Unhappy meals

November 4, 2010 • 5:26 am

One of the few jokes I’ve ever made up (besides this one: Q: What do French horses eat?  A: Haute cuisine), was about the “Unhappy meal,” which I proposed would be given to badly-behaving kids on family trips to McDonald’s. It consisted of a tuna fish sandwich, carrot sticks, a kiwi, a bottle of water, and a toy: the New York Times crossword puzzle with a miniature pencil.

It ain’t a joke any more.  On Tuesday, the board of supervisors of the People’s Republic of San Francisco banned the traditional Happy Meal, stipulating that any meal given with a toy would have to meet certain nutritional standards (fewer than 600 calories in the meal, and it has to have fruits, vegetables, and no sugary soft drinks).  Now all meals are Unhappy Meals.

Until now, Happy Meals included the following:

  • a side order consisting of small of french fries or sliced apples with a side of caramel dip.
  • a soft drink (12 ounces), milk, chocolate milk, orange juice or apple juice.
  • a hamburger, cheeseburger, or a four piece order of Chicken McNuggets with dipping sauce.

Fighting childhood obesity is a really good thing to do, but enough is enough. (After all, it’s usually parents who buy the Happy Meals for their kids, and they can choose milk and apples.)  What’s next—carding kids before they can buy a Coke?  And why stop at childhood obesity?  After all, New York has already banned trans fats.  Can a ban on steaks, cakes, and pakes be far behind?

Food isn’t medicine, and kids—unless they’re really obese—deserve an occasional treat.  If you want to keep your kids healthy, feed them good stuff at home and don’t take them to McDonald’s so often.

(Here’s my only other joke: “Did you hear about the Kleenex magnate? He’s always putting his business in other people’s noses.”)


112 thoughts on “Unhappy meals”

  1. Here in Stockholm the Happy Meal always includes either sliced apples or carrots and its up to the parents to choose a non sugary drink (although the usual colas are an option). The children get used to the fruit and not having a sugary drink – so long as they get their fries and chicken nuggets! The only Unhappy Meal in my experience is when the McDonalds run out of ‘boys’ toys and give my son a pink princess toy with the meal!

    1. You know, that would be an upside to the toys disappearing: no more stereo-type enforcing “boy toys” and “girl toys” anymore.

  2. Admittedly, McDonald’s is well aware that it is using toys to buy kids’ loyalty to the McDonald’s brand. And it works too. It’s likely one of the main reasons that McDonald’s is so big – it’s surely not because they’re the fast food chain with the best burgers.

    But banning the toys does go pretty far.

    1. Their recently introduced “Angus” burgers are pretty good, and I have taken to eating one once in a while when I am in the Store for hot coffee.

  3. Nanny state, protect us from ourselves. It’s all made of corn anyway, even our cows and pigs are all made of carbon 13 isotopes(corn) now anyway. My daughter used to want the happy nugget meal every night of the week until I let her watch Super Size Me. It seemed to solve the problem as well as any regulation would. I like ingredient and calorie disclosure. “Carbon 13 doesn’t lie.”

  4. I thought the worst part of the whole thing was that only 35% of the 600 alloted calories can come from fat. How could it possibly matter, caloricly speaking? 600 calories from carrots or 600 calories from pure lard is still 600 calories. If scurvy or rickets was epidemic amongst San Franciscan children it would be one thing, but if the focus is on preventing obesity then banning fats as a percentage of the total calorie allotment is just insane.

    2. Every single Happy Meal currently falls below the 35% fat requirement. So, it’s not that onerous.

      All of the hamburger meals and all of the chicken nuggets meals currently fall below the guidelines for calories. Only the cheeseburger meals are generally above the requirement for calories. Which of course, means there goes the calcium.

      Of course, the problem is that if you require fruit AND vegetable, then you pretty much knock out any chance of a kid having anything to eat that isn’t a fruit or vegetable and still keep under 600 calories.

      Fruit OR vegetable, and all hamburger and nugget meals are currently OK (fries are vegetable – albeit horridly unhealthily prepared vegetable). Fruit AND vegetable, and you’d have to Reaganize the ketchup on the burger to meet the requirement.

      Basically, this is a war on French Fries.

      I blame the Republicans. Darn them and their Freedom Fries!!!

    3. This might make some sense if you entirely disregard the beneficial phytochemicals in carrots and the cholesterol in pure lard. Forcing part of the caloric count to be fruits (containing antioxidants) and vegetables implies that these will be consumed as part of that calorie count instead of ’empty calories’.

      Are you serious?

      If you are only concerned with the caloric content of foods might I suggest a diet of cardboard and worms. It’s totally sane and satisfying.

  5. I suppose like most things it comes back to parental (and personal) responsibility.

    On the other hand, junk food is marketed to kids pretty “heavily”. In my day, there was a lot less of it (no McDonalds!), but we still managed to get enough candy and soft drinks to rot our teeth.

  6. Three cheers for San Francisco!

    Including toys with junk food is marketing to children. Many very reasonable jurisdictions already ban marketing to children.

    Citing parental responsibility does not end the argument. Of course parents are fully responsible for what they feed their kids. This does not absolve other parties of responsibility. Responsibility is not a fixed quantity to be divvied up among contributing parties. Two conspirators convicted of committing a murder do not split the sentence – they are both fully responsible.

    If a driver travelling 25mph in a 15mph school zone strikes the child and speed is a factor, the driver bears some legal responsibility. What if there were no posted speed limits in the school zone? Should we allow drivers to self-regulate? After all, a parent must be responsible for the safety of her child when crossing the street.

    Ultimately, I think this boils down to a theme Dr. Coyne visits once in awhile: free will. We don’t have it. Top marketers know this, and know how to appeal to our lizard brains. Not everyone possesses Dr. Coyne’s patience or restraint. It is unfortunate that laws like this limit our freedoms, but I believe they provide a net benefit.

    1. A ban on selling a certain type of legal product is a completely different kind of regulation than speed limits. If a driver speeds around the corner and hits me or my kid, I don’t have any choice in the matter. I can choose (your conclusions on free will aside) not to buy my kid a Happy Meal. Yes, marketing to kids is troublesome, but it can be overcome by parental involvement rather than government overreach.

      1. “A ban on selling a certain type of legal product is a completely different kind of regulation than speed limits.”

        Everything is legal until the nanny state decides otherwise. Can you please explain how they are different? Let’s switch the speed limit in a school zone (public property) to the speed limit in a shopping mall parking lot (private, but most places have bylaws). Or are you also opposed to speed limits on private property?

        Also, you *do* have a choice in crossing a street with no posted speed limit. That was kind of the point. You can either exercise parental responsibility by not crossing or you can cross and assume responsibility for whatever happens. Another option (unavailable to libertarians) is to limit some freedoms for the greater good.

        1. Things that can harm other people (speeding, smoking in pulic)- topic of legislation.
          Things that harm nobody but yourself – (unhealthy eating, cocaine) – topic of information and education.
          If you hurt yourself, someone should ASK you to stop, if you hurt someone else, someone should ORDER you to stop.

          1. And if the parents feed crap to children, they are hurting them. If you screw with economy with ridiculous subsidies so that everything not containing corn syrup is more expensive, you are already distorting the market, perhaps this is just a way to try to rebalance it a bit.

            I’m in the US for a week (from Australia) and am finding this whole nanny state, government fear thing pretty ridiculous. You elect the the government, they should be broadly representing your views. If not, put yourself up for election.

            Sometime it takes a community to work together to get something done. That doesn’t make it communism, nor does it suggest you will shortly be under a police state.
            Libertarianism seems as much a pipe dream approach as communism.
            A cohesive functional community requires a balance.

      2. Your opinion might change if you thought of this as a public health issue. Public health measures often have the goal of altering human behavior en masse. Yes, any individual person can choose to do X (healthy) or Y (unhealthy). But if you make it harder to do Y, then fewer people will do it, and the population will be healthier. Whether this particular case will be an effective example, I am not so sure of..

    2. Including toys with junk food is marketing to children. Many very reasonable jurisdictions already ban marketing to children.

      Good point.

    3. Many very reasonable jurisdictions already ban marketing to children.

      Evidence, please?

      The FDA bans tobacco marketing to kids. Kraft voluntarily limited marketing some products to some age groups on some TV shows.

      What else you got?

  7. Just as I’d like so-called “conservatives” to stay out of my bedroom activities, I’d like liberals to stay the hell out of my parenting.

    Cue Faux News blowhards berating anti-capitalist liberals in 3…2…1…

  8. They didn’t go far enough. They should ban anyone under 90 years old>/b> from eating at McDonald’s, BK, Wendy’s, etc. where they only serve gross and disgusting ‘food’.

      1. About once a month I really like a hamburger and some fries and a diet Mountain Dew. If I really feel daring I sometimes might have some ice cream once in a while. I have managed to live to be 70 (through no fault of my own).

        I also eat raw fish, rare meat, rare eggs. I will NOT eat a kiwi.

          1. Enjoy the Wild Turkey for its own sake, but don’t fool yourself into thinking it helps you sleep. It might help you fall asleep, but the way the body metabolizes alcohol means that it’ll prevent you from getting a full, restful night’s sleep with the proper amount of REM and all.

            Might I suggest? Have the drink with lunch, and don’t drink any more alcohol after that. Try it for a week or so and see how you feel in the morning.

            Cheers,

            b&

    2. After “Supersize Me” came out, McDonalds (at least in the UK) came out with some pretty good salads and low-fat deli sandwiches.

      For a year or so, I enjoyed their salads while watching nearly everyone else buy and wolf down Big Macs, Quarter Pounders and fries. (I don’t entirely blame them, since I like them, too.)

      Anyway, it’s hard to blame McDonalds too much for serving what people like, especially if they offer healthier alternatives that actually don’t sell very well.

  9. Ban the toys! I must have at least a dozen floating around in my car after trips to McDonalds. They serve no practical purpose. Kids play with them for maybe 2 minutes and they are then discarded, in the manner of a used condom without the added bonus of an orgasm. Their existence is meaningless.

    1. The plastic will end up out of the way in the north Pacific gyre –
      http://preview.tinyurl.com/2wo4p7n

      As for the beef with the beef, one major problem building up is overuse of antibiotics in cattle & lateral gene transfer in resistant E.Coli – see for example Cantaurus, Vol. 16, 18-20, May 2008, article by Snell, Isolation and Identification of Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria from the Intestinal Flora of Feedlot Cattle and a Measure of Their Efficacy for Lateral Gene Transfer.

      There are of course also acrylamides in ‘freedom fries’ & coffee etc, to name another risk.

      But I think this issue is broader than food. One ethical point is, life is not risk free, so how far should an elected government go to protect people from themselves & from big business. Where you weaken control, the latter will push the boundaries as far as possible. Another point is ignorance. Poor people & less educated have in a sense fewer choices. They are likely to die sooner than better educated people. They are more likely to eat ‘junk’ or takeaway food on a regular basis, so to what extent should the state act paternalistically? I realize that in the US generally people are against the state doing this, whereas in Europe people expect the state to intervene. Popular opinion was nevertheless quick to condemn BP over the Gulf oil spill for example, & demand the state intervene. I think that government should intervene to control businesses to protect consumers, but shuld not necessarily be intervening with consumers themselves. Or something like that. Perhaps!

    1. Where should the line be drawn? Treats are great, as long as they don’t prevent a daily nutritious intake. There is no way to pass regulations that do not do more harm than good: in the future before a kid can order an ice cream she will have to be subjected to a stomach lavage to see if she ate a nutritious meal?

      Is education regarding healthy eating effective? Can parents choose if they themselves are ignorant about nutrition basics. I knew a university-educated mother who when I said make sure you eat protein everyday, asked what foods contain protein?

      Meanwhile the obesity epidemic continues.

      1. You make good points, but the point about treats interfering with a good meal is irrelevant to this particular measure. This is about preventing a certain type of marketing, not banning a certain type of treat. It’s just saying, if you are going to serve kids unhealthy food you can’t trick them into it with a toy, and if you are going to trick kids into eating your food with a toy then it has to be reasonably healthy. You can still do one or the other, just not both.

    2. Indeed, but the Unhappy Meal was pretty good, especially the Xword kicker. One outta three is better than SNL anymore.

      2. The oat and Kleenex ons were both great. I chuckled audibly (and that’s saying something – I’m Scandinavian).

          1. Oh, my tongue was firmly planted in my cheek. Just as was the tongue of the author of “Scandinavian Humor, and other Myths.” Don’t recall the author’s name at the moment.

          4. I know! I spoke for the information of Others.

            I encountered the sunniest little toddler in Djurgården on Saturday morning – he flung his hand up and said “Hej!” to me like a goodwill ambassador. All this Bergmanesque gloom is a myth.

            Let me know if you have a spare room you’d like me to come live in.

      3. (lols @ all of this subthread!)

        I loved “oat” & “Kleenex!” As to “Unhappy Meals,” though, I’m afraid I coined that myself years ago, and I suspect thousands of others have, too.

        But I can envision a whole website based on variants…Passive-Aggressive Meals, Irrational Exuberance Meals, Whiny Little Snot Meals…

    1. How can you accomplish that directly, though? Public education? Already failed. (Which is not to say we should give up, of course) Limit the number of times per week people can go to MacDonald’s?!? Yeeeahhh…

      1. Most children (I think) do not possess a driver’s license. It should be the adult’s responsibility concerning how many revolutions per second are completed in a McDonald’s drive thu.

  12. The food Nazis strike again! I have been harassed by nutritional nonsense my whole life, from monster mega-vitamins to oatmeal-only diets. Perhaps if McDonalds put a small weapon in the meal instead of a toy. Or perhaps a miniature New Testament (Nutrition naziism is a form of religious zeal for many people.)

    Actually, McDonalds is rather good. Some years back Consumer Reports reported that the hamburger one got at McDonalds was better than what could be bought at most grocery stores. I remember when they peeled and cut actual fresh potatoes for their fries. They now also serve better coffee than Starbucks with half the cost and ambience.

    WhenI go to San Francisco I always eat wholesome Chinese food anyway,

    1. Actually, McDonalds is rather good.

      If you say so!

      I think the point is not whether a McDonald’s hamburger is more or less healthy than a supermarket hamburger, but that the marketing, pricing, and convenience means that kids are eating hamburgers a lot more often than they otherwise would.

      On a personal note, I find McDonald’s hamburgers pretty nasty. Burger King and Wendy’s are not exactly haute cuisine, and their fare is just about as unhealthy as McDonald’s, and their marketing to kids is almost as despicable… but in a pinch, I’ll eat a hamburger from one of those places, and enjoy it. Not so with McDonald’s. But maybe that’s just me…

      1. That’s less about the quality of meat however, and more about the horrible terrible way they prepare a hamburger.

        McD’s actually has very high standards for their meat. I know someone who used to work in a packing plant that supplied them. Their standards were higher than your local grocery store.

        1. Yeah, I understood that was what was meant, but the end product is still lousy, and as I said, the ubiquity, pricing, convenience, and marketing makes it ultimately more harmful, IMO.

    2. I understand that such food is easily available, that McDonalds may provide employment in areas few other employers may go, & is convenient, yet making a beefburger is so simple & much nicer done yourself, so I would opine! I remember the McLibel trial in the UK in the 1990s, & I don’t like them –
      http://www.mcspotlight.org/case/

  13. This is a question of availability and responsible freedoms.

    Just make them very expensive more like their true price (they are already environmentally and heath-wise expensive but the cost is cheap because tax payer pays the external costs), parents will be forced to use them as a treat.

    1. And on the other side, making getting healthy food uber-cheap.

      That’s the problem, is that subsidies are messed up.

  14. I’m not quite so utterly opposed to this as Jerry, though I do have reservations. The fact that it only applies to meals sold with a toy makes it more palatable.

    The NYC trans-fat ban is bullshit because it’s an outright ban. Not a tax, not a “you can use it but you have to exercise full disclosure”, not a “you can’t market this to kids with sneaky tricks like giving them a toy” — it is an outright ban. That I oppose.

    But this is not a ban. McDonald’s can still sell horribly unhealthy food to kids, and they can still trick them into preferring their crappy food by including a toy — they just can’t do both at the same time. It seems fairly measured to me.

    Which is not to say I support it outright. I’m pretty ambivalent about it. If childhood obesity weren’t such a crisis, I’d oppose it outright on general principles.

  16. Well I either did something right or something wrong … my youngest would eat the ‘Unhappy Meal’ and like it! She’d be a bit miffed about doing a crossword but a Sudoku puzzle would go down nicely. On the other hand if I took her to McDonalds she’d expect a happy meal not an unhappy meal.

    Count me in as someone that enjoys the *occasional* Big-Mac or Quarter-Pounder.

    That Kleenex joke is pretty funny, I’ll have to find a use for that.

  17. I think the good doctor is simply worried that he may no longer have access to his preferred style of footwear if government is given too much control over what is good and what is bad for consumers.

    Yeah, I went there.

    1. If I made an Unhappy Meal, there’d either be a couple Mary Janes or some halvah in the kiwi’s place. Or for cruel and unusual punishment – horehound drops!

  19. Some number of years ago, I lived in Jersey City, NJ. My condo was directly across the street from an elementary school; therefore, I often passed kids and had them pass me during the morning commute (bus to PATH train for me, or longer walk to different PATH terminal if I was feeling frisky).

    Virtually 100% of the kids I passed along the way stopped by the local bodega for things like Cheetos, fried pies, sticky buns, full-sugar soda, and on and on and on. No exceptions. It was junk food all the way. Lots and lots of Cheetos and other no-nutrition-allowed crisps/chips.

    Blaming McDonalds (and surely this is an unConstitutional restraint of trade) for the obesity epidemic is like blaming a single raindrop for the wetness of the Pacific Ocean.

    1. BTW: If I were to place any blame on the obesity epidemic in an area where government influence was involved it would be the reduction of mandatory gym class for kids.

      According to Parenthood magazine: The percentage of students attending a daily physical education class has dropped from 42 percent in 1991 to 28 percent in 2003. In fact, only 8 percent of elementary school, 6.4 percent of middle schools and 5.8 percent of high schools provide daily physical education or an equivalent.

      Fix that!

        1. PE being yet another example of trying to solve a social issue via the wrong conduit. But it’s one we got used to…

          1. Why would that be the wrong conduit?

            The government recommends that kids get an hour of exercise every day.

            Exercise has been shown to have benefits that include better performance in mental tasks (ie, school work).

            The schools have kids 8 hours or thereabouts a day. 1 gym class a day (OK, not dodge ball) does no harm and has many positive benefits.

            I’m mystified as to why that would be the “wrong conduit”. Perhaps you had bad experiences in gym class. Yes, I agree, gym teachers back in the day weren’t quite — well, let’s just say they weren’t sophisticated about exercise physiology and individualizing a plan so that everyone got equivalently appropriate levels of exercise.

            But that doesn’t mean that the conduit is inappropriate. We need to teach kids that exercise is fun, worth doing for reasons other than the fitness aspects, and teach them life-long skills. I can’t imagine a better place than school to educate them about those things. Or another subject that would be so directly applicable continuously throughout their lives after graduation.

            Seriously. I’d like to know the reasoning behind “wrong conduit”.

          2. Your rationale is fine but schools have an increasingly difficult time accomplishing even their academic mission. Tho, given that pedagogy is as bad as it routinely is, sacrificing a knowledge hour for a PE hour is hardly noticeable, I agree. Still, PE is yet another instance of burdening the education system with a tangential mission that should ultimately be the responsibility of families. The US in particular seems to pay less & less attention to expecting responsible parenting and more and more to addressing its absence via the already overburdened schools.

            I did not find my children’s K-8 PE much more impressive than my own experiences, tho at one time a teacher did employ heart monitors. (Actually, my post-Sputnik elementary experience with the “President’s Physical Fitness” program (some such title, anyway), was in some ways superior. We were at least doing regular calisthenics-type excercises and given benchmarks to aim for…)

            Worse is the emphasis on competitive sports at the HS level, so that only a handful of kids play team sports, with an unseemly burdensome level of practice hours, while the majority of kids who would happily play intramural sports find their participation abruptly curtailed…

            The best PE my kids had in HS was marching band. And it was even a PE credit!

    3. Really? What are they, independently wealthy? Do their parents give them, like, $50 a week for an allowance? I couldn’t AFFORD to buy groceries every morning on the way to school, quite apart from the fact that it wouldn’t have occurred to me. Cheetos first thing in the morning? Blurgh.

      1. Jersey City, NJ. Not a rich neighborhood. In fact, quite urban and very very mixed. I believe that the elementary school had students who spoke 26 different languages natively. No, I’m not making that up – we used to meet with the principal fairly regularly.

        Whatever money they had went right to the junk food. Cheetos was number 1 with a bullet. Not so much candy, though. Salty snack foods for breakfast (or at least while they were trundling to class).

        I quite agree on blurgh. That’s why it’s an easily recalled memory.

      2. For real.

        We didnt eat out or have a lot of junk food growing up because we couldnt afford it. Mom could feed us all for a week, what it would cost to eat out one day.

        And, everyone please notice that this targets fast food. You are still free to go to The French Laundry and stuff your child full of calories.

  20. Q:How many narcissists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

    A: Me

    very proud of that one…

    1. Q. How many Rotarians does it take to screw in a light bulb?

      A. Five. One to change the bulb and four to screw up the plaque.

      (Q. What’s the New Zealand idea of foreplay?
      A. Y’awake, love?)
      My answer:
      Q. What’s the Australian idea of foreplay?
      A. Didda wakeya, love?

      1. Q: How many psychiatrists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

        A: Only one, but the light bulb really has to want to change.

        1. Um, we’re posting original jokes here… You could maybe answer how many psychiatrists it takes to screw up a light bulb…

  23. Doesn’t it bother the good people from San Francisco that they’re giving an endangered bird or a national of a south pacific nation out with each ‘happy’ meal? Now if it were the chinese gooseberry, which those clever Kiwis marketed as Kiwi-fruit, then I’d understand.

    1. It’s really a joke that needs to be spoken rather than read. If you can pronounce French, read it out loud.

  25. I have no idea if this ban can accomplish anything, but I’m behind the effort to address childhood obesity and the eating habits children develop that lead to heart disease.

    I don’t think too many former kids will tell their oncologists, “Thank god my parents fed me all that garbage!”

  27. “People’s Republic of San Francisco”

    This jibe is unhelpful and unnecessary. It just perpetuates the myth that a Socialist State would be a nanny state and that Socialist state would curtail your freedom. Nothing could be further from the truth in the type of Socialism supported by, for example, Bertrand Russell.

    A jibe like this just reinforces the prejudice already in the minds of the unthinking rightwing wingnuts like those in the Tea Party movement.

    1. The jibe represents the success of the T-baggers in infiltrating our brains with their stupid, methinks.

  28. Great point Jerry!
    Childhood obesity is horrible (hell, I was a statistic, but took to losing 30kg myself when I was 16), but blaming fast food is stupid. It’s not that calorie content that hurts the kid – it’s the calorie content average that the parents offer to the child on a daily basis. An occasional treat won’t hurt them, but fast food as a norm will. It’s really shifting the blame away from where it falls – from the parents. Feed your kids wholesome, home cooked most nights and every now and then, treat them. It’s child abuse to provide fast food to a child as a staple. Have you heard Tim Minchin’s song “Fat children”?

  29. Somewhere Michael Moore is celebrating over what I’m sure is a reasonably portioned and calorie-conscious meal.

  30. As a vegan and avid reader of reputable nutritional science journals, I’ll disagree with your view of ‘enough is enough’. Saying food isn’t medicine is true in the strictest sense but it’s also a poor comparison. You can most definitely show that consuming certain foods (leafy green cruciferous veg) is healthier for humans than a diet of animal products. You can place yourself, statistically, into a group less likely to develop heart disease, type 2 diabetes and other diseases of affluence by consuming a specific diet.

    This isn’t NEARLY enough, especially for children. Eating habits are determined so young in life and usually due to the unhealthy eating of parents. It’s transferred from parent to child just like religion! It’s a great example, actually, of another social norm (promotion of the constant consumption of animal products and junk) that isn’t questioned enough, similar to religion. Trying to come between someone and the way they want to eat is just as difficult if not more difficult than telling them their religion is wrong. Love of particular types of food is an area where theists and non-theists overlap greatly.

    You know physiology, evolution and history. The way we have been eating for the past 200 years has shifted so radically! I’m still so surprised that more atheists aren’t more concerned with cutting out animal products and concerns of animal ethics
    but it makes sense.

    There’s a cognitive dissonance there as well, the nutritional science is there but ignored.

    I support the Healthy School Meals Act as well. If you don’t want a nation of slobs you have to start with children. It’s probably already too late though, the obesity rates are skyrocketing!

    http://polis.house.gov/legislation/hr4870.htm

    1. Vegetarians Are Evil!

      Pol Pot – Vegan Despot and Mass Murderer
      Charles Manson – Vegan Animal Rights Activist
      Volkert Van der Graaf – Vegan Assassin and Murderer
      Adolf Hitler – Vegetarian Megalomaniac Mass Murderer
      Genghis Khan – Vegetarian Marauder and Rapist
      CAIN – THE FIRST KILLER (VEGETARIAN)

  31. Right on, Jerry.

    To those of you who say “look at this as a public health issue,” I say, “There’s nothing public health advocates (and sometimes zealots) do not want to frame as a “public health issue.” Using the term “public health” is not a get-out-of-jail-free card that gives you license to impinge on other values. Too many public health advocates don’t understand this. There are other, competing interests – personal choice, personal responsibility, “bad” choices we’re allowed to make for the sake of pleasure, parental autonomy – that are not obviously overrridden by claims of public health imperatives. Read that again – you don’t have a trump card.

    I’m a big ‘ol leftie liberal. I think capitalism is out of control, and society would be much better off with firmer regulations, and with more attention paid to reining in excesses for the benefit of all.

    But I’m weary of the reflexive attitude “public health” advocates adopt toward everything. Initiatives like this one in San Francisco don’t even make sense. You seriously think banning toys in Happy Meals is going to stop children from being fat? If you do, you’re talking out of your hat, and supporting a – I’m sorry – stereotypically liberal feel-good bunch of crap.

    Children are not fat because of Happy Meals. They’re fat because of multiple, interacting forces. Primary among them is their parents. It’s parents – not the evil bodega, not high-fructose corn syrup, not the siren song of toys – that control what children eat. When I hear stories of these alleged children who stop to buy sticky buns at the bodega, I have to ask why you’re madder at the bodega than you seem to be at the parents. Why do you seem more willing to come down on the manufacturers or retailers than you do on the people who are really responsible -the parents?

    Sure, many parents need some help figuring out how to say “no,” and how to feed their kids more healthful foods on a limited budget. But that’s not McDonalds’ problem, and it’s not the bodega’s problem.

    Like Abby, I grew up poor. There was no spending money to buy Coke at the corner store on the way to school. Even if there were, my mother was well acquainted with the phrase, “No.” So what’s the problem with contemporary parents? Hint: it ain’t the evil marketing companies. Human nature and nutritional facts didn’t change in one generation, and targeting retailers does not address the problem.

    Bullshit bans like this one in San Francisco make me cringe to be called a liberal. They’re not even a Band-Aid; they’re just empty sanctimony. You want to make a difference in family nutrition? Start identifying why it is that poor families seem to have lost the ability to buy and cook healthful (if humble) food in recent generations, and figure out how to fix it. I’m tired of hearing “convenience food is chosen because it’s cheap.” That’s not true. It’s most emphatically not cheaper than buying most basic ingredients in bulk, sensibly, on a budget.

    There’s a serious empirical disconnect going on, and banning toys ain’t gonna solve it.

    1. I’m tired of hearing “convenience food is chosen because it’s cheap.” That’s not true. It’s most emphatically not cheaper than buying most basic ingredients in bulk, sensibly, on a budget.
      QFT.

      Add in coupons (still doubled at some grocery stores) and sales, its even easier to eat well on a budget.

      I was just speaking with a neighbor about this, as he just caught himself spending $300 last month, eating out for lunch. $300 is more than I spent on all my food last month.

      1. Exactly.

        My mother figured out how to feed herself and three children on a food stamp budget that would make most “poor” people faint. No, we didn’t have convenience foods, we didn’t have “Lunchables,” and we didn’t have an endless supply of soda. We ate very modestly: there were plenty of bean soup or eggs-and-pancakes suppers in my house.

        But we never went hungry, and for the most part, we got our vegetables, too (some of which we grew in the summer months).

        Shopping economically, and planning family meals on a budget, is a lost art.

    3. “I’m tired of hearing “convenience food is chosen because it’s cheap.” That’s not true. It’s most emphatically not cheaper than buying most basic ingredients in bulk, sensibly, on a budget.”

      Clearly, for a whole lot of people:

      (cost of convenience food) < (cost of bulk ingredients)+(preparation and cleanup time & effort)

      For kids, peer pressure and status concerns are real. Our innate preference for sugar, fat and salt is real. Not every kid is lucky enough to have parents like yours. As a liberal, do you think it's fair to chuck kids under the bus due to the failings of their parents?

      Marketing works. That's why they do it. When directed to kids, I think it is coercion.

    4. “…identifying why it is that poor families seem to have lost the ability to buy and cook healthful (if humble) food in recent generations…”

      Nobody gonna say it? I’ll say it. Too lazy, or too busy. You pick.

      I myself, fall under the “too lazy” category, but I’m not responsible for any children. And I’m not trying to imply that poor people are lazy – American people are lazy, but healthier pre-packed options are very expensive. Last time I tried to make a pretty linky it was broken so here:
      http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/04/04/business/04metrics_g.html?ref=business
      Cute infographic.

    5. That’s what I was hinting at in my comment above on the fact that it wouldn’t have occurred to me to buy Cheetos on the way to school. Things like chips were an occasional treat, usually in the evening when the grownups were having a sociable drink before dinner. They weren’t something you ate every damn day, and certainly not first thing in the morning.

      I’m not so sure about poverty and good nutrition in the past though. It happens I’m reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for the first time since late childhood, and I’m staggered by the diet. It was all bread. Bread turned back into dough and fried, bread made into a paste and then a loaf and baked (again) and eaten with catsup – and so on. It’s a wonder they didn’t all die of malnutrition.

  32. Its a reasonable law. It only applies to high calorie meals that are sold together with toys. In fact, this law is good policy, other governments should consider this law, except they should probably confine the restriction to maximum calories, sugar and salt without requiring that there be vegetables and fruits or singling out sugary drinks as forbidden.

  33. I don’t know what it is, but I have seen otherwise liberal or progressive people go nuts when you even hint at lowering meat consumption.

    This law doesn’t say you can’t eat all the garbage you want. It doesn’t say you can’t feed it to your kids. It says you can’t entice kids to eat garbage by packaging it with toys.

    I don’t even understand what most of you are defending. The right to… buy bad food that’s packaged with toys?

    1. Yeah, I agree. Sounds like a lot of people are taking the facts and running with them on this issue. I do not feel strongly about this issue either way. Just because “restaurants” like McDonald’s are not the ONLY cause of childhood obesity does not mean that we shouldn’t examine them. And if you don’t think that childhood obesity hurts more than the child, you don’t understand health care economics and worker productivity in the U.S. This is not an unreasonable law. But I do wonder about it’s practical impact in isolation. Nobody is legislating parenting any more than say seat belt laws or some schools policy on immunizations (though this can be circumvented). Less rhetoric, more research please. Placing the sole blame or responsibility on the parent is not going to curb the problem.

      1. Ah, but we appear to be placing *no* responsibility on the parents, only on the restaurants.

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