By now, you’ve probably heard of this study from the Stanford University School of Medicine in which preschoolers overwhelmingly declared that McDonald’s food tasted better than the same food placed in plain wrappers. I await the follow-up study in which preschoolers declare poster paint “delicious” and reveal that the Gorton’s fisherman hides in their bedroom closet at night.
Of course most kids are going to say McDonald’s food tastes better. They’re also going to claim Coke tastes better than Sam’s Choice Cola and that Honey Nut Cheerios taste better than the store-brand equivalent (“Sugar-Shellacked Oat Tori”), because they believe commercials, because they watch too much TV and because their parents buy them the scrapple they clamor for.
I recall junk food advertised more heavily when I was a kid, but I think I escaped most of its charms because, at the risk of making my family and I seem even more like colorectal Family Values politicians, my parents laid down the law, reserving fast food meals for special, occasional treats, and limiting commercial television consumption.
As hinted here before, as an impressionable youngster, mainly I watched commercial-free shows on PBS such as All Creatures Great and Small, 3-2-1 Contact, The Electric Company, Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, as well as cuddly family-fare sitcoms like The Cosby Show and Murder, She Wrote, which may explain why I didn’t have many friends as a child, seeing as I was unable to chime-in on playground conversations about who shot J.R. or the coolness of the newest Duran Duran video. And although I did get my fair after-school share of G.I. Joe and Transformers, I also got a healthy jolt of classic Warner Bros. cartoons, which opened my eyes to cross dressing rabbits, pigs that sing “Moonlight Bay” and shotgun-toting hunters with speech impediments. (I must say, I’m a more confident New Yorker having been educated early by Looney Tunes about life’s grotesqueries and idiosyncrasies.)
My TV intake was leavened further by reading. Oh, I was a precocious youth, reading as a Kindergartner, volunteering at the local library in grade school, and plowing through perhaps hundreds of books. At home, in addition to Highlights (“Fun with a Purpose!”), my magazine reading included my Dad’s copies of Consumer Reports, the theme of which is that food and other objects in name brand packaging is not necessarily as good or as price-effective as similar items in other packaging.
But enough about me. This story has a happy ending in that, as most parents will tell you, it’s easy to play off preschoolers’ small minds in a positive way, like how you can tell them that their dead hamster is in heaven and that cursing is “wrong” because “I said so.” For you see, the Stanford study found that fruits, vegetables and milk in McDonald’s packaging also tasted great to kids. Under fire for peddling crap to kids, McDonald’s, realizes this as well, and now only heavily promotes Happy Meals that contain fruit and food with fewer calories and less fat. Now all the company needs to do is brand exercise with its golden arches so kids think that’s cool, too, and we’ll have the Childhood Obesity Epidemic licked.