Fence sitting doesn't come naturally to me, but I can see both sides in the controversy over how food is marketed to kids. Kellogg and Nickelodeon are about to get sued by a coalition of fed-up parents and consumer watchdog groups for peddling nutritionally bankrupt cereals and snack foods to kids.

Thank goodness, in this age of outsourcing, we can still manufacture plenty of righteous indignation. Is this just another one of those frivolous lawsuits for which America's become so famous?

Contrarian conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan says yes, and advocates a “just say no” policy for harried parents with cuckoo-for-Cocoa Puff kids. The purpose of companies like Kellogg and Nickelodeon is to sell stuff, after all, not to ensure that your kids eat right.

But the processed foods so heavily promoted to kids may be warping their palates at an early age, programming them to crave excessively sweet and salty foods, and causing an unprecedented rise in childhood diabetes in this country.

What's the solution? The movement to ban sodas from schools and make cafeteria meals more wholesome makes a lot of sense to me. But forcing manufacturers to stop marketing crap to kids? That kind of social engineering might lead us down the slippery slope to something really radical, like, oh, I don't know, some kind of national health care system. Of course, that could come in handy if we can't wean our children off the frosted flakes.

Freedom, as one craggy neo-con famously said, is messy. Sometimes, it's sugar coated or loaded with trans fats, too. Can children and television coexist happily in a household, or do you have to pull the plug to preserve your sanity and their health?