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Weekly Check-Up: Tommy the Tomato Brings, Er, Fruit To Life?
You know the old PSA trick of animating inanimate objects to make them friendly and appealing for kids? Like, the toothbrush comes to life and tells you how to brush, or perhaps even a forlorn little bill sits on Capitol Hill waiting to be made into law. Sometimes I find these animated things scarier than clowns, and sometimes if there’s a catchy song involved, they become part of my fond Saturday morning memories. So I guess it’s up to you to decide where Tommy the Tomato will fall in this. My kid likes his website. He’s a tomato created by a nutritionist to educate kids about healthy eating, because of course “childhood obesity” is right up there with “ebola” and “nuclear”. There’s no singing, and his friend Barry the Banana looks…well…full of nutrients.
Let’s hope Tommy comes out quickly as a fruit (not vegetable) and that he can teach kids valuable lessons about antioxidants and whole foods and stuff like that. But there’s a danger in anthropomorphizing things: While Tommy is advocating healthy eating, isn’t he also promoting the consumption of his own kind? Isn’t he in fact endorsing cannibalism?
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