No, this is not a blog about how to stop your kids from demanding cookies.
I am indeed talking about your friend and mine, the beloved furry blue monster from Sesame Street.
He has been tamed. He’s learning that you should eat a variety of foods to stay healthy. One cannot live on cookies alone. And I say, NO WAY!
Beginning last year – and I suppose I’ve not noticed because we canceled our cable service – everyone on Sesame Street contributed in some way to promoting better health: exercise, healthy eating, etc. And that’s all well and good, I suppose. Children are getting more and more prone to obesity nowadays, and if we give them good choices instead of always popping chicken nuggets and french fries into their mouths then they’ll be more likely to stay fit.
But as the man – er, monster – himself said once, “what you think: me Rice Cake Monster?”
It’s not just that some things are sacred and you can’t touch them. Mr. Hooper died. The Sesame Street people in the neighborhood get older, the kids grow up. And it was important that at some point Mr. Snuffleupagus would be seen by everyone, not just Big Bird. I get that.
But would you tell the Count to stop counting? Would you teach Prairie Dawn to play some other melody on her piano? Would you ask Zoey to give up her pet rock? Would you make Telly less neurotic? Would you let Grover start using contractions (he does not, you know)? Would you stop Elmo from speaking in the third person like Bob Dole? Would you have Big Bird stop snoring (after all, it’s rude, and besides it could be a sign the bird has sleep apnia or some other health risk)? Would you make Oscar the Grouch say, “oh, hello! Please, do come on in and welcome to my home” like he was Martha Stewart? Of course not!
His name is COOKIE MONSTER. Again – he’s a MONSTER. He’s fictional. He’s a muppet. Besides, he’s a perfect manifestation of our eating id – if we ate nothing but cookies we’d be blue, furry, and have a bug-eyed look on our faces too! Nobody eats cookies like Cookie Monster. Part of the pleasure of watching him is to see how he eats – and of course he also has goat-like tendencies, eating paper and furniture and other things.
Now you want him to sing “C is For Carrots”??
Do the researchers at Sesame Street really believe that exposure to furry cookie-eating puppets on a tv show is causing American children to gain all this weight?
Sure – Oscar can be mean and sarcastic, Ernie can pull pranks on Bert, and Big Bird can have a sleep disorder, but Cookie? Sorry, you gotta get with the program!
You want to stop American children from gaining weight?
How about turning off the TV set and going outside?
You probably spend at least five hundred dollars a year for cable TV. That’s about the cost of at least one session of gymnastics, or karate class.
How much is an X-Box? Wouldn’t your child be better off taking a class at your local botanic gardens and learning how to grow a vegetable plant?
American children are overweight because they are not as encouraged to exercise as they were a generation ago. Their forms of entertainment involve technology, not physical activity. They are also overexposed to advertising and the mere omnipresence of fast-food places. And since good healthy food often takes time to prepare, today’s working parents don’t have the time to cook the way their own parents did.
American children are not getting fat because they see some blue puppet on television.
If we are serious about solving the epidemic of obesity, we have to adopt real solutions.
Save my Cookie Monster!