A friend of mine sent me this article that I have some really mixed feelings about. Here is a direct quote:
“San Francisco’s board of supervisors has voted, by a veto-proof margin, to ban most of McDonald’s Happy Meals as they are now served in the restaurants.”
The first thing I have a problem with is that the fast food chains are purposely increasing the fat content of food so that when you eat it, it triggers the pleasure centers in the brain. This causes you to crave more and more somewhat similar to a drug addiction. Now that is bad enough by itself. The fact that they are marketing to children who have little capacity to resist is what bothers me.
But wait. Is it really the six year old who goes out and buys the happy meal? How many children do you see in line alone at Mcy D’s? Odds are, very few. The parents are the ones who have control over what the child eats. So why are we holding the fast food companies responsible? The parents are ultimately responsible for the well being of their child.
Here is where some parents make excuses such as: ‘But I don’t have time to make dinner at home’, ‘I don’t have the money to buy better food’, ‘It’s not that simple, you don’t understand because you don’t have kids’. The bottom line is that even if there is a grain of truth to those excuses, they are still excuses. As a parent your ultimate responsibility is to your child.
The next problem I have with this ‘ban’ on happy meals is this: What right does the government have to decide what I eat? What’s going to happen next…a Twinkie prohibition? Because let’s be honest, Twinkies have no nutritional value. So we shouldn’t have them.
And if the government is going to make it illegal to sell food that isn’t good for us, we’ll have to start closing down every single restaurant on the planet. Have you ever checked the calorie and fat content of a typical Chili’s or Applebees meal? They can dish out 3000 to 5000 calories in a single sitting! At what point do you say stop? When the only thing left in the grocery isles is celery?!?
Now on the flip side, what the heck is wrong with the people selling this stuff?!? At some point the government should step in and say enough is enough! A perfect example would be using ammonia to clean the ‘meat’ in school lunches and fast food chains. Does that make any sense at all? At what point is profit no longer good enough motivation for selling bad food for consumption?
My thoughts are this. If a food is naturally occurring, great sell it. If for some reason you decide to add additional ‘ingredients’ to the food, it should be disclosed what it is and why it is added. All food should be labeled in a standard format that is easily understandable by the general public. If a dangerous chemical is added to food, that is when the government should step in and start slamming down the hammer. Otherwise, the individual (or parent in the happy meal case) should be the final decision maker.
If you’d like to read the full story you can find it here..
