Aging & Wisdom Quote by Doug Larson

Larson’s joke lands because it treats public health like a marketing problem, not a moral one. The punchline isn’t really about vegetables; it’s about the tyranny of appetites and the way biology quietly vetoes our best intentions. If broccoli carried the same aromatic halo as bacon, he suggests, we wouldn’t need lectures, diets, or wellness influencers. We’d simply obey our noses and live longer by accident.

A cartoonist’s sensibility is all over the construction: a clean, absurd conditional that exposes a real frustration. The line flatters no one. It assumes most of us already know what we “should” do, and it mocks the pious idea that knowledge automatically produces virtue. The subtext is that modern life is a constant negotiation between long-term benefit and short-term pleasure, and pleasure has better PR. Bacon doesn’t just taste good; it smells like indulgence, comfort, and permission. “Green vegetables,” in this framing, aren’t hated for being healthy. They’re punished for being uncool.

The context is classic mid-century-to-now American food culture: abundance, processed convenience, and health advice delivered as scolding. Larson sidesteps the scold by making the obstacle sensory and immediate. That’s why it works: it reframes “bad choices” as predictable outcomes of design, temptation, and environment. Change the incentives (or the smell), and behavior follows. The laugh carries a darker implication: we’re not weak, we’re engineered.