Slashdot Mirror
California's Santa Clara County Bans Happy Meal Toys
WrongSizeGlass writes "The L.A. Times is reporting that Santa Clara County officials have voted to ban toys and other promotions that restaurants offer with high-calorie children's meals. 'This ordinance prevents restaurants from preying on children's love of toys' to sell high-calorie, unhealthful food, said Supervisor Ken Yeager, who sponsored the measure. 'This ordinance breaks the link between unhealthy food and prizes.' Supervisor Donald Gage, who voted against the measure, said, 'If you can't control a 3-year-old child for a toy, God save you when they get to be teenagers.' The vote was 3 - 2 in favor of the ban."
Why? It seems like a damn good idea to me.
Ob: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jamie_oliver.html
No sig today...
...this is a great idea. I had to institute a rule in my house that no toys were allowed with food. I found that when I forbid the kids from having the toys, when I gave them a choice of restaurants for dinner, they were much more likely to chose one with better food. It seems that the toys were a large part of the draw...take that away, and they were much more likely to eat something healthy.
Seriously? So a county located in a state makes a law like this, yet it is somehow Obama's fault? Look. Obama has done a lot of things wrong, there is no denying that...but can't you look away from the talking points for just one second? Please? If not for Slashdot, at least for the sake of whatever intelligence you may have?
Living With a Nerd
I also want a law banning fruit or candy additives to milkshakes (Damn you Chick-fil-a and your irresistible milkshakes that I -only- buy when I can get 'em peachy or minty).
While we're at it, why not ban making unhealthy food taste good?
Then again, we could perhaps just expect adults to act like adults and suffer the consequences of their choices. And yes, the consequence of having children is having to raise them to make good choices, even when the bad food comes with a toy. Can't handle it? Don't have kids. Don't use law to constrain someone else to make up for your lack of spine.
First, let me say this. I'm totally on board with Jamie Oliver, love what the guy is trying to do, etc etc. I think his "revolution" show is only vaguely based on the reality of the people he's covering, but he's gotta sell ads for his network so he can keep buying food for his family, and it doesn't detract from the good that such a revolution could do.
Having said all that... Here's a tip: If the kid never learns that McDonald's meals come with toys, the toys cannot be used to sell the food.
But the shitty plastic toys are as bad for brain development as the shitty fatty food is for body development. And the shitty mind pablum TV that the shitty food and the shitty toys are advertised on is even worse.
Stay away from the King, the Clown, and the young girl with the red pigtails. There is absolutely nothing inside those four walls that your kid needs, or that is in any way good for your kid.
We don't need laws against using plastic crap to sell crap food. We need to make good healthy food as affordable as crap food, and show people how easy it is to feed it to their kids. We need to get rid of the plastic crap and go back to durable toys that last and foster imagination and free play. We don't need our congresscritters to pass "Save the Children" laws to do this for us, because those almost always backfire.
(Example from the show: like making Jamie take his pasta-and-vegetables off the food line because it didn't have enough vegetables, then stating that french fries DO count as a full vegetable when it was replaced with prepared crap).
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
After reading the subject, I thought the law was to cut down on plastic garbage. Too bad.
Talk about brainless consumption. Those "toys" are completely useless. If they do anything at all, they'll break after a few hours, and they exist only there to promote new consumption (movies, TV, other toys.)
I guess they keep kids entertained for the rest of the ride or meal, therefore freeing parents of the task of interaction.
When I used to get my Happy Meal as a child, I was more entertained by the toy than my food. I began to have weight problems as I grew older because I saw food as an event, a fun thing, a highlight of my day, instead of something to keep me fueled. High calorie foods aren't healthy, but they don't cause fat kids. Children with normal, healthy eating habits will take two bites of their burger and then run along to play with their new toy. When parents use food as a reward ("You did good on your report card, lets order pizza!") you have a problem. When I got to my mid to later teens, most of my friends had normal eating habits -- they didn't get excited by food like me. I picked up on that, and changed my eating habits to view food as fuel, not fun. It took about three years, but I've lost over 50 pounds and have a proper build complete with muscle tone. Bottom line: unhealthy food itself isn't the problem, it's how we view food in our daily lives. If you snack to pass the time, even when you're not hungry, if you go back for seconds after your pains are gone, you have unhealthy eating habits. Eat to live, don't live to eat. It's a habit our culture in America breeds -- food for fun. Unhealthy food isn't the root cause though (even if it contributes.)
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
While I agree with you in theory it's obvious that parents are not doing their jobs so government must step in SOMETIMES.
How is taking away the happy meal toy "stepping in"? The parents who are so irresponsible as to allow their kids to live off this crap aren't going there for the free toys. They are going there because they are too lazy and/or stupid to come up with a better choice at dinnertime.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Good for Santa Clara County! We need to crack down on obesity. "Fat Acceptance" is now recognized as having been a horrible public policy mistake. We have 300 pound oinkers blocking sidewalks, overloading aircraft, and running up medical costs. There's a shortage of qualified recruits for the Army. This has to stop. Fat kids used to be extremely rare. There's no excuse for being fat in your teens. Fat kids grow up to be huge adults. Anything we can do to cut down on childhood obesity is a step forward.
The Youth Fitness Song was distributed by the U.S. Government in the 1960s. No "fat acceptance" back then. "Nuts to the flabby guys".
Now drop and give me 20.
A positive outcome from this though is less demand for foreign (usually Chinese) sweatshop labor. :)
Sure. The solution, of course, is for people TO own their responsibility rather than to leave it for the Government to pick up. If all responsibility were appropriately owned, it cannot be re-owned by others and therefore cannot be misused by others.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
And California wonders why their state is ready to self-implode.
No we don't, at least, not all of us. California has a decently large population so there are plenty of people here who facepalm themselves every time they read about shit like this. Those people even go out of their way to stop it. We attend local meetings at government centers. We try to meet with our legislators at the state level. We even help the city-councilman next door carry groceries in from his car in an attempt to get his ear. We talk about things rationally. We vote with plenty of sense. We even try to convince others that shit like this is retarded, regularly.
/b-tards that think their penis is more important than it really is.
Unfortunately, those of us that are trying to fix this state are fighting a constant uphill battle against strung-out junkies, the radical religious zealots, the love-will-fix-everything nutjobs, the city-slicking Sierra clubbers (seriously, the Bay is not part of the Sierras guys, get your title straight), and the apathetic, fuck-you types that can't be bothered with anything that doesn't involve their favorite music or X-box game. It's a hard battle. =P
That said, don't discount all Californians as bat-shit crazies, just realize that since we have a nice climate, a lot of people move here so the ratio of common-sense to dumb-fuckery is extraordinarily low. Think of it as a population made up of the entirety of 4chan and slashdot. While the slashdotters (most of the time) try to be rational, they are far outnumbered by the
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
So you think that removing toys from kids meals will make parents who previously fed their children fast food every day suddenly start cooking healthy meals?
If so, you're as deluded as the morons in California.
Bad parents will still be bad parents.
Except when I'm craving chicken (as I do fortnightly) and they're closed, you insensitive clod!
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
And Supervisor Donald Gage agrees with you. The problem is, we've tried that for decades and it isn't working. The "personal responsibility" people stamp their feet and complain "It's the parents' responsibility! It's the parents' responsibility! (stamp, stamp, stamp...)". Hey, why don't you stamp your feet a little harder? Maybe, then, all of those parents will suddenly take up an interest in pediatric nutrition.
"(stamp, stamp, stamp!) Kids shouldn't... they shouldn't. Shouldn't, shouldn't, shouldn't!". Yeah, but you know what? They do. In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice but, in practice, there is. You can yell and complain about responsibility and the nanny state and all that jazz, but, ultimately, it fails to actually fix the problem. So, the county supervisors have decided to try this. And I think you have to admit that, regardless of whether you think that the county should have passed this ordinance, the restaurants are throwing the toys in there to help peddle a product which should probably be peddled on their merits of its nutrition.
This issue reminds me of the Simpsons episiode with "Mt. Splashmore", where a commercial for the water park teaches the kids the "Take me to Mt. Splashmore" song and then instructs the kids to go sing it to their parents over and over again. Or, in "The Corporation", I think it was, where the market research lady interviewed parents about their nagging children. The parents thought it was research into how to get kids to nag less but it was really studying how to get the kids to nag their parents more effectively so that the parents would cave in and buy more often. I think you're naive if you don't think these companies aren't pouring millions of dollars into ways of getting around this "personal responsibility" firewall, and the toys are just one part of their arsenal.
For example, even when kids don't really have a say, they do. You even admit "The toy is just a bonus to keep our child busy long enough so we can finish our meals with some level of peace.". So, the toy does help bring you in to that particular restaurant chain. Besides, I can use the "parental responsibility" argument on you. I know a couple that actually takes parenting seriously. When we all go out to dinner with their kid, their kid finishes first, and then knows to sit there, quietly, while we all chat a while. She knows that, if she starts getting fidgety or rambunctious, things are going to turn out worse for her in the long run. So, we can always finish our meals in peace... toy or no toy. But then, that's because they feel that they should be responsible parents.
I have no problem with you (or anyone else) buying large pizzas or anything else. Nor do I believe in defining what is good for you or in micromanaging.
What I do believe in is that the net amount of control in a closed society is fixed and that if you don't control yourself, you are implicitly giving that control to others. So if you don't want to be micromanaged, don't give control away. It's very simple.
What I also believe is that many (not all, but many) unhealthy behaviours (including eating disorders) are a consequence of control disorders and, in turn, have consequences on others - including, but not restricted to, expense and yet more control disorders.
Nobody is "perfect" and nobody knows what this "perfect" thing is anyway, but if you have a reasonable level of self-control, you will have a reasonable level of health, you will (within reasonable margins of error) maximize what you get out of life for what you put in, and you will maximize (also within reasonable margins of error) maximize the benefit to society you have to offer -- though how much of that benefit is ever seen is, itself, another choice.
Is a person gratuitously buying fatty foods a "bad" thing? No. Actually, the British diet (which is mostly fat) is far more nutritious than a lot of the "healthy" diets in the US because it's better-balanced and has far better ratios of healthy fats, healthy cholesterol, etc.
Ok, so is a person gratuitously buying a specifically unhealthy fatty food a bad thing? Not necessarily. If you've a healthy state of mind, you will tend to steer towards the food that your body needs, whether or not it is technically "unhealthy" according to any given standard. If your mind is unhealthy, you well tend to steer towards the food that will damage or destroy your body, whether or not it is technically "healthy" by any other standard.
When is a mind unhealthy? Hard to say, but one common symptom is grabbing inappropriate control from others, and rejecting appropriate control from oneself.
Thus, if you have appropriate control, the odds are you will eat what is right for you at that moment, no matter how it is labeled by others. In which case, the label is immaterial and restrictions become stupid and naive.
If you have inappropriate control, you will be destructive towards yourself and your family. I regard insanity less as the inability to tell right and wrong apart and more as the inability to act on whatever it is you do know. By this understanding, inappropriate control is insanity and I can see nothing wrong with outsiders stepping in and restricting the damage the insane can do.
What happens if nobody steps in? As I've said elsewhere, that's been tried. Historically, if nobody accepts control of their own lives, you get someone stepping in and accepting that control on their behalf. That is very very bad juju. I do not recommend it.
The problem is, in the US people take the attitude that they don't want anyone to step in when needed, but they ALSO don't want to accept any personal responsibility or any personal control. THAT is the reason why America keeps ending up with dodgy Government officials. It has nothing to do with whether Government is big or small.
(IMHO, ideally, Government would be so big that everyone had the power to make a difference. Small Government, to me, means too much power is being given to too few people. In Somalia, for example, absolute power is in the hands of a few dozen warlords. You can't get a smaller Government than that.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Also, you need more money to flow into the schools but people will vote down any tax increase to fund the increase.
That's depressing. In the UK when Jamie said on his TV programme that schools were spending an average of 37 pence per child there was significant pressure on the government (including a petition) to spend more. They increased the minimum to 50p (in 2005), which Jamie said was sufficient.
If you're not going to spend tax revenue on your nation's children, what are you going to spend it on? (Rhetorical question.)
Articles from centre-left (Guardian) and right (Times) newspapers:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/feb/20/channel4.food
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/article432258.ece (disable cookies if it doesn't work)
Hmm, interesting...
I wouldn't consider myself an awesome parent, but stuff like happy meals with toys helps me convince my children to be suspicious of things like that. I tell them that the restaurant food is so nasty that the toy is the only way for them to sell their crappy food at all. But we could get better food at a real food place (like home) and better toys at a real toy store and it would be cheaper (my son is very money conscious, probably because we so often tell him that we just don't have money to buy some random crap for him).
Same thing with the checkout aisle at the grocery store. They put all that candy in the "impulse buy" section because they charge more for it than they do in the candy aisle. But the kids are only allowed to pick one thing for themselves, and if they want another thing they have to put the first one back. They usually end up getting a donut, which they munch on while sitting in the cart as we stroll through the store. Shopper's is known as the "Donut Store" in our family :P
Umm, no. religion has been a tool to start wars and intimidate large groups of people.
Why did we go into Iraq..oh yeah, they were 'evil'. then there is the crusade, and the founding fathers manipulate people to be afraid of the catholics that where going to be shipped to the north; which was the real cause for the tea party, by the way.
Then there is the war on drugs, a religious backed war.
Sociopaths may cause war, but they often use religion as a tool for control.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on