A recent study has connected the dots between fast food marketing and childhood obesity.
I bought more than a few Happy Meals for my kids back in the day. It’s hard to believe how easily I could be convinced to ‘treat’ my little darlings to some over-processed bland food and a 1/2 hour of sliding down plastic slides into a giant pile of plastic balls. I think one of the main things that made them want to go back again and again were the toys. McDonald’s Happy Meal Toys were free, and worth every penny. They were cherished for most of the trip home and I would usually throw a handful away every time I was cleaning out the backseats.
When they got older, I got wiser. They got a kick out of me ordering them cheeseburgers without cheese on the day that the cheeseburger was a value item of the day. Now that we are out of range of the Golden Arches, we sometimes get a merguez sandwich from a guy that fans his charcoal grill with a tree branch.
But I digress…
The simple point that I wanted to make is that a big corporation is using cheap plastic toys to lure children into unhealthy eating practices and it’s BAD.
If there is to be a government solution, I would suggest some kind of stringent requirements for any non-nutritional gimmick used to market food to kids. These requirements could be any combination of things related to environmental responsibility, educational value, quality of materials, even country of origin. If they were so stringent that the chains gave up altogether, that would be great. If they started giving away Arthur Miller plays written on recyclable paper, that’d be fine too.
December 3rd, 2008 at 5:53 pm
The fast food places should go back to providing “not so bad for you food”- it hasn’t always been laden w/transfats, fragrances and extra calories from “biggie” deals etc.
A regular hamburger, regular fries (in a little bag, not a huge box) and a 12 drink were common. Marketing tactics are horrible- weather it be by the fast food giants or food manufacturers. They are just as bad and will market anything that sells despite it’s effect on health and environment (remember Lunchables?)