Sitter’s Checklist: Kids and food, sexualization, and smoking
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008The FTC released the results of its research on food marketing to kids, Marketing Food To Children and Adolescents: A Review of Industry Expenditures, Activities, and Self-Regulation: A Federal Trade Commission Report To Congress (pdf).
The report recommends more of the same food industry self-regulation; critics maintain that self-regulation just doesn’t work.
Michele Simon writes:
Most importantly, the FTC should be calling on the food industry to stop marketing to children, period. If a child under the age of 8 does not have the cognitive capacity to understand that she is being targeted commercially, then how can any marketing to young children be ethical? Even older kids, while they can understand “persuasive intent,” are still unable to resist the power of marketing. It’s entirely possible that the FTC recommendations, if followed, could result in more, not less food marketing to kids. The agency is essentially encouraging the nation’s most aggressive food marketers to keep it up, as long as it’s for the “right” foods, however that gets defined.
Kids should not be taught to eat carrots and oranges because SpongeBob or even Elmo says so. Rather, they should eat when they are hungry, just as adults should. We cannot depend on marketers to make kids eat right. If the food industry just stopped targeting kids with billions of dollars worth of sophisticated unhealthy food messages, parents’ jobs would get a whole lot easier.
I recommend reading Michele Simon’s entire diary entry at Daily Kos.
CCFC co-founder Diane Levin and Jean Kilbourne (of Killing Us Softly fame) talked about their new book, So Sexy So Soon, on the Today Show:
I had the pleasure of seeing both women (as well as Michele Simon) at the last CCFC Summit. I was even able to tell Jean Kilbourne (while she was trapped in line with me waiting for the bathroom) how her book Can’t Buy My Love was instrumental in motivating me to finally quit smoking.
And on that note, the House voted to allow the FDA to regulate tobacco. And by “regulate,” we mean crack down on tobacco marketing and sales to kids. The Senate has not yet voted; President Bush may veto:
The reasoning is positively Orwellian. “FDA regulates drugs and devices by approving products after weighing the benefits against the risks of a product,” the White House policy statement on the bill says. “In contrast, there is no such thing as a cigarette in which the benefits outweigh the risks. The use of tobacco products is inherently unsafe.”
Taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean that the government should ban cigarettes, not stop at merely regulating them. The only other translation possible is that the White House has concluded cigarettes are so dangerous the government should do nothing about them.
Which reminds me: I’ve got tickets to the Daily Show when it’s in town for the RNC. Can’t wait.
Read also: Big Tobacco’s Guinea Pigs: How an Unregulated Industry Experiments on America’s Kids and Consumers
