When it comes to being a stronger influence on my grandchildren than fast food dispensers, time is not on my side. I’m not with my grandchildren every day. If I had access to the same amount of time with them, I still wouldn’t have the kind of money they have. According to Yale, fast food/junk food providers spent about $4.2 billion (yep with a b) in 2009 in advertising and marketing, and American children saw 25,000 to 40,000 commercials per year. Let’s break that down-- for fast food, the average preschooler saw about 3 ads per day, children between the ages of 6-11 saw 3 1/2 ads per day, and your typical teen between the ages of 12-17 saw almost 5 ads per day in 2009. I can’t compete with that, and something tells me hugs and kisses and even bedtime stories aren’t going to be enough to overcome that level of exposure. And those numbers don’t include secondary contact like billboards, friends, and product placement in television shows and movies. If those numbers don’t scare you, go to http://www.fastfoodmarketing.org and you’ll find even more reasons to keep your grandchildren away from all television, friends, movies, or contact with the outside world. Eventually they have to go to school or at the very least go to work so we might as well get used to having fast food/junk food ads thrown at them at every turn. Right? I thought so. The correct answer to that would be No! Even Hell no!
This level and intensity of exposure more than concerns me. I am a fierce protectress of my grandchildren. I only thought I was a lioness when it came to my children. I am positively irrational when it comes to my grandchildren. The odds of them becoming obese and/or developing diabetes is pretty strong. In terms of genetics, our family already has that ticket punched. Obesity and diabetes run on almost every branch of our family tree. There is evidence that fast food marketing is a “probable” cause of obesity. Yes, I know the marketing itself isn’t the cause, but eating fast food is the cause of obesity; however, kids age 3-5 who are exposed to fast food branding (packaging, colors, marketing, etc.) prefer that food even when it doesn’t come from that restaurant. If I bought their wrappers and put my food in it, my grandkids would prefer it. This tells me the branding is pretty darn good. It also tells me that whatever is in the package is going to be eaten and what “they” put in the package is not necessarily healthy food. I've seen some that I wasn't sure if it was real food.
So as a grandmother trying to create home cooked meals that the grandkids remember fondly and as an eco-omi trying to influence their tastebuds to prefer organic, whole, and natural foods, I’m up against billions of dollars and thousands of hours of advertising and slick packaging. If that wasn’t bad enough, the toys and the playscape are another draw for kids to go to fast food restaurants. In fact, now they don’t even have to go into a restaurant to be exposed to food as a “play” theme. There’s going to be a monopoly game that includes all the brands of all the products a child needs in order to be happy. Monopoly! I love Monopoly. So much for non-descript little green houses and red hotels. But that isn’t all. We can’t forget the “give-aways,” like the one sponsored by McDonald’s on July 27th in Phoenix where the first 100 children to come to that restaurant received a backpack as part of a 28,000 backpack giveaway statewide. Now, how am I going to compete with that? I remember loving everything my grandmothers cooked, but they weren’t competing with flavor enhancers, fast food advertising, free toys, play-scapes, and backpacks.
Connecting play and food is huge with fast food/junk food. Playing and food was a concept my mother strictly forbade and would have made both grandmothers faint in disgust. Well, maybe not faint, but we would have gotten frowns and that was a pretty serious indictment from them. As if toys, games, and play-scapes aren’t enough, there are also websites specifically for kids to go and “play.” I like the McBudget best. This isn’t actually a kid website, but it does feature teenagers/young adults. McDonald’s partnered with Visa to help McDonald’s employees (supposedly teenagers and young adults, but actually they’re closer to 30 understand how to live on the salary they pay them. It’s a pretend budget, but then so is thinking that eating fast food is a best choice for anyone’s at any income. I hear cost used as the reason people eat fast food all the time and it’s obviously pretty common as it was written up in the New York Post and we all know how trendy they are.
Truthfully, I’ve never found eating at fast food restaurants to be cheaper and studies confirm that fast food is not just less healthy, but more expensive than foods you prepare yourself when you shop with a meal plan. I guess it’s the meal plan that adds the perceived cost to the non-fast food since you do have to sit down and think about what you’re going to eat and then horrors-- make a meal plan, which can take almost an hour if you do it for the month. But hey, let’s say fast food is cheaper and it isn’t, but we can pretend for one minute. The meal itself may cost less, but the health costs far outweigh the couple of dollars a person might save. A family spends around $13,000 per year on healthcare resulting from diabetes. That doesn’t sound like a savings to me. It sounds like deferred costs with pawn shop interests rates-- heart disease, obesity, diabetes. It also sounds like taking the money away from the entire family and devoting it to the child or adult who gets ill.
It may sound like I’m getting all excited about nothing, except it isn’t “nothing” to me. There is increasing evidence of the rise of obesity and diabetes in this country, even for children. This is serious stuff not just for me as a grandmother of two of the most precious children ever born, but as an organic gardner and climate change activist. It really is all related, but understanding how is for next week.
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