"No, the Problem With the Ban Is That It Doesn't Go Far Enough."
Generally, I'm skeptical of psychologizing political viewpoints. But yesterday in Time food writer Josh Ozersky, author of The Hamburger: A History, swings that door wide open, so let's take a peek through.
About the San Francisco plan to ban toys in high-calorie Happy Meals, he writes:
I was an obese child, and precisely for the reasons progressives point to: I ate hamburgers far too often. My parents, like many well-meaning adults back then and now, would have preferred me to gobble down fruit and whole-grain bread, just as they would have preferred me to play with handcrafted birch-wood toys instead of Six Million Dollar Man figurines. But I wailed like a car alarm until I got what I wanted. The toys aren't the main reason kids love Happy Meals. They love the packaging more than anything else. Everything comes in a box, and it all belongs to them. As a kid, you don't have to poach fries from your parents and you get a toy and something to read or draw on. It's a little package of pleasure, just for you.
This is a well-crafted portrait of a particular kid's intense relationship with his Happy Meals, but it's not a diagnosis of our national obesity problem. He could just as easily have said, "I was an obese child because I didn't get enough exercise," or "I was an obese child because my mom and dad didn't know how to deal with my temper tantrums," and then gone on to advocate more recess time or more stern parenting. For every kid who loves a Happy Meal for the packaging, there's a kid who loves the toy, a kid who's in it for the Nuggets, and kid who hates McDonald's but eats it anyway because the restaurant is conveniently located between soccer and ballet. Each case is different, and Ozersky's support for a blanket ban based on his personal story misses those subtleties.
Ozersky does acknowledge that Happy Meals are far from the only reason American kids are chunky. But if you have made your living writing about hamburgers—and if you have any doubt of Ozersky's deep and ongoing love affair with meat patties, just check out a Google image search on the guy's name—you start to see burgers at the center of everything.
In fact, while it's clear Ozersky isn't thrilled about his chubby childhood, one could argue that those wonderful moments with his Happy Meals are part of the reason that the Internet wound up with one of its most thorough hamburger critics—and how Ozersky wound up with a James Beard award. Seems like a reasonable trade-off to me. Why not let other kids (and their parents) make the call about similar tradeoffs for themselves?
