Squash Still Suffers From Public Relations Crisis

(Squeeze Box Chronicle – July 10, 2015)

The North American Association of Squash Tillers has hired a Madison Avenue advertising firm to beef up its image and present a more attractive option on the dinner table. Squash sales have severely plummeted since the 2000 due in part to successful promotions by traditional competitors like turnips, soybeans, lentils and okra.
The introduction of cute little Tommy Turnip or giddy and cuddly Sarah Soybean have upset the apple cart. Lentils and okra have made great strides too in the garden and on the grill.
It is not easy for a generic vegetable matter like squash to compete with these slick yet phony cartoons,” quacked Melvin Toole, copy boy at Morstern, Hamill and Glick, the agency hired by the squash people.
“We hope to turn the tide here from the inside out,” said Toole. “Imagine little children gnawing on boiled turnips, masticating steamed okra or sipping soy drinks for breakfast. It ain’t right.”
Marketing experts are hesitant to summarize the status of these vegetables admitting that dancing hot dogs and talking raisins have revolutionized the industry. For centuries promoters avoided using humanized food to communicate to the masses thinking no one would swallow the idea of eating their new little friends. Lately however, statistics soundly suggest that the average consumer will eat whatever is placed in front of him, mineral or animal. In addition these interlopers have found that most humans, after constant prompting, would be quite happy nibbling on his own grandmother if he thought, “everyone was doing it”.
“Now squash,” started Toole, presents another set of problems. A lot o it is onomatopoeia, or the formation of words to imitate what they denote,” he said. “Who out there wants to eat something that sounds squished, forcibly mashed or otherwise repressed?
“We have considered renaming the vegetable in out own likeness but names like ecstasy loaf and rhapsody gourd seemed rather forced. It just ain’t like the Cher thing.”
Readers may recall that back in 1980 the agency brought in the actress Cher to plug the onion industry. Her seductive TV spots, where she appeared in nothing but a small black dress designed entirely of garlic clusters and onionskin, never really increased sales substantially but made a lot of onion farmers happy.
One local squash entrepreneur told the Horseshoe that squash is squash and always would be squash.
“It’s not clover. It’s not corn. It’s squash. Anything else is bunk.”
“Those New York boys could convince a prospective home buyer that a cat box was another bath and a half,” he laughed. “Squash was so named in an attempt to allow children to digest a sample of life’s unpleasantness a spoonful at a time in the safety of their own homes.”
Perhaps the most dramatic impact on vegetable consumption is the fast food phenomenon whereas freethinking individuals purposely swallow poison, calling it lunch or dinner. This twisted culinary preference has all but killed dining diversity and will soon be counting these unusually fat garbage gobblers as another category of its victims, effectively relieving fringe symptoms of over-population. Science and nutritional truths clearly shows that eating these unhealthy chemicals should have already done their dire duty but many fast food enthusiasts continue to hold out. For how long?
– Kashmir Horseshoe