I think it was Neil Armstrong who said, “Houston, did y’all pack my Gatorade Xtreme?”
OK, maybe that’s not his most famous quote, but I’m sure Armstrong and his Tang-swilling Apollo crewmates would feel right at home eating out of a typical school lunchbox these days.
It's time for me to get back into the lunchbox mindset, and I'm starting to feel like I’m preparing my brown-baggers for a space voyage every time I pack lunches for school. Nearly everything I put in looks and is named like it’s packaged to endure a three-year journey to Mars.
Take Go-Gurt “portable yogurt,” made by Yoplait. You rip off the end and suck it out of a plastic tube. The Danimals
Crush Cup is even worse. No complicated spoon needed, and no crumbs to float away and get stuck in the instrument panel.
The flavor names sound like a nuclear acidophilus reaction is imminent. While mom is content with blueberry or peach yogurt, kids have been hypnotized by commercials to believe they need “watermelon meltdown” and “extreme red rush,” whatever fruit that’s supposed to be.
Fruit Roll-Ups and Fruit-by-the-Foot are favorites with my kids. It’s basically fruit (and sugar) jerky, but the name’s the thing with this product. My picky eater wasn’t interested until he found out I had bought “Tropical Tango Twister,” which may or may not be in the citrus family.
I guess adjectives I grew up with, like “great-tasting grape,” aren’t convincing enough. Food marketed to kids can’t just be food anymore. It has to be extreme and fierce and thermostabilized with lots of other descriptors you’d hear in the halls of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
For a few years now we’ve seen snack foods miniaturized even as our butts and guts have maximized, so that lunchboxes are full of Mini Oreos, Baby Goldfish crackers and, occasionally, baby carrots with itty-bitty ranch dippin’ cups.
By the way, you should know that Pepperidge Farm has “flavor blasted” those innocent little Goldfish.
The metamorphosis of beverages is the most hilarious, though. To improve “the science of hydration,” the guys at Gatorade have taken the same four or five fruit flavors we’ve always had and added “fusion” or an X to the name to make it seem different.
Thanks to the science of marketing, I have to search Mapco’s drink cooler for Cascade Crash or X-Factor flavors on the way to my kids' games.
Of course, as a child I was enthralled with the Sprite Lymon ads. Who didn’t beg their mom to glue a half a lemon to half a lime?
In fact, it’s probably good that my TV-loving generation wasn’t the first to land on the moon. It wouldn’t have sounded as cool to hear, “That’s one small step for man, one nice Hawaiian Punch for mankind.”
