Bob McCarty Writes

Thanks to the public affairs folks at the U.S. Census Bureau, I learned today that this month is — or should I say was — both National Nutrition Month and National Frozen Food Month.

While I’m sure the organizations behind each of these month-long recognition efforts — the American Dietary Association and the National Frozen and Refrigerated Foods Association, respectively — also relied upon other means to get the word out, I’m disappointed that the Census Bureau spent — at a minimum — hundreds of dollars on their belated effort to publicize the efforts.

Below is the “meat” of the Census Bureau’s message, released as today’s Daily Feature via PR Newswire, which I stumbled upon during a visit to the PR Newswire web site:

This month has been set aside to recognize a number of various causes. Two of these seem to go hand in hand, National Nutrition Month and National Frozen Food Month. The goal of the first is to make consumers aware of just how easy it is to eat healthy meals. And one of the ways this is possible is because of frozen food. The first commercially available frozen food was fish in 1925. Frozen food became increasingly popular as refrigerated freight trains and trucks were able to carry it to all parts of the nation. Today, close to a third of U.S. homes have a separate freezer aside from their refrigerators. And the complimentary appliance a microwave oven is in more than nine-out-of-10 homes. You can find these and more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau on the Web at http://www.census.gov.

So what do you think? Was it worth it for the Census Bureau to spend hundreds of dollars to inform the public about two month-long recognition efforts less than 48 hours before the recognition months ended? Let me know what you think.