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Hey Kids, How’s That Self-Regulation Thing Working Out?
image via Serious Play for Serious Girls
A few years back, we decided to let the food industry self-regulate.
Consumers, the medical community, policymakers—everyone was up in arms over rising rates of childhood obesity. With government regulation looming large, the food industry came up with its own plan: the food and beverage companies would police themselves. The industry’s largest manufacturers and marketers would spearhead a voluntary effort to rein in their own marketing of unhealthy foods and drinks. That’s how we got the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI). Its 17 member companies are all the big dogs: Burger King and McDonald’s, Coke and Pepsi, Post and Kellogg, Hershey and Nestlé; and they all signed a pledge committing themselves to ”marketing only healthier dietary choices to children.”
…marketing only healthier dietary choices to children…
Look closely at the pledged phrase. The CFBAI members all did. Note the punctuation, sense the unseen air quotes, appreciate the ersatz truthiness of the wording.
First let’s consider what’s meant by ‘healthier dietary choices’.
If they meant healthy they would have said healthy, but instead they went with a fungible but fuzzier choice. Since this is the world of Big Food, healthier doesn’t necessarily mean healthy anymore than chicken wyngz and creme filling mean that you’re eating poultry and dairy. The CFBAI isn’t promising actual healthy dietary choices but something a little more business-friendly and a lot less burdened by nutritional science. In the first go-round, the CFBAI adopted a fox-guarding-the-henhouse policy leaving each company to its own interpretation of healthier dietary choices. The organization produced a laughable report touting the companies’ compliance as ‘excellent,’ and illustrated the wishful group-think by highlighting some of the allowable choices:
← here’s a little taste of the allowable products. The new criteria still fall far short of most people’s interpretation of reasonably healthy choices, and the vast majority of the member companies’ existing kid-friendly products seem to magically conform.
Let’s consider the use of the word ‘marketing’.
Junk food’s television advertising is well-documented as a significant risk factor contributing to childhood obesity, but there are plenty of other ways for brand messaging to reach children. Since the pledge was taken, member companies spent more a billion dollars on in-school promotions including giveaways, sponsorships, and contests. They offer classroom visits from Ronald McDonald, provide branded curricula materials like Nestle’s Healthy Steps for Healthy Lives, and Pizza Hut’s BOOK IT!, and donate logo-imprinted playground equipment. They sponsor school plays, spring carnivals, and youth sports teams, and put branded fast food in school cafeterias and junk-filled vending machines in the corridors. The participating companies may have toned down the advertising during Saturday morning cartoons, but the CFBAI pledge leaves plenty of wiggle room.
Now let’s examine the final word in the pledge: ‘children’.
Herein lies the biggest loophole of them all. The CFBAI members pledge to limit their messaging when 35% or more of an audience is comprised of children. But they’ve chosen to define ’children’ as up to age 11 even though most of the relevant obesity studies include older children through age 14. This narrow definition means that only 5% of all television shows meet the criteria.
The CFBAI members have managed to ward off federal guidelines by pointing to promises fulfilled with nearly perfect compliance and adherence to their standards. The rest of us bemoan the smoke and mirrors of those standards which have managed to keep regulators at bay while failing to improve industry practices or to make a dent in the blight of childhood obesity. Food marketing runs rampant in the educational and cultural institutions surrounding children and remains virtually unchecked even in the most pernicious forms of television advertising. Nearly a decade after the CFBAI was formed children still see more than six food ads during a typical hour of TV viewing, and according to US Department of Health and Human Services guidelines, five of those ads are likely to be for foods that are classified in the poorest nutritional category.
