I blogged this as well: http://workthatmatters.blogspot.com/2010/09/junk.html

Ridiculous campaign.

Pretty powerful, but I also feel that it can bring on a lot of mother blame/guilt for those without the financial resources to feed their children in more healthy ways. Still needs to be part of the conversation though.

Interventions can work both ways - sure, the social context matters a lot, but that's not something individuals watching the ad can do anything about. Changing the norms of eating too much fast food and making the choice aspect relevant are important as well, and this ad reflects that.

also interesting is that once again it is mothers who are positioned as being the primary care givers. or lack of care, as this ad implies. as stated on the youtube page (emphasis mine):

A commercial made to raise awareness in a current social epidemic and to draw attention to those whom the artists believe are most responsible in a bid to drive discussion and action to reverse the downward trend.

so it's not the corporations that make and sell the junk, nor the advertisers who promote the junk, it's the people who actually buy the junk who're most responsible. brought to you by people who make advertisements for a living. nice.

Wow, ugh. I hate this. Not only does it place the 'blame' for poor eating squarely on the mother, it also goes dangerously far into "food as a moral choice" territory. Ridiculous.

Whose moral choice is it? The mother's, who's working 2 jobs and doesn't have time to cook and doesn't have the money to buy healthy food in any case, in order to support the child? Or the corporations who are getting rich making the fast foods or the advertisers who are getting rich pushing fast food at her and her child, or the choices made by governments in the last 20 years to relentlessly impoverish the working classes so that they HAVE to work two jobs and can't afford decent food?

Absolutely it's a moral choice. But the moral - or rather the immoral - choices are being made by groups and corporations far, far more powerful than individual mothers are, who are benefitting hugely by what they have done to her and the choices they have taken away.

Relies on false logic of Fat = Bad, equates Fatties with illicit drug addicts, mother-blames, moralises food, takes responsibility away from food producers/advertisers, removes capitalist social context of all subjects, lies about the word "epidemic", and so on and so forth. I could go on all day with the problems with this ad. But I'll just finish with it's good to see whoever these idiots are increasing the number of patients in eating disorder wards. Because that's clearly what society needs more of.

This is NOT an actual PSA. This is a publicity stunt by an advertising agency!

Dr Samantha Thomas blogged about it: Giving my child a burger is not child abuse. There are links to other great critiques in the post.

Parents are directly responsible for what young children eat. This is a fact. I think this commercial, though it uses shock tactics, is trying to point this out. You do have choices, even if you are poor. Rice, beans, potatoes and apples are not expensive. You can feed your family good food for a reasonable amount of money. The fact that they chose a mother (as opposed to a father) might not have been a great idea, but I think we need to look beyond that. Parents choose food for their children, and parents need to start making better choices. Maybe it is time to cancel cable t.v. and buy better food. And read your kid a bedtime story while you're at it.

I am sorry, but parenting is in a sad state these days. There is no one to blame but the parents themselves.

All of the structural arguments are perfectly fair comments. However, to characterize the individual (parent/family/consumer) as a powerless victim is not constructive. You can talk about how the "food industry" or government subsidies or [insert other valid issue] is the cause of the problem... but it missed how you effect change. This is in the hands of the consumer, not the provider of the product or service. It's a demand-side issue. How do you motivate the consumer? By creating a counterpoint....

Fast food is cheap, delicious, filling, easy, quick.

vs.

Fast food is unhealthy and not worth the trade-off

Mom could just use the guide provided by the USDA for nutritious meals on a small budget.

http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/publications/foodplans/miscpubs/foodplansrecipebook.pdf

I don't have the time to read all of the comments about this, but shouldn't we also remember who is mostly eating fast food (other than me)?

Poor people.

So before we start touting the importance of making sure we are feeding our children 'morally sound' food, let's remember that lots of people don't have a lot of choice in the matter--see Detroit, where there ARE NO GROCERY STORES IN THE CITY LIMITS OF DETROIT.

This ad and the sentiment behind the ad angers me.

Junk food IS NOT heroin. People who eat junk food may not be doing the best thing, but they are NOT child abusers.

If you haven't noticed, heroin addicts tend to be pretty skinny, so really the message here is you should get your kids to shoot up so they don't get fat like the kids eating at McDonald's all the time.

Seriously though,

Laboratory grade heroin is actually not as bad for you as everyone thinks, it's mostly the crap that dealers put into the stuff sold on the street, plus the dangers of overdose and potential addiction (heroin is roughly as addictive as cigarettes). On the whole, it would be way less dangerous if it was legal. It is probably the case that occasional use of opiates is much safer and better for your body than the consumption of massive quantities of fast food.

By the way, I don't actually think we should shoot kids up with heroin. I'm just pointing out that in some ways the commercial may be a more accurate reflection of relative medical risks than we think, and this sorta demonstrates the absolute absurdity/insanity/hypocrisy of drug prohibition.

VOTE YES ON PROP 19!!!

Could it be that the point of the ad is that fast-food is addictive, just like heroine? I think that is a legitimate point to make.

I think it is very misguided to lay the blame at the mother's feet. Here is why.

As a single (and incidentally obese) mother I worked very hard to make sure my daughter grew up loving healthy foods. She almost never ate red meat and she gobbled up tons of fruits, veggies, lean turkey, brown rice, natural peanut butter, whole wheat breads, etc, etc. I breastfed her until she was almost two and a half to top off her healthy diet. I opened a licensed daycare in my home where I fed an organic whole food diet to my child and all the children I cared for so I was as sure as I could be that they were getting good food.

About the time my daughter was ready for kindergarten financial disaster hit our family. I had planned to home school her, but instead I had to send her to public school where I discovered she qualified for free lunches. I sadly found myself unable to turn down "free" and so she started eating USDA approved, government subsidized breakfast and lunch at school where she learned to love Trix cereal, cinnamon rolls, french fries, "burgers" and once-frozen pizza. Sometimes there were fresh carrots available for the kids if they wanted them, but often there were not. Oh and this was in the early '00s - not back in the dark ages of the '80s.

So do you think she still loves beans and brown rice or veggie stir fry? NO WAY! I spent five years laying a good diet foundation for my child and it was turned to crap by a year of government subsidized school lunches that have very little to do with "healthy". School lunches are about providing calories - any calories - and creating markets for the things American farmers find easiest to produce - and nothing more.

Yep, I had lots of choices. I could have (and in hind sight should have) sent her with whole wheat peanut butter sandwiches every day. I could have forced the issue at home "making" her eat the healthy foods she had once loved. But I will tell you this, going from "getting by pretty well" to "so broke we qualify for free lunches" is F-ING STRESSFUL. I was no longer thinking about my child's healthy adult body to be (she never strayed from her healthy weight and she remained very active) - I was thinking about surviving day to day. Did my child and I need the added stress of constant dinner table conflict. I decided no.

So slowly, quietly, surely our family's diet changed for the worse. And now four years down the road, I am back to making healthy foods again (but not organic) and she still refuses to eat them. She instead makes herself toast - at least it is whole wheat.

So back to my original thought - foods that are "bad" for you ARE addictive http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/26/AR2009042602711_3.html. There are numerous societal structures and practices in place - including our government - that, in effect, feed that addiction. My family survived a momentary bump in the road that may potentially have life-long consequences for my child's relationship with food and her health. How much worse is it for those among us for whom the crises never end?

Other people have made the point about shaming families instead of laying blame on the corporation who produces the product better than I can, but few people (with the exception of the person above me) have said anything at all about the fact that these foods can actually be just as addictive as heroin if you're receptive to it. Food addiction is rarely discussed at all, and that bothers me, because it's a real strong factor in this (so-called) "obesity epidemic," which nobody seems to want to talk about anyway, as they'd much rather take a stick and poke a fatty with it until their amusement has been satisfied.

Always kind of disappointing when I see a thread with lots of comments and am all excited to see some real discussion only to find out there are so many comments just because of a troll(s). :\

And this PSA is pretty much terrible. It does nothing to add to the conversation on the issue of kids eating junk food or showing the complexity of the issue. It basically runs in, points and yells "FAST FOOD IS BAD FOR YOU AND IRRESPONSIBLE MOTHERS FEEDING KIDS CRAPPY FOOD ARE THE PROBLEM WITH CHILDHOOD OBESITY!!!" and then quickly runs out. Shock can get a point across, true, but if you have no real point to get across in the first place it's just shock for shock's sake.

I do think tackling the issue of junk food is important, but you can't take on the issue with dumb marketing like this. And it's not as simple as telling moms to just not get their kids fast food either, since it is something that can be difficult or even impossible to do. It's not a matter of them "choosing" bad food, it's generally an inability to acquire healthy food. Sometimes I hate the focus on individualism in some countries, because the focus is often put on individual people/parents and not on larger social/institutional obstacles to an individual's choices.

The ad's tactics aside, telling poor people to eat rice or boxed mac and cheese instead of a burger is an excellent way to make them fatter faster (especially if they have metabolic syndrome), cause nutritional deficiency and possibly type two diabetes.
As cheap food goes, a fast food burger at least has the three primary macronutrients, while those other cheap options do not. People don't get fat because of fast food; fast food just provides a convenient scapegoat for holier-than-thou moralizers like Sadie and T.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I do eat fast food - maybe once a month.

Heroin is not equal to fast food. That is all.

Ad has plenty of shock value, but could have come up with a more positive message, like nutritional information, the effects of a fast food diet into adulthood, cheap alternatives, that sort of thing, more research required, which by the way, is the point of the ad campaign against childhood obesity then they should have done it. Escapist.
You people need to watch Food. Inc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food,_Inc.
Fast food comes at a very high price, on people, on animals, on the environment. I can see if it's gotten this bad then you need to DEMAND easier access to better food, period, you have so many consumer forums and organizations and books and information online. Make your choice people, read up, and stop acting so helpless.

ljUByP http://cra3Zzphu47hvm4bbmp82f0vwJs.com