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May 01, 2005
Marketing to Kids and Other Fun Stuff
I read this quote in the latest edition of Mothering Magazine:
"The US spends $15 billion per year marketing food to kids--more per child than any other nation in the world, and more than it would cost to provide health insurance for all uninsured children."
Original source: Organic Consumers Association
This quote really stood out because last week I attended a talk on the environment. One presenter, a science teacher ended her presentation with a slideshow. She showed us photographs of many local species of birds, plants and some other wildlife. She also mixed in pics of parts of corporate logos. Not the whole logo but definitely enough where every person in the room recognized each one. The sad thing was that only a couple of people in the room knew the names of the birds and trees. (Unfortunately I was not one of them)
She certainly made the point about how pervasive marketing is but that was not her purpose. Her main point was that to raise more environmentally aware children we need to not start with the rainforests and endangered species but to teach them a love of the nature in their own backyards. Give them something tangible and their awareness will broaden as they grow.
I surfed around on the aformentioned Organic Comsumers website and came across this article, which directly relates to first presentation I heard that evening. The speaker who is in the Dept of Environmental Health at the Harvard School of Public Health talked to us about the dangers of phthalates and other chemicals in the everyday products in our home, mainly the scented ones. I'm not going to recount the many scary facts she gave us (in part because I can not decipher my jumble of notes) but here is a link to an article from the Boston Globe. (note: mainstream media)
Posted by Julee at May 1, 2005 09:33 PM