Who Lives in an Over-Licensed Mechandising Environment Under the Sea?

Sponge! Bob! Square! Pants! That's who.

To the surprise of no one, 82 percent of the "food" (note the quotes) directed at kids with a movie/tv/toy tie-in are considered unhealthy by Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity.

As BNET notes: "Marketing to kids is lucrative — why would anyone give that up if they didn’t have to? As any mom knows, all you need to do is slap Tony the Tiger or Hannah Montana on a package of chips and kids want it. It’s a fight to get out the grocery store alive."

I'd like to punch Tony the Tiger in the face. Those "WE ARE TIGER" commercials have Jackson thinking that the key to sports success is downing a bowl of sugar-coated corn flakes. It would help if he had his cereal with milk, but the idea is as radical to him as adding peanut butter to his spaghetti.

There was a time when I was going to avoid all crap foods for the kids, but that, like many other good intentions, has gone out the window.

I can't count how many boxes of fruit snacks, which lack any fruit whatsoever, Jackson's begged us to buy. When I was I kid, the only fruit snacks available were the mostly real deal, the sticky grainy circle of strained grapes or apricots or raspberries that you had to peel off a sheet of cellophane and took quite a lot of effort to chew.

Today's pseudo-fruits are these rubbery, oddly colored turds vaguely shaped like Spider-Man, or Batman, or SpongeBob. They taste like shit, and thankfully, Jackson agrees. Yet he continues to insist on trying every different box, in the hopes that he'll find a variety he'll like.

The kids are also big fans of Gogurt, which is a kind of sugary yogurt that you suck out of a tube. The SpongeBob version is quite popular in my house, particularly the Bikini Bottom Berry flavor.

Bikini Bottom Berry. I'm a fan of SpongeBob SquarePants, and I've seen probably every episode multiple times, but I cannot recall any reference to Bikini Bottom Berries, either the planting or the harvesting or a special episode where SpongeBob and Patrick run out of pectin while trying to jar Bikini Bottom Berries for the winter. Yet Bikini Bottom Berry is my kids' favorite flavor. They ask for it, even if I had the misfortune of buying the generic, no-tie-in box of Gogurt and the same blue Gogurt is called just "Berry" or whatever the hell they call it.

"Is it Bikini Bottom Berry?" the kids will ask. I can't wait for the pediatrician or a teacher to ask the kids what their favorite fruit is, and they say, "Bikini Bottom Berry."

Maybe I'll try to serve them some Bikini Bottom Brussels Sprouts this week. Read more...