There’s Something about Blue French Fries
Adventures in Junk Culture
More than a decade ago, a few weeks before Christmas, my friend Mary and I were shopping with my two sons. Ian was one year old and buckled into his stroller. Theo was three and stood on a built-in step riding behind his brother. Mary and I were walking the aisles of an electronics store looking for presents for our husbands. The two of us were in a silly, festive mood, examining electric windshield deicers and white noise machines. I parked the stroller as Mary and I played with a pair of yellow walkie-talkies. Calling each other “Bandit” and “Cledus,” we mimicked the old trucker movie Smokey and the Bandit.
“Breaker-breaker, you read me?” I said. (Of course she did. Although the walkie-talkies had no batteries, we were standing right next to each other.)
“Loud and clear,” Mary said.
“Cledus, I’ll catch you in Texarkana.”
“I read you, Bandit,” she said, using her best drawl. (Mary’s from Arkansas; she can do a good Cledus.)
After a moment, we put the handsets down and glanced at my boys. They were staring at a television. On the screen, a corporate spokesperson demonstrated how a particular mattress could be soft on one side of the bed and firm on the other. I started to push the stroller away.
“Wait—wait! It’s not over,” Theo protested.
“Well, how about that, Jen?” Mary said, teasing me. “You’ve got him watching product demos. You sure that’s better than Playhouse Disney?”
“That’s a big ten-four, Cledus,” I said.
Months before, when I told her why I’d booted TV from my home, Mary had been amused (and slightly puzzled) by the story. My decision to do so had come about dramatically during a time when David and I were deeply immersed in that twilight zone that is the world of raising small children. With two young sons and a baby on the way, David and I were overtired, understimulated, and not sure when—or if—we would ever feel like ourselves again. In the evenings, it was rare that we did anything except bathe the boys and get them to sleep, tidy up the house, and fall into bed ourselves.
“When did you say their parents were coming to pick them up?” David would ask me wearily, attempting a dark joke.
Sometimes when the boys were down for the night, we would try to have a conversation. This usually involved David staring out the window into the night, exhausted and consumed by his new career in software, while I stared at his reflection in the window and discussed the minutiae of my day at home. I’d tell him how this one might be constipated or that one had learned a new word. I’d share observations I’d made about the neighbors. One woman ironed every night at eleven. Across the street, the neighbors were putting in a new fence. Maybe they were getting a dog, I speculated. And then there were the reports of what I’d done all day with the kids.
Even I would find myself bored by some of the anecdotes I shared with him.
“So then I told him not to be so frustrated,” I’d report. “He’d already built a big castle out of the blocks. It was good, actually. The castle, I mean. Well, the drawbridge wasn’t really attached, but that’s very hard to do, don’t you think? He was so proud of what he’d made, though. It was fun to see. David? David? Are you with me?”
“What? Yeah. The drawbridge. Drawbridges are hard,” David would murmur.
Often, we’d forego the scintillating conversation when our chores were done and just turn on the TV.
In those days making the effort to go out in the evening even just to rent a video—yes, on VHS—and spend the evening watching it was a significant event. It meant much more than just forfeiting the tête-à-têtes about spit-up or the contents of our son’s diaper, but required that we sacrifice at least ninety minutes of sleep. This was no small matter.
The movie David had rented one fateful night was There’s Something about Mary. Released in 1998, it was an enormous box-office success. I doubt we could have missed that it was billed as a “gross-out romantic comedy,” but we were likely in the market for a good laugh and thought the movie would provide us with a temporary escape from what was often a grueling time in our lives.
But seeing it that night—or the portion of it that I watched, anyway—changed our family life forever. The movie was so full of . . . um . . . inappropriate situations and, mostly, was so very not entertaining to me that I not only grabbed the television cord and yanked the plug out from the wall, but also decided to rethink my relationship with American culture. Now before you start throwing stones and calling me a prude, I need to confess that I have many times before and since that evening laughed at bawdy, silly comedies. Trust me, no one who knows me even marginally would call my tastes puritanical. And, yes, I’ve already been told by several friends that they think the movie is hilarious.
But that night, about a half hour into There’s Something about Mary, I stood up from the sofa.
“That’s it!” I shouted. “I have had it!”
Looking back, I realize it wasn’t just that particular movie that sent me over the edge, but all of the useless junk that I felt my culture was selling to me.
Years before, when I moved to New York City after having grown up in the Midwest, I brought my unfailing politeness with me. Numerous times a day, I’d pass men—it was always men—holding out colored fliers advertising everything from restaurant specials to concerts in the Bowery to “girlie shows.” As I passed each person and his fliers, he’d reach toward me and I would graciously accept the piece of paper.
“Thank you,” I said, cheerfully, making eye contact with the person who had given me the paper whenever possible.
Sitting on the subway on the way home from work, I’d pull folded and crumpled papers from my coat pockets or briefcase and page through them. Inevitably, on exiting the train, I’d toss the whole lot into a garbage can on the platform. There was nothing worth keeping, no information I wanted, and in fact sometimes my eyes had scanned images and words I’d rather not have seen. After a few weeks in New York, I stopped reaching out and taking colored fliers from the guys on the sidewalk.
Incidentally, at about the same time, I also stopped giving whatever loose change I had in my pockets to anyone who asked for it. Admittedly, I can be a slow learner about such things, but on the fourth day in a row that the very same woman stopped me on the platform at Lexington Avenue and told me it was her first day of work and she had dropped her wallet on the train and just needed a few dollars to get to her job, I got wise. My feelings were also a bit hurt that she didn’t remember me from the previous few days. I felt like we’d started to get to know one other.
So, watching There’s Something about Mary, and irritated beyond measure, I felt the same way I did in New York City those years ago. I wondered why I kept stuffing my pockets and my mind with useless and offensive junk. I wondered why I kept giving away my money to people who were lying to me.
Now, I’ll admit to overthinking certain things from time to time and being perhaps just the littlest bit neurotic, but even in those early, sleep-deprived years in parenting, my hunch was right that my culture was changing. Further, I was worried about the way it would affect my children’s minds and hearts as they grew. Companies had begun aggressively marketing to children on television in ways that they didn’t when I was a child. Childhood, as author and sociology professor Juliet Schor so eloquently describes, had been “commodified.”1 Schor writes, “In the early days of children’s marketing, most of the people who made commercials or crafted branding strategies relied on personal experience. They were parents and considered their own children to be good representations of the target audience. Today, most of the how-to books on children’s marketing explicitly condemn such an approach. . . . Instead, they counsel, extensive research is necessary to succeed.”2
One item that was likely developed after such careful research was Ore-Ida’s Funky Fries. (Remember those?) The company knew kids loved french fries, bright colors, and fun food, so they came out with a new line that combined all three! Yippee! One flavor of french fries was chocolate and another was cinnamon. And then there were the “Kool Blue” fries that were as blue as a can of bright blue Play-Doh or, say, a barrel of toxic waste. For those who look with concern at the rise of pediatric health issues, the connection between ADHD and chemicals, sugar, and food dye made Funky Fries a particularly bad choice for kids.3 The amount of trans fat in the fries was nothing to brag about either. The blue fries were just one example of junk products made for and marketed to children that would provide no real nutrition or other benefit to them—and indeed could harm their health. Happily, wise parents everywhere decided that feeding their kids blue french fries was going too far. The product flopped after about a year. (Blue fries. Really.)
On the There’s Something about Mary night, I had a moment of clarity and saw that too much of my culture was built around the relentless quest for every kind of fleeting pleasure without regard to its consequences. It seemed to me that junk TV, crude and humorless movies, and so much else about our society was just a distraction. The underlying message—that pleasure should be our only and truest goal—flashed its face to me that night. It was ugly and sinister.
“I have had it,” I said to David again. “And I want my time back. I wish I’d been doing anything else than watching that tonight. I don’t want the TV. At all. Anymore.”
As I mentioned previously, TV and I would get back together later, but with new rules and expectations about the relationship. (Obviously, we weren’t the only ones to draw new boundaries; savvy parents today routinely skip over commercials using new technology that is only a click away on their remotes.)
“We don’t have to finish watching the movie,” David offered. I don’t recall now whether he had been enjoying the movie, but I’m sure he could tell I was serious about making a significant change. He also knew that when I was pregnant, I was not a person to be crossed.
“I’m sick of it. There’s just so much garbage I can put up with and I have had it.”
“But what about ER?” he asked, meekly. We’d watched that show together for years.
“I can live without it.”
“Seinfeld?”
I shook my head.
“Or . . .” I could tell he was reaching, trying hard to keep my decision from hardening and getting set in stone. “Well, what about that cute English show you like? With those people who have the chickens. Or maybe goats. I mean, they farm in their backyard.”
“Good Neighbors. I don’t care,” I said. He’d never called it “cute” before; I could tell he was working hard.
“Bill Nye the Science Guy?” he yelped in one last-ditch effort to change my mind.
“I can check him out from the library.”
Before There’s Something about Mary pulled me up from the comfort of my family room couch, I was a champion channel surfer. And, as I pounded through the channels, I glimpsed scenes that authenticated the kinds of statistics I’d been reading about television. I didn’t like what I learned was true:
• By the time an average American child is eighteen, he or she will have seen 200,000 violent acts and 16,000 murders depicted on TV.4
• Parents spend 3.5 minutes each week in meaningful conversation with their children; the average child watches 1,680 minutes of television each week.
• The number of thirty-second TV commercials seen in a year by an average child: 20,000.5
• The number of TV commercials seen by the average person by age sixty-five: 2 million.6
Jewish cultural critic Max Antby writes, “Television does not exist to entertain us; it exists to sell to us.” Antby quotes Georgetown and University of Maryland professor Colman McCarthy who said, “It is a commercial arrangement, with the TV set a salesman permanently assigned to one house, and often two or three salesmen working different rooms.”7
The glowing television can be a distraction that we’ve stopped noticing, like the bark of a small dog that has shared our home for a decade. “Oh, that. That’s just Scrappy,” we say, waving at the noise. “I don’t even notice it anymore—he’s always barking like that. Don’t mind him.”
Studies have shown that kids younger than six usually can’t distinguish between commercials and program content.8 After I unplugged, I liked knowing that my children weren’t drinking in and growing accustomed to messages that sounded to me to be the antithesis of what I wanted our lives to be about. I hoped that children who didn’t see many commercials might grow up to be people who tread more lightly on the planet than they might otherwise have done, using less resources and given to fewer consumeristic whims.
I also hoped they would be happier.
In her brilliant movie The Story of Stuff, environmentalist Annie Leonard reports that each of us in the US is targeted with more than three thousand advertisements a day. Having the TV unplugged silenced at least most of these for my family and me. Leonard’s research shows that Americans now see more advertisements in one year than people fifty years ago saw in a lifetime. She writes, “And if you think about it, what is the point of an ad except to make us unhappy with what we have. So, three thousand times a day, we’re told that our hair is wrong, our skin is wrong, clothes are wrong, our furniture is wrong, our cars are wrong, we are wrong but that it can all be made right if we just go shopping.”9
Leonard details how more commercials and more shopping actually makes Americans less happy. “Our national happiness peaked sometime in the 1950s, the same time as this consumption mania exploded,” she writes. “We have more stuff but we have less time for the things that really make us happy: family, friends, leisure time. . . . And do you know what the two main activities are that we do with the scant leisure time we have? Watch TV and shop.”10
I didn’t pontificate about our choice and didn’t want to be Self-Righteous, TV-Free Mom. (Remember the danger of those labels?) But I was glad the television was no longer casting its own particular spells on our family life. Without it, things changed for the better. David and I returned to activities that filled up our younger, pre-children lives. We lingered over cups of decaf coffee in the evenings, went on walks, and played Scrabble. I felt grateful that we’d unplugged.
When people learn that my kids have grown up without TV, they look at me strangely as though we use an outhouse instead of indoor plumbing or that I weave all my kids’ clothes in homespun yarn. They talk about the benefits of educational programs such as Sesame Street. I agree, and I tell them I used to borrow videos and DVDs from the library so my kids could count with the Count and sing along with Elmo.
“You homeschool them, right?” they ask, eyeing me suspiciously.
This seems a logical question to ask, for many people. (Um, for both my own sanity and the health and well-being of my children, I have never seriously entertained the idea of doing so.) I think the assumption is that the reason I got rid of the TV was that I want to keep my children in a bubble, unsullied by outside influences. This isn’t the case. (You should see our DVD collection.)
Every parent has a distinct set of resources, convictions, and preferences. We learn as we go regarding what activities, traditions, and practices help us connect with our children and help them thrive. We also learn, by trial and error, what defeats us in our attempts to raise healthy, happy children. Every family I know puzzles out those yesses and nos in their own way. Some do homeschool their children. Others opt out of standardized testing in schools. Still others avoid weekend sports commitments, and some families even make Sunday a true day of Sabbath. We are all different, and we make myriad personal decisions as we craft our family cultures.
In the interest of full disclosure, to say I’ve raised the kids in a TV-free home isn’t exactly what it might sound like. It’s true we don’t have televisions in our bedrooms. It’s (usually) true that during school weeks, the rule is “no screen.” But on weekends, we watch movies together. I stream TV shows such as 30 Rock, The Office, and Arrested Development and sometimes watch episodes with my older kids. I would even argue that Arrested Development, wellwritten and full of quirky characters thrown into ridiculous situations, imparts valuable lessons about integrity and the importance of family. All three programs provide keen insight into American popular culture, and they make me laugh until I snort.
Regarding the choice to minimize my family’s exposure to commercials by ridding us of the TV, I echo the sentiments of Ellen Currey-Wilson, author of the hilarious memoir The Big Turn-Off: Confessions of a TV-Addicted Mom Trying to Raise a TV-Free Kid, who writes, “I don’t want to make parents feel guilty for plugging their kids in. I know what it’s like to need a break as much as the next stressed-out mom. Unfortunately, if the latest studies are at all predictive, a child hooked on television is more likely to have a life filled with tutors, medications, diets and counseling, and that hardly gives parents the guilt-free break they need and deserve. . . . But not everyone has to jump on the bandwagon. When parents simply remove the television sets from kids’ bedrooms, positive changes occur.”11
Things are different than when my kids were really little and I yanked out that cord. Back then, we didn’t have TiVo, streaming, or other options for avoiding commercials. Watching TV required sitting through all of those ads; there was no getting around it.
Now there is.
Early on after my TV breakup, I worried that my kids would miss out. After all, I’d been raised on television and the movies that were shown on it. The Brady Bunch, The Jetsons, and Family Ties, among countless others. My brain is full of superfluous information, such as the names Bandit and Cledus, which, of course, don’t come into use very often unless you are pretending to be a trucker on her CB radio when she is playing with walkie-talkies with her friend at a shopping mall at Christmastime. But, as usual, I needn’t have worried. Despite not being able to sing the tune of the latest Oreo cookie commercial, my kids all have turned out just fine.
A few days ago I had lunch with a woman I’ve known since high school. Like me, she is in her early forties. You might say midforties, but let’s not split (gray) hairs, okay? Like me, she is the mother of four children and, like me, she has watched her high parenting standards and ideals crumble and fall away as the years pass with each subsequent child. She remains mindful about nutrition, manners, and raising kids who respect themselves and others. But as we looked back on the way we parented our oldest children, we laughed at our formerly perfectionist selves. Many of the things that once seemed critical to us now seem, well, kind of ludicrous.
No refined sugar until she’s five!
Nothing but collared shirts and khakis to school!
Only Mozart or other classical music on weekdays!
“You learn to pick your battles, right?” my friend asked me, smiling. I nodded. Then, in a flurry of motion as the people beside us stood to leave and a waiter poured water into our glasses, I missed part of something she said. She held her hand up, her palm facing me, her fingers spread wide.
“I have it down to just five key things now,” is what I thought she said.
I almost dropped my fork: she’d crystallized everything that mattered about raising children into five essential things? Was that even possible?
“Five? What?” I sputtered.
She laughed when I told her how I’d misheard her. We began brainstorming the idea of what would be those five essentials of parenting and family life? It’s a difficult exercise, to be sure. I mean, if someone wrote a book after truly discerning the five essentials of raising kids, he or she would sell more copies than a hot, new Amish novel.
“One would be love,” I said. “I mean not only telling them I love them, but snuggling them. Even when they’re older.”
“Absolutely. I still hug and kiss my kids. They need it.”
“Yep,” I said.
“The second thing could be spiritual grounding,” my friend suggested. “Praying with them, giving them opportunities to know God better.”
“Agreed.”
“Three could be books,” I said. “Teaching them, as much as possible, to love to read. Not just because of what it does for them in school, but just because it will be something they’ll always enjoy.”
“That’s right. And it’s easier with some kids than others. Some are natural readers,” my friend said. “Others, not so much. You have to encourage them. You have to let them catch you reading too. Work it, you know?”
“Amen!”
We never quite figured out what the last two items on the “five essentials” would be, but instead launched into a conversation on the proven benefits of reading.12 Reading helps us learn to express ourselves, helps to develop imagination, and—yes—children who read more do better in school. They have longer attention spans, build bigger vocabularies, and understand cultural references in ways their nonreading peers do not. But when I try to make reading a part of my family culture, I know I’m giving my kids much more than an educational vitamin.
I’m giving them a friend.
Books are companions that usher us through difficult times or away from the inevitable periods when the world isn’t going our way. Most of us, at one time or another, will be stuck standing in a long line. Trains will be late. Flights will be canceled. A friend will betray us. We’ll sit for hours at the car dealer while someone investigates why that warning light is flashing. I mean, we could contemplate the cans of motor oil stacked nearby, play a mindless game on our mobile phones, or . . . read and be transported away from those brittle plastic chairs and the brash reality show on the TV above our heads to a small mill town in Georgia where a deaf man named John Singer listens to his young friend talk about her dream of buying a piano.13 We could travel far from the strip mall to a coffee plantation in Kenya14 or wander in a Savannah square, Spanish moss hanging eerily from the trees.15
Yes, I can live with my kids wearing T-shirts to school, having occasional sugar highs, and staying up too late on school nights from time to time, but reading has got to be a big part of all our lives—and having a family culture where TV isn’t a barking dog we’ve all learned to ignore does help.
It only takes staying in a hotel for a few days to remind me why I’m glad not to have ready access to the TV in my home. A few weekends ago, I was in Annapolis, Maryland. Ian, my lacrosse-playing son, had a tournament there. In the evenings, while he and his teammates ate copious amounts of french fries (not dyed blue, I’m happy to report) and ran around the hotel, I stayed in my room. I attacked my e-mail inbox. I called friends who live in the area and caught up with them. I also did something I rarely do—and put my feet up on the bed and clicked on the TV.
As I mentioned, I’m a terrific channel surfer. I find it highly pleasurable to click through a hundred stations, getting a split-second sense of what’s on the show. This time, however, I slowed down. It had been so long since I’d seen “real” TV. Was it really all that bad? Maybe I’m just an old Debbie Downer when indeed the quality of programming had improved. Maybe TV now was a bastion of excellence. I slowed down and took a look.
One station was playing The Wizard of Oz. Now who can complain about that? I savored the scene of Dorothy oiling the Tin Man’s rusted joints and then started the progression through the channels.
Immediately I went from “Why, it’s a man, a man made out of tin!” to a reality show on which a woman is tearfully telling the story of her husband’s murder. By his brother. Who had shot him in the head. You see, the wife and her brother-in-law were having an affair, the details of which she very openly shared on this program.
Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
I clicked away from that one.
Next up was a program describing how to make sombreros. Helpful as that is, I didn’t think I’d have occasion to need this information anytime soon, so I changed the channel.
Next I saw a commercial for a wrestling show.
Click.
A car race called Super DIRTcar.
Click.
A snippet of a sitcom on which a woman laughingly calls the man beside her a “meth-daddy” and talks about getting “butt naked” together.
Click.
Next was one of the Back to the Future movies. (Hi, Biff!)
Click.
Next was The Story of Stuff’s Annie Leonard’s worst nightmare. It was a lengthy commercial that shows two women chatting and shopping at a huge discount store, their carts overflowing. One remarked admiringly about the massive amount of stuff her friend has in her cart and the other bragged that because of a special payment plan, she didn’t even have to think about paying for any of it for six months! (Wow! Six months! That’s like half a lifetime!)
I changed the channel.
I skimmed past a college football game, a boxing match, and then football again.
Next was a television drama on which a character was describing the domestic abuse she had suffered. She tearfully confessed that she was sure she deserved it.
The last show I saw before Dorothy and her friends lit up the screen again could be seen as a nightmarish sequel to the commercial of those two women and the overloaded shopping carts. Called Hoarding: Buried Alive, this reality show featured people who, on one level, were just obeying the call of their culture to buy, buy, buy. (Many hoarders also suffer from obsessive-compulsive or other mental disorders, so of course there’s much more to it than a love of shopping.) They purchased mountains of “stuff” in a desperate attempt to make themselves happy and whole. There were stacks of clothes, still on their hangers. There were microwaves, toys, garbage, and canned foods stacked floor to ceiling in their homes. The occupants of the houses were ashamed and isolated. All the things they had bought had been rendered useless by damage and decay.
That the show was darkly called Buried Alive disheartened me.
I turned off the TV.