Today’s New York Times has a story about the food fight [1] brewing among the major American food manufacturers over the kinds of foods they’ve been marketing to kids and the way they’re going about it. The Institute of Medicine [2] issued a report last week that has the food industry on the defensive with its statement that current food and beverage marketing practices are jeopardizing our children’s long term health.
According to the report, “80 to 97 percent of the food products now aimed at children and teenagers are of “poor nutritional quality.””
Companies like General Mills and Kellogg have been fattening their bottom lines and our children’s waistlines for decades by using cherished childhood characters to push food products that are high in fat, sugar, and salt, and correspondingly low in nutritional value. Malleable moppets bombarded by print and TV ads lobby their parents to buy the latest cartoon character-certified, sugar coated crap.
Who hasn’t witnessed a mommy meltdown in the cereal aisle when a lil’ consumer grabs a box of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs (well, OK, that was the mythic cereal of Calvin and Hobbes [3], but you get the idea) and throws a tantrum till the well-intentioned but weary woman caves in, puts the organic Weetabix [4] back on the shelf, and buys Sugar Smacks instead? No wonder I’m not having kids.
General Mills, which outspends Kraft, Kellogg and Pepsico in the battle for tiny tots’ taste buds, is trumpeting the virtues of its new line of whole grain-enhanced cereals, despite the fact that some of them contain 40 percent sugar, according to the Times.
Kraft has so far been the most responsive to parents’ demands to curb ad campaigns directed at kids, going so far as to ban Clifford the Big Red Dog [5] from boxes of Teddy Grahams. But now that Clifford’s been banished to the doghouse, Dora the Explorer’s touting the Teddies; this is progress?
Disney has promised to take icons like Mickey Mouse and Winnie-the-Pooh off packages of candy and food products deemed unhealthy for children and plans to partner with a major supermarket chain (they won’t say who) to put Mickey to work promoting healthier foods. Pooh will presumably be joining Clifford on the unemployment line, given his defiantly pro-fat attitude:
“A bear, however hard he tries,
Grows tubby without exercise.
Our Teddy Bear is short and fat,
Which is not to be wondered at.
But do you think it worries him
To know that he is far from slim?
No, just the other way about—
He’s proud of being short and stout.”
(from A. A. Milne’s “Teddy Bear,” in The Complete Tales & Poems of Winnie-the-Pooh [6])
Now, I’m as fond of Pooh as the next person (OK, possibly fonder) but still: we can’t have an unapologetically obese bear peddling junk food to our kids. I’d say take him out to the Hundred Acre Woodshed and paddle some sense into his overstuffed rump, only I’m opposed to corporal punishment, even for stuffed animals.
Image: Photo of Steiff Pooh