chain has been stealing our thunder for years.

I’d also like to play up more of the health benefits of vegetables. Yes, we always hear tidbits about cancer fighting ability and so on, but this news is always conditional and hypothetical. Give me a story that begins “research suggests” and I’ll tune out after ten seconds. I think our erstwhile vegetable marketer caught onto this, and I’ve been noticing that the ketchup manufacturers have been really pushing the Lycopene campaign. This was a valiant attempt, but Mr. President, it’s pretty clear that Lycopene is a term some marketing guy made up out of desperation. I’ve only heard it on ketchup commercials, nowhere else. Lycopene sort of sounds more like a disease than anything else. If we’re going to make up some terms, let’s at least ask the pharmaceutical companies to give us a few suggestions. They always come up with clever, uplifting product names for products that are often pretty gross.

So in conclusion, please consider my suggestions, and let me know what you think.

Thanks,


Brett Ortler