Slate listed the winners of a contest today to find new ways to tackle childhood obesity. The winning idea was holding companies accountable for the way they market food to kids. About a year ago, I went to a media literacy conference with educators and advocates who spent their time trying to find the best ways to teach their students to read the messages sent to all of us, nonstop, through a variety of mediums. One of the biggest thing nearly everyone there agreed on was that the way food companies advertise to children is particularly exploitative and should be curbed.
Other ideas, like teaching children how to resist the messages through cognitive control, sound like they would be useful for adults, too. (And, in this instance, by "adults" I mean "me.") Not just because adults are barraged with ads for sweet and salty temptations but because there is a certain overwhelming idea among adults and children that some kinds of food -- chicken nuggets, pizza bagels, etc. -- are "kids' foods." The sixth-favorite judges' option was one that we "change the cultural norms around eating." That's easier said than done, and it would be wrong to think of America as having one food culture. The suburban, middle-class "soccer mom" type of family -- that is, the type of family many writers often mean when they say "American" -- will think about lunch and dinner and food in general in an entirely different way from rural Southern families, poor families, urban Latino families, etc. In fact, we even use different words for food -- until I was 18 and went to college, I had supper every day around 5 p.m. Dinner was a big midday meal we had on Sunday. Food was rarely rushed, and we didn't have a fast-food outlet until I was in high school.
But the readers got to choose some winners too, and among them was the idea to "end corn subsidies." I'll have more to say about this idea later this week, but corn subsidies have become a favorite target of the left since Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. It is true that the way we dole out corn subsidies distorts the food market, but ending them entirely would create problems too. Either way, Slate picked 12 ideas. Some of them overlap, and some are a little out-there sounding, but the presence of 12 winning ideas should show how complicated the picture is.
