Happy Meals will be "happy" no longer in San Francisco, come December 1st. The SF Board of Supervisors voted 8-3 to ban toys from coming with meals that don't meet certain nutritional requirements.
This is a slap in the face - across the board - to personal responsibility. If kids are becoming obese from eating too much food from McDonald's, the problem isn't toys, it's MCDONALD'S. The horrible food will still be there, whether it comes with a toy or not. You can't really successfully market to kids. Sure, they want the toy, but you can just as easily give kids of many ages another toy and they'll be happy enough with it.
This likely won't end any problems, because the availability of cheap fast food will still be there. The parents can still buy a burger and a small fry for a dollar each, and McDonald's (and other places) can still sell the toys separately. In the end, it'll be about the same price.
Happy Meals existed when I was a kid, and I even had a box full of Happy Meal toys, proving that I ate a lot of them. However, I didn't end up obese from it. Why not? I guess I didn't eat it often enough.
McDonald's isn't to blame for kids ending up obese - the parents who feed them solely on shitty, greasy fast food are to blame. If you pass a law telling a business they can't give away a toy with a meal, you're just preventing them from giving away a toy, which isn't the problem! The problem is the parents, who are still going to give their kids cheap, shitty food that makes them fat and gives them diabetes.
If you want to pass a law to protect kids from McDonald's, pass something that states that no more than 25% of their calories in a day can come from such foods, or something like that. Sure, it's hard as hell to enforce (but so is this one, since they can still sell the toy and the food separately for the same price if they want), but it makes more sense in the end.
1. Article
This is a slap in the face - across the board - to personal responsibility. If kids are becoming obese from eating too much food from McDonald's, the problem isn't toys, it's MCDONALD'S. The horrible food will still be there, whether it comes with a toy or not. You can't really successfully market to kids. Sure, they want the toy, but you can just as easily give kids of many ages another toy and they'll be happy enough with it.This likely won't end any problems, because the availability of cheap fast food will still be there. The parents can still buy a burger and a small fry for a dollar each, and McDonald's (and other places) can still sell the toys separately. In the end, it'll be about the same price.
Happy Meals existed when I was a kid, and I even had a box full of Happy Meal toys, proving that I ate a lot of them. However, I didn't end up obese from it. Why not? I guess I didn't eat it often enough.
McDonald's isn't to blame for kids ending up obese - the parents who feed them solely on shitty, greasy fast food are to blame. If you pass a law telling a business they can't give away a toy with a meal, you're just preventing them from giving away a toy, which isn't the problem! The problem is the parents, who are still going to give their kids cheap, shitty food that makes them fat and gives them diabetes.
If you want to pass a law to protect kids from McDonald's, pass something that states that no more than 25% of their calories in a day can come from such foods, or something like that. Sure, it's hard as hell to enforce (but so is this one, since they can still sell the toy and the food separately for the same price if they want), but it makes more sense in the end.
1. Article
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