Rebranding Carrots as Junk Food | Hacker News Reader

Rebranding Carrots as Junk Food

thedieline.com

59 pointstortilla57 comments

Brilliant! And fitting, since baby carrots are already the sort of "junk food of the carrot world." At least, insofar as that they're the lazy alternative to buying and cutting your own damn carrots.

(Baby carrots are just big carrots that have been pre-cut and marked way up. Info here: http://www.wisebread.com/baby-carrots-the-frugal-idea-that-i... ... which also brings to mind the semi-related issue of America's aversion to non-"perfect" produce. That's one of the reasons small, local producers have a hard time selling to big grocery chains -- they can't afford to cull their produce of the "ugly" carrots, tomatoes, peppers, etc.)

This aversion to ugly fruit and veg invaded UK and Australia year ago as well. So now, when you go to a supermarket, you will have beautiful tastless food, whereas when you go to Spain or Italy, you have ugly delicious fruit and veg.

I totally agree. I live in Australia, and I didn't realise this until I went to India a little while ago.

The fruit there seemed smaller, but far, FAR more tastier.

So it's not just the looks, but also the size that seems to matter in Australian supermarkets.

We're ridiculous sometimes. I was at the farmers market and wanted some strawberries. I noticed none at the stand but the vendor had some stacked on a table behind her. Why weren't those being sold? She said she'd forgot to wash them off and customers don't like fruit with dirt on it.

Clever idea. I subscribe to the wacky theory that kids prefer junk food to vegetables because it tastes better rather than because they've been brainwashed by evil advertisers, but either way this will provide useful data.

While I agree with you, I notice that I eat disproportionately few carrots than their taste would suggest (they are pretty delicious), and it's mostly because of the inconvenience of cleaning them and their relative unavailability. If I had a vending machine with carrots, I'd definitely choose them over the other snacks most of the time.

Is it really that inconvenient to clean a carrot? Just peel it and eat it. I can peel a carrot quicker than most people can even decide what to have at a vending machine.

if you have access to a knife

Don't you carry one with you?

You don't need to peel carrots, really. They are nice to eat just like they are!

How about all the pesticides though?

Carrots are roots. Even if the plant has been sprayed, you're not eating the part of the plant that got sprayed.

When I was young we used to pick carrots from the field and wash them in the irrigator before eating them, good times.

You're leaving out the bit where you find a knife and a cutting board, and then you wash the knife and the cutting board, and the bit where you throw away all the peel you cut off, and the bit where some of the peel winds up on the floor so you have to bend over and pick it up, and... wait, can't you just buy packaged prepeeled babby carrots anyway? They sell 'em at my local supermarket.

I can't tell if this is tongue-in-cheek or not, but I'll reply seriously anyway:

When I want a carrot I grab one out of the fridge, grab the peeler off of the counter, pull my compost box out from under the sink and peel it directly into the compost. Why would you need a cutting board?!

The longer I live in the "real world" the more cutting carrots while watching bad television has become a part of my routine. I can really eat them faster than I have the patience to shell them.

And if we want to make them junk food, all we have to do is up the sodium content to about 25% of that of a bag of chips, and kids will be gobbling them up just as if they were any other snack food. Of course, they won't be such a great thing anymore.

>all we have to do is up the sodium content to about 25% of that of a bag of chips, and kids will be gobbling them up just as if they were any other snack food

I thought the process was mince the food up, add salt, modified soya protein and flavour enhancers, some sunset yellow (or other diabolical food colouring) and then reshape the resulting mush into mini carrot-ettes.

Finish by frying in a vat of lard, dip in HCFS and then in sugar and crisp on the grill.

Voila, fast-food-ised carrots.

It'd also be nice if when you do find carrots, they were packaged with something other than ranch dressing as a dip (e.g. carrots + hummus).

It's not necessary to go over the top with cleaning carrots. Just run them under some water and wipe off any excess dirt with some paper towel (or, as I've been guilty of doing, a t-shirt). Definitely don't peel them, plenty of nutrition there.

How much dirt isn't excess?

If it bothers your teeth beyond the point of enjoyment.

When I pick carrots from the garden, I just wipe dirt off with my hands and eat them. So delicious.

I agree. I'd love to have the option of getting carrots (if they were in decent condition) out of the vending machine at work.

Why don't you just keep a bag of carrots from the supermarket in a desk drawer instead? If put them in a paperbag instead of the plastic they usually come in (or else condensation will rot them), they'll easily keep for a week.

Sugar acts somewhat like a slightly addictive drug, that may cause them to prefer the other foods in addition to the advertising.

See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/?tool=pm...

Or maybe they just prefer 'em because they're sweet and tasty.

C'mon folks, don't you remember being a kid? Sweet food tasted awesome, whether you'd seen an advertisement for it or not. Human beings, and especially children, are hard-wired to find sweets delicious and carrots merely tolerable. This made perfect sense to our prehistorical ancestors, since if they ever did manage to get access to something sweet it would be an excellent source of much-needed calories which should be prioritised.

It's part of the picture. It's not only the taste, but the availability of the junk food as well. The marketing doesn't hurt though (i.e. you weren't thirsty until you saw that Coke ad and now your mouth is watering).

Damn it, now I'm thirsty.

Its not as simple as you might think: Children have been shown to prefer the taste of carrots wrapped in McDonald packaging.

Science!

http://archpedi.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/161/8/792

>kids prefer junk food to vegetables because it tastes better

I'm reminded of the studies in which people perceive that wine poured from an expensive bottle tastes better than wine poured from a cheap bottle - even though they're the same wine. Tasters actually processed the two wines in different parts of their brains.

I'm kind of a crazy person when it comes to eating healthily, but I wasn't always. It's clear to me now, sitting on the other side of the chasm, that your notion of what "tastes good" is completely fabricated by marketing and a lifetime of consuming foods that soak your brain in feel-good chemicals.

I literally can't stand the taste of junk food now, on the rare occasions I'll try a bit just for contrast.

It'll take a year or two for your body to reacclimate to what real food tastes and feels like, but once it does, you'll realize what a terrible fog you've been in all this time. That's exactly what happened to me, and I'd bet money that would happen to you if you gave it a shot.

I agree. Same thing happened to me. Once I learned how nutrition and diseases are linked I started paying attention to what I ate. My wife reversed her type 2 diabetes entirely through nutrition as have thousands of others. I reversed years of severe food allergies. We know many people who have reversed heart disease and cancers through intensive nutritional therapies as well.

This "rebranding" is obnoxious. If I was kid I'd be pissed. Kids can tell when you're bs'ing them. They're exposed to enough propaganda already.

The path to healthy food isn't in telling kids what to do, but exposing them to something better. Look at what Japanese kids eat. I _know_ kids would prefer salmon-roe onigiri and fried rice to potato chips and twinkies.

Is Japan a good example? If any country is second to the USA in packaging products to appeal to kids (or, as you put it, "BSing them"), it's Japan:

http://japanfix.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/DSC_0019.jpg http://s7.thisnext.com/media/largest_dimension/23448865.jpg

(I think this is a good thing if, and only if, the food is healthy and worthwhile to eat - as here. It's easy to rail against branding and advertising - it's harder to prove it doesn't work.)

The first of your links isn't sushi, by the way. It's a kit for making grape-flavored candy in the shape of sushi.

I learn something new every day - thanks! If I were going to be evil and do a ninja edit, I could pick any of 100s of weird, in-your-face Japanese products, but it appears I have been hoisted by my own petard on this one.

Yes. Yes it is. Just because they have lots of fancy candy packaging doesn't mean that Japanese kids eat tons of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_obesity#Japan

Just look at photos of what the Jap kids eat for lunch:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lunchinabox/1378172475/

This is actually what they eat for lunch everyday. It's amazing.

I think I misunderstood your message. What Japanese kids eat seems to be excellent and I support healthy food choices. What I sensed, however, was an unfair antagonism towards branding and packaging design as a way to achieve that. If my inference was wrong, apologies!

Cool picture but I have no idea what any of that is. Obviously rice 3 of the plates have what I would guess are eggs, beyond that there are some random vegetables about like putting lettuce, tomatoes and pickles on a hamburger.

My favorite bit about carrots is the idea that they'll help your night vision is propaganda from WWII:

http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/carrots.asp

If carrots actually tasted like they were supposed to, sweet and carroty, it wouldn't be so hard to get kids to eat them.

Especially baby carrots, which are the junk of the carrot world, do not taste good.

Why do baby carrots taste different from regular carrots? I thought they were regular carrots, just pre-peeled/cut.

Because they use the lowest quality carrots to make them (since they are usually sold cheaply), and because by cutting and peeling they can hide defects.

Also peeling them causes them to deteriorate somewhat.

They also bleach them for color and tumble them to round the edges.

I think it's all in the freshness. My parents grow their own fruit and vegetables which taste amazing. The ones you buy in the shop, having probably been left in cold storage for who knows how long, are dull and uninspiring in comparison.

I speculate that the varieties are different too. A carrot grown for a supermarket has to have properties that its home-grown cousin needn't, for instance a uniform size and shape to facilitate packaging, and not shrivelling after a week in storage. These probably win over taste when it comes to selecting the variety.

I think it's a silly idea for children since children aren't quite dumb enough to buy the idea that carrots are tasty just because you advertise 'em (I didn't buy my parents' assertions that cleaning up my room was fun, either, and teenagers don't seem to buy the "abstinence is cool" message).

But I have to admit that it _did_ make me go to my fridge and get some carrots.

Interesting idea, although I think the slogan (Eat 'Em Like Junk Food) might be so corn that it turns kids off of the product. If you want to reach kids you have to speak their language and whens the last time you heard a 12y.o. say anything like that?

For me, the corniness of the phrase isn't as much a turn-off as the fact that it validates gorging on junk food.

1. Nice packaging has a marketing merit no matter the product. Think how a beautiful gift wrap elevates an average gift. So why no have a nice packaging without the "Junk" logo?

2. Never a good idea to assume that the kids are stupid.

>Think how a beautiful gift wrap elevates an average gift.

Beautiful gift wrap always makes me think "what a waste of resources" it's even worse if it's plastic.

I don't think we should be trying to trick people into following what we've decided they should eat.

Reminds me of "Veggie O's"

Ever see Daddy Daycare with Eddie Murphy? Carrots and Broccoli Cereal.

Enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7tjFE6QMcE&feature=relat...

Several diet books I read actually advise against carrots (maybe they are high in fructose? forgot the reason), so I was expecting this to be serious.

Nice, but it may be more effective to limit advertising of unhealthy food during cartoons and shows targeted directly at children.

No, no it wouldn't. It would be more effective to stop subsidizing unhealthy food. The long-term effects of such legislation are almost guaranteed to be a net-negative because of edge cases. There are already way too many laws. You should always look first at what can be removed, rather than what can be added.

No, what would be effective is if the parents of children stopped letting 'em eat junk food all the fricking time. "Mummy, I want a Snickers". Bad fricking luck, kid, eat your fricking vegetables.

No kidding. If parents would do their damn job and not let kids eat junk just because they want it, we wouldn't have an issue.

In fairness, "we" don't have the issue.

It's somebody else's issue, and I refuse to accept any responsibility or worry over the fact that somebody else's kids are fat. I have enough problems of my own, I've got better things to do than accept part-ownership of the easily-soluble problems of others.

I believe this has been law here in the UK for some years but the childhood obesity rates are still high. The problem is that the most convenient food in terms of both price and preparation time is the least healthy.

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