Monday, March 02, 2009

Name Your Vegetables.

A new study suggests that kids are more likely to eat vegetables if they are given a "cool" name. LiveScience.com reports, "186 four-year-olds were given regular carrots and, on other lunch days, they were given the same vegetables renamed X-ray Vision Carrots. On the latter days, they ate nearly twice as many."

Ah-doy-ee!

Who wouldn't want an X-ray Vision Carrot?! I want one right now.

I don't care how old you are, food tastes better when you make it fun. If a side dish has a funny name, I'm on board. If a meal has a theme, I'm there. Who can forget the baby shrimp, baby corn, baby back ribs episode of Full House? And I'm 27, but I still make my pancakes into shapes. Is this weird? Probably. But go make a dinosaur out of batter and then come talk to me.

Some vegetables are blessed with awesome names but if you have to help the others out I say do it. Swiss Chard could use an ounce of cool. Rhubarb sounds like a lost Golden Girl, while Sweetcorn is too innocent, and Broccolini probably gets the crap beat out of him. Obviously the vegetable with the coolest name and the most street cred is Radicchio. Radicchio could release an album if it wanted.

If vegetables were renamed after American Gladiators, we'd all be eating our daily 5 to be sure. Just a big salad packed with Blaze, Turbo, Gemini, Zap, and Laser with a little Ranch dressing on the side.

Clearly, I have the culinary sophistication of a four-year-old.

7 comments:

Criss L. Cox said...

Rhubarb is a cool name! Not on the same level as Radicchio, but then again, who is?

Arugula is another cool one. I have no idea what it is, but if I saw it on the menu I'd order it. Because it's fun to say.

Anonymous said...

I can completely vouch for this! Just the other night we had baby corn and Cole loved it. However we had it again tonight and instead of eating it Cole marveled at it... Awwww mommy look at the baby corn, it is soooo cute!!! Then h proceeded to call me momma corn and so of course I had to start calling him baby corn. Tomorrow I think we will play baby and momma radicchio!
You should come up this weekend for a visit, Ashley is coming up and maybe Juliet.

Jess said...

-can you honestly say rhubarb without stressing the "arrrb" like a pirate? i can't.

-um, could cole BE any cuter?!!! it's really gotten to like ridiculous levels of cute now. I think it goes basket of puppies, Snuggles the fabric softener bear, Cole calling you momma corn. Check your email. talk soon!

Anonymous said...

Everyday I try to think of something interesting to do instead of teaching. Today I went online and googled myself. There are a couple famous people named Bridget Quinn, which was annoying because I had to search through like 18 pages of google results to find something about myself. I knew about the Fox News lady named Bridget Quinn, but I didn't realize there were a quite a few more Bridget Quinns who had somehow made it bigger than I have.

At any rate, I came across your blog because you mentioned me in one of the posts. I haven't read your blog in years so I figured I'd better get caught up! I think I started reading around 8:30am and I'm just coming up on the more recent posts now. It's taken me this long because children keep coming up to me asking me to "teach them to read." Ugh!

I wanted to comment on your blog about vegetables because until recently, I lived with a little vegan pipsqueak and I learned A LOT about vegetables. I also learned that if all vegans behave like this little nugget, I never want to live with another one. I have two true stories about her I think you'd find amusing, but I need your email address. (The stories are already written -- I email my sister whenever she pulls a vegan stunt.)

Jess said...

"Miss Quinn, you smell like my dad." Have you won any teaching awards yet?

Bridget Quinn! I was just talking about you the other day! That's pretty weird, don't you think? It's like The Secret: Send a thought out into the world, wait for said thought to search for web information about itself, hope said thought finds a link to your blog. That's what The Secret is about, right?

I love when people are honest about googling themselves. What are we all hoping to find? I think there's a future post there. Maybe to increase web traffic to my blog I should just start posting people's names.

Anyway, can't wait to hear what you have to say about vegans. I'm actually laughing just thinking about it. jessleighmartin@aol.com

Hope you're doing well!

Anonymous said...

No teaching awards yet. Lost out on Teacher of the Year in '06 because I forgot to give the kids Valentines. They were crushed. I told them to get a deck of cards and deal with it. (They all just stared at me.) Last year, I called in sick 9 Mondays in a row, so I obviously didn't get awarded anything other than a stern talking to.

Email will be coming tomorrow...I'll save that to do at work. --BQ

p.s. I've been looking into getting an account on that alleged "Facebook" - I assume a conversation like this would normally be held on that sort of venue?

Anonymous said...

Hello. And Bye.