Nickelodeon News

Nickelodeon and frozen vegetable distributor Birds Eye are teaming up to "empower kids to embrace a healthier diet by eating more vegetables." With Jennette McCurdy, star of the popular series iCarly, as the spokesperson, this campaign for healthier kids provides a breath of fresh air in a marketing industry that regularly pushes the more profitable high sugar, high fat snack foods to young audiences.

The iCarly iCook with Birds Eye Sweepstakes, complete with a website dedicated to encouraging recipe sharing and loaded with prize-filled contests - even the chance to land a guest spot on an iCarly episode and have your vegetable dish featured- this joint venture is "spurring kids' culinary creativity and encouraging them to share their veggie inspiration with other kids."

We are beginning to see an uptick in incremental, wide reaching improvements in food marketing that targets children. Just last month, Disney announced that it will ban junk-food marketing on its programming that specifically targets children. Now that two children's programming behemoths have set the stage, there is a growing hope that other bigwig marketers will follow suit.

Could marketing fresh vegetables actually become lucrative? Could carrots and green beans become the next item that children are begging to put in the grocery basket? Never say never.

But marketing and education needs to come from more than just the television and the computer screens. It needs to come from school and from home; it needs to involve interaction in and conversation surrounding the planting and cooking process so as to give children the confidence to make their own healthy choices. It is time to prove that healthy foods can indeed be craveable.

Helping to instill campus-wide cultures of health, Recipe for Success Foundation's nationally-recognized Seed-to-Plate Nutrition Education Program offers interactive gardening and cooking classes that can be integrated into each school's curriculum, promising comprehensive and enlightening lessons that change the way children understand, appreciate and eat their food.