Nina In New York: Broccoli's Final Frontier

A lighthearted look at news, events, culture and everyday life in New York. The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.
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By Nina Pajak

Since Kim Kardashian broke the Internet with her oily butt, I've been really bored. For a while, I puttered around wondering what people did when there was no Internet to break and tried to live as those people did. You know, I relit a few gas lamps, chased a hoop with a stick, taught my daughter to churn butter. Then, thankfully, they patched up the old girl and I was able to hop back on that information superhighway until I reached the exit that brought me this piece of news:

McDonald's successfully created—but failed to sell—bubblegum flavored broccoli.

That's right. The lifelike robots engineered by pharmaceutical companies and passed off as corporate fast food chain executives were faced with a quandary. People seem to care about being "healthy" these days. While this fact, in and of itself, is of little concern, the bothersome nutritional fad does seem to be eating into (har har) profits and creating some unwelcome negative press. Everyone knows that children detest all vegetables, so how to convince them to shove broccoli down their throats and keep asking for more? Do they attempt to prepare it in an interesting way that makes it undeniably delicious? No, that's stupid. Youths hate the stuff no matter how well it's cooked. But do you know what soulless androids think tiny people unanimously love?

Well, Archie comics and paper dolls and Ovaltine and . . . bubblegum! Of course! It's so simple. Why, it's sweet and devoid of most known food substances and by gum (har har), it's pink. And broccoli is simply none of those things. In fact, bubblegum and broccoli couldn't be more different! It's almost like they definitely don't belong anywhere near each other. Boy, if only broccoli was bubblegum, we'd all be pooping rainbows with doctor-approved frequency and ease. Michelle Obama would be out of a job!

So the evil scientists chefs at Mickey D's got to work creating a hybrid so perfect even god himself could not have conceived it.

Disappointingly, the children who taste-tested this manna from the future were not convinced. They found the stuff "confusing" and ultimately brought the whole plan to a halt. But the important thing is that we all learned a valuable lesson. And that lesson is that if a grotesque, Moreau-ian experiment with fresh produce and artificial candy flavoring doesn't convince kids to eat their greens, nothing ever will and we can confidently go back to hoping that french fries and ketchup can count as vegetables.

At press time, there was no word on the status of McDonald's rumored "Blue Raspberry Asparagus" or the much whispered about "Greenbeansicle Project."

Nina Pajak is a writer living with her husband, daughter and dog in Queens. Connect with Nina on Twitter!