Thom Hartmann Worries About the Cost of Hiring Dietary Supervisors for Children

I just appeared on Thom Hartmann's radio show to discuss the evils of Happy Meals and other forms of food marketing aimed at children. Knowing that Hartmann would be passionately defending the right of the people to protect children against Big Food's assault by banning toy giveaways and censoring advertising, I opened with a joke, saying that my solution is to assign an adult, or maybe even two, to each child as a dietary supervisor. It would be the job of these adults to decide whether and how often kids can eat at McDonald's as well as to regulate their nutritional intake generally. Tellingly, Hartmann did not understand that I was referring to parents. He responded by accusing me of being utterly unrealistic: How could we possibly afford to hire tens of millions of new government employees to carry out this function? 

I don't think the Hartmann segment is available online yet, but KPCC, the NPR affiliate in Pasadena, has my recent debate on the same subject with Stephen Gardner, litigation director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. CSPI has threatened to sue McDonald's over toy giveaways, likening fast food purveyors to child molestors.

Update: Here is the segment from Hartmann's show.