Eat More Vegetables!

The punchline is:  Does carrot cake count as a vegetable?

A New York Times article reported that vegetables are struggling to gain appeal and that baby carrots just tried to reposition themselves as junk food. A $25 million campaign was launched advertising baby carrots with heavy metal music, a phone app and a commercial showing a young man dodging baby-carrot bullets shot by an attractive woman in tight jeans.

I don’t know if that campaign will increase baby carrot sales or not. But here are some of my ideas to ramp up vegetable consumption:

Slap a “Go Green” label on broccoli. Promise consumers they’ll be saving the earth by eating vegetables that look like trees. Show commercial spots of environmental devastation and then crying children who won’t have an earth to call home if we don’t all start “going green” by eating broccoli.

Peas. Lots of nostalgia and fairy tale/nursery rhyme possibilities here. We can tout peas as the vegetables of royalty and show beautiful (and of course, sexy) young women only being able to sleep and wake up beautiful because they’ve eaten their peas and there are no more that could have inadvertently rolled under their mattresses.

Or we could make peas more kid-friendly and appetizing: “I eat my peas with honey; I’ve done it all my life. It makes the peas taste funny, but it keeps them on my knife.” Now – wouldn’t that be fun? Little lunch-sized pea and honey snack packs with plastic knives. Kids are gonna love ‘em!

The Red Hot Chile Peppers are a natural fit for promoting chili peppers.

And it should be easy enough to bring back “Popeye” cartoons to promote spinach. The hard task will be making the public think a pipe-smoking bald sailor with a smoker’s voice is cool and aspirational. I have no idea how they did it the first time.

In conclusion, launching vegetable campaigns ought to be as easy as sweet potato pie. All advertisers need to do is give the public something they can really sink their teeth into. Ha, ha. Sink their teeth into. Get it?