I Enter the Kid Food Universe

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.