An Urban's Rural View

President Barack Obama told a group of children the other day that broccoli is his favorite food. Salute him for that, even if he was stretching to make a dietetically correct point.

That his forays in search of cheeseburgers and his love of steak have been well reported doesn't prove he was stretching, of course. No one can know for sure what another person would choose if marooned on a desert island and allowed only one food forever.

At worst giving broccoli pride of place on his favorites list was a trivial, well-intentioned stretch, forgivable if it convinces young eaters to give the green cabbage a chance.

For obvious reasons the United Fresh Produce Association saluted the choice. So did PETA. The animal-rights group is selling an Obama Broccoli t-shirt portraying the president's face as the light green stem of a head of broccoli and his hair as the darker green florets (http://tiny.cc/…). Talk about a stretch.

Washington's political class had fun with the presidential proclamation. In The Hagstrom Report my friend and colleague Jerry Hagstrom remembered that the first President Bush hated broccoli and had it banned from the White House. He quoted the second President Bush's former press secretary, Ari Fleischer, as tweeting: "What kind of POTUS [president of the United States] says his fav food is Broccoli? Same one who in 2008 complained about the price of arugula at Whole Foods."

I like broccoli, though it's not my favorite food, and I applaud the Obamas for hosting a White House "Kids' State Dinner" to encourage healthy eating. The 54 children who attended were chosen because they submitted the best "healthy recipes." At an occasion like that, a pro-vegetable stretch hardly qualifies as mortal sin.

But are there other ways to get larger numbers of kids to eat their vegetables? Consider the recent article in the online edition of Smithsonian Magazine titled "Kids Will Eat Their Veggies If You Explain Why They Need To" (http://tiny.cc/…).

It told of an experiment in which one group of pre-schoolers read nutrition books during snack time for three months while a control group just ate the snacks. "It worked," the article reported. "The kids assigned to read about nutrition ate twice as many snack time veggies as they had been -- all of their own will."

Maybe the old-fashioned "Eat 'em because they're good for you" isn't such a bad approach after all.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanity@hotmail.com

(AG)

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