Curtains for Cap’n Crunch

Food Criminals

Say goodbye to Tony the Tiger and the Jolly Green Giant. Consumer mafia groups want cartoons, images and even celebrities that might appeal to children banned from food advertising - even if the ads are actually aimed at parents. The advertising censors insist children need to be protected from the food industry because parents aren’t up to the task. Thus they created the Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children (IWG). Under the pretext of getting chubby cherubs into shape, sympathetic Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, and then-Sen. Sam Brownback, Kansas Republican, slipped language into the 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act mandating the creation of the IWG to develop recommendations for standards for industry marketing to children under age 17 - even though there is little credible evidence linking marketing trends and childhood obesity. The congressional charter lends the group legitimacy. After missing a 2010 deadline to report back, the IWG released a preview of the “voluntary” nutrition principles that they want industry to adopt, and they were radical. In addition to trying to exile the Pillsbury Doughboy, it proposes nutritional requirements that would prohibit the advertising of 88 of the 100 most commonly consumed foods, including bagels, 2 percent milk, peanut butter, canned tuna, carrot juice, ready-to-eat cereals (except for unflavored shredded wheat), leaf salad with low-fat dressing, hot cereal, canned corn, rice, wheat bread, pretzels and scrambled eggs, according to the Sensible Food Policy Coalition...more