Eating Fruits, Vegetables Good for You and the Planet : Dole has launched an ad campaign to boost consumption by kids. After all, why should fast foods have all the fun?

Today’s Earthwatch is about locally grown veggies and why they’re good for you and the planet. I often think about such things when I drive westward down the Conejo Grade and see agricultural fields on the Oxnard Plain.

The other day I read a comment by a distinguished newspaperman admonishing fellow columnists, before they comment on serious things, to reveal “what is really on his or her mind.” The point was that writers frequently have a hidden agenda about hot-button topics.

Mine is the environment and, today, I have something to say about Dole Food Co. Its Westlake headquarters this week announced an interactive CD-ROM computer disc and an Internet connection to promote a cause I agree with.

I really like fruits and vegetables. They make me feel good. But in five years of writing Earthwatch and decades of sneakily avoiding America’s red-meat lifestyle, I’ve hardly ever seen any advertising supporting my appetites.

Until recently.

I have had to find reinforcement from sources like Mothers & Others for a Livable Planet, an advocacy group whose goal is “promoting consumer behavior which is ecologically sustainable for current and future generations.”

That’s my not-very-hidden, agenda. These people provide me with shopping tips laced with such comments as “cattle and other livestock consume more than 70% of the grain produced in the U.S.,” coupled with descriptions of how much water and topsoil degradation is avoided when acreage is devoted to crops destined directly for people.

Happily, that’s not a problem hereabouts. So I’m quite ready to boost the longevity of our local fruit and vegetable industry--plus fight urban sprawl--by promoting my personal preferences.

When I noticed Dole’s ad blitz--part of an industrywide scheme to get Americans, especially growing kids, to eat five servings a day of fruits and vegetables--I decided to speak up.

OK, so Dole’s not an organic grower like some of its neighbors on the plain, such as PurePak, and the citrus growers near Piru who long ago stopped using soil-polluting chemicals. But, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the U.S Department of Health, it’s a good thing to boost consumption of any broccoli over any beef.

Dole’s advertising muscle helps Ventura County growers sell their carrots and citrus nationwide. In the county, Dole grows only a few of its 60 different types of produce. But the hard-sell, glamorously produced “5-a-Day Adventures” campaign also promotes a wide range of edibles that Dole’s neighbors grow hereabouts.

You’ve maybe noticed some of the initial promotional materials in the produce section of your local supermarkets, plus a few public service announcements on Saturday morning TV.

This month, with a degree of cunning usually reserved for the selling of highly sugared, salted and fatted fast food, the campaign has begun to push characters like Barney Broccoli: “I’m SUPER because I’m CRUNCHY and taste great RAW!” In the campaign being waged in cyberspace, kids can become e-mail pen pals with Bobby Banana, Lucy Lettuce and Amber Orange, who’s “really sweet and juicy at this time of year.”

If this stuff seems odd, you haven’t been watching kids’ TV shows lately. Its language has been stolen from the fast-food ads, which the medical community says are leading kids nutritionally astray.

Anyway, why must the Devil have all the good songs?--as Lincoln remarked when he asked the White House band to play “Dixie.” Who knows, maybe someday, with enough advertising push, Barney Broccoli might find himself invited into the home of his legendary foe, George Bush.

Details

* FYI: “5-a-Day Adventures,” a $14.95 multimedia nutrition CD-ROM, is available from Dole Food Co. of Westlake; call (800) 472-8777, Ext. 555. The Internet address for an on-line version is htt://www.dole5aday.com. “The New Green Diet,” a publication of Mothers & Others for a Livable Planet, is $2.95; call (212) 242-0010.