The pressure to eat yogurt in America is out of control.
In recent years makers of the tasty snack, once the province of menopausal women and grade-school sack lunches, have been aggressively targeting the minds of the nation’s young adults and middle-aged. The campaign is now going full bore. Big Yogurt is in the throes of a vicious battle for market share. If you are not a yogurt fanatic, you are caught in a dizzy, distinctly unappetizing crossfire.
“I eat Greek yogurt at Starbucks at least four times a week,” a lawyer friend told me by phone from the health-conscious paradise of Los Angeles. “I’ll admit it, I’m a yogurt eater.”
“I’m actually eating some right now,” said a TV writer friend. “We keep a stash of Greek yogurt in the writers’ room.”
Earlier this year, Harry Balzer, vice president with the market research firm NPD Group, declared yogurt as the food of the decade. “The versatile dairy product really does define what I think America wants from its food supply,” he said in an interview on NPR. What breakfast food saw the biggest decline? Toast. Toast!
What is wrong with these people?
The clarion calls to consume this multi-functional goop play on a mix of cultural insecurities, and have gotten so out of hand that mere mention of the unfortunate sounding word calls to mind a grotesque menagerie of women’s gastrointestinal hygiene and sexual beauty. Yo-gurt.
