I Enter the Kid Food Universe

It was the yogurt that raised the first warning.

I am old enough to remember when yogurt was strange, consumed mostly by 100-year-old Russians, communists with a small “c” and dieters grown weary of cottage cheese. No way a kid would eat it, even if you covered it in whipped cream and put a cherry on top.

Now, of course, that’s how it comes--with whipped cream and cherries, on top or on the bottom, with chocolate chips and cookie crumbs, with sprinkles shaped like dinosaurs or witches’ hats, with powder that changes colors when you stir it in. There’s yogurt in a big bottle, a little bottle, a big cup, a little cup; there’s yogurt in a tube. Some of it is the traditional pastel-hued fruit flavors, but there’s also bubble gum and cotton candy in colors last seen in the ‘60s on a Peter Max poster. And all of it’s for kids.

When I became a parent, I expected to start purchasing things I had previously passed up. Things such as SpaghettiOs and apple juice, frozen waffles and hot dogs, string cheese and those really orange crackers with peanut butter between them. But I was not prepared to enter an alternate grocery universe where juice comes in a bag, macaroni and cheese in a can and milk in a box, a place where fruit and cookies and corn dogs and carrots all come in leprechaun-sized packages--a place where ketchup is green and margarine blue and everything is shaped either like a dinosaur or Winnie-the-Pooh.

Kids’ food has ever been with us, as this year’s 100th anniversary of Animal Crackers and the enduring popularity of the chicken nugget proves. But never before has it been such a large and diverse market. From Oscar Mayer packaged Lunchables to Ritz Bitz, from dinosaur-egg-littered oatmeal to the immortalization of every critter imaginable in a fruit snack, kid food occupies shelf space in every aisle of the supermarket. It’s as if Cap’n Crunch and Count Chocula roused the cereal aisle and took over the whole store.

Though shocking in a isn’t-this-how-things-started-to-look-right-before-the-fall-of-Rome way, this state of affairs is probably not cause for alarm in the average adult. For a parent, on the other hand, it is yet another dilemma to be unraveled, yet another pit and pendulum to be faced down. While an unencumbered adult is free to walk past the new single-serving frost-it-yourself brownies and smirk, a parent knows that, like it or not, this latest breakthrough in marketing theory (“Let kids do it themselves!” “Messy is fun!”) will become part of their lives, one way or another.

Because if the playground is where we learn about Darwinian theory and the social order, the lunchroom is where we learn to covet. It is the first opportunity we have to bring tangible representations of our families into a communal setting.

And it is the first real indication we have that other parents have different ways of doing things. That some moms think popcorn is a vegetable while others make their own ravioli. That some dads believe graham crackers with peanut butter absolutely count as a sandwich and others think it’s never too early to appreciate spinach.

At the lunch table we experience our first snobbery and practice the art of negotiation. Perusing the food of our peers, we learn the power of packaging, the relationship of scarcity to desire and the lure of the forbidden. Who doesn’t remember the kid in second grade who always got two Ring Dings? Or the girl who brought a bottle of Yoo-hoo? Whose mom kept the leftover Kentucky Fried Chicken warm with a complicated system of plastic wrap and aluminum foil? The first kid to get a sackful of Doritos?

In my day, the hierarchy of lunches was simple. On top were the kids who got to buy lunch every day, followed by those who had the most packaged, name-brand food and bought their milk, followed by the rest of us who had our tuna fish sandwiches and carrot sticks, our bananas and hard-boiled eggs, our store-brand cookies and Bionic Woman thermoses full of Kool-Aid.

As a parent, I was prepared to negotiate my way through this caste system, prepared to make concessions that perhaps my mother had not, prepared to buy the pudding cups I had so longed for, or the fruit cups with the pop tops.

But now I have no idea where I stand. I cannot bring myself to buy kid-size anything when adult-size boxes and jars are so much cheaper and I have more tiny Tupperware containers than I have brains. I tried the drink sacks until I discovered their similarity in content, and intent, to water balloons. After sniffing snottily over the toddler meals with my first child, I found myself dumping them in the cart by the armloads for my second.

But I’m still too green to buy any meal in which the packaging outweighs the food. Other kids may love their Trader Joe’s quiches and canned salmon, but I stand by the sandwich and banana, although baby carrots are a real improvement over carrot sticks (remember how they were always dry and curling up a bit by the time you got to them?).

The only thing I’m sure about in this new Munchkin Land universe is the yogurt. My kids love the yogurt. I try to buy the adult version in the hopes of keeping the sugar to a reasonable level and also because I refuse to believe that cotton candy yogurt tastes good. But I buy it in the cups and in the bottles and especially in the tubes, I buy it with stir-ins and sprinkles, and I have even bought it with the powder that changes color. Which is pretty darn cool.