and a parent complains and ruins it for everybody. Story here.
Not much to be said about this other than I’m upset. Not that some parent wants healthier eating for their own child, but that this parent had to complain and go and ruin it for everybody else. So what if my kids want McDonalds? Does it lead to unhealthy habits later in life? If that’s the conclusion, then why is my wife, son, parents, sisters, and their families all equal or below the recommended weight for their height, and every single one of them eats at McDonalds occasionally? Sure, we don’t make a daily thing of it, but we are capable of controlling ourselves and our kids, without some a “complainer” saving us.
Why can’t some people draw the line between worrying about themselves and controlling everybody else?
I didn’t get a vibe from the link that it was about healthy eating habits. And the creepy feeling I got when I read about the McDonald’s promotion wasn’t specifically about how bad McDonald’s food-like substances are for you.
I got a creepy feeling about a school district handing kids marketing tools and telling them to take them home to their parents.
They probably did, just like they did with the Pizza Hut “Book-It” program, just like they do with Scholastic book club fliers, just like they do with a whole bunch of promotions. And parents are quite free to say no to their children if they don’t want to participate. Life is like that, sometimes.
I don’t doubt it. And it bugs me, to a greater or lesser degree, depending on how I perceive the intrusiveness of the marketing. Michaela has brought more than a few Pizza Hut coupons home in the past couple of years. She’s never redeemed a single one. And no-one from PepsiCo (or whoever owns the chain these days) has ever nagged her to do so.
I don’t really have a problem with offering incentives for performance, at least in principle. But ISTM that putting the advertising right on the report card envelope crosses a line into marketing to a captive audience. I hate it that school districts have to resort to methods such as this to achieve the funding levels necessary to provide basic educational services, and I’m happy to learn of someone successfully forcing them to use a little self-restraint.
ETA: yes, I realize I am making a great leap of assumption that the school district was thusly motivated into allow McDonalds to print the envelopes. Although I would be pleased to be shown to be wrong about that, at this time, I don’t think I will be.
Oh yeah, Book-It! And you got these big button pins with star stickers! Thanks for remind me-I completely forgot about that! We were always cashing those things in, considering what I bookworm I was-and still am.
We also used to get Ponderosa coupons for perfect attendance for a grading period.
McDonald’s is primarily just another convenient target that it’s fashionable to Hayte, like Wal-Mart. And I’ve actually sat in a (packed to overflowing) McDonald’s in Paris and listened to people complain about how “bad” McDonald’s is and how they shouldn’t be eating there. :rolleyes:
I admit to a fondness for McDonald’s, although I only eat there a few times a year. Mostly when I travel overseas, as it happens - I’ve been to about 15 countries, some with regularity, and McDonald’s is always the “mini embassy” for me. It has (relatively) clean bathrooms (pretty much impossible to find in some countries), food I can expect at least has some level of care put into it for not being rotten, and I can always order something without being abused by the staff for not speaking their language. That’s not to say I don’t eat local cuisine; except in Spain (which has abominable cuisine IME) all my meals are local. But at least once, I have to eat at a McDonald’s so I have that connection back to the strip malls and suburban subdivisions of Kansas City.
Yep, it’s appalling to read about McDonalds’ efforts at socially engineering children to associate “unhealthy food” with “reward for good behavior,” and I’m glad to see that parents who have to send their kids to school DO have the right to stop it.
Hell, that’s nothing compared to when I was in high school (early-mid '90s). We had Channel 1 on the TVs. This was a program that put televisions in every classroom in exchange for forcing the students to watch a 15-minute newscast each day… complete with commercials. I wonder how much that network charged for advertising. Millions of kids in the most prized demographic out there were literally forced to watch their ads. No changing the channel, no opting out. If you didn’t want to flunk out of school, you had to watch their commercials.
Then when lunch rolled around, we bought ourselves marked-up Pizza Hut pizza in the school cafeteria.
I used to get those Pizza Hut pan pizza coupons for reading, too. And you know what? That was the only time we were ever allowed to get Pizza Hut. Going every once in awhile as a reward for good grades/academic achievement won’t kill the kid. I certainly don’t have an overwhelming love of Pizza Hut today; in fact I think it’s a bit over-greasy.
I don’t necessarily agree that if something doesn’t kill a kid, it’s got to be OK.
Anecdotal evidence aside, this isn’t about rewarding kids at all. It’s about building brand loyalty while they’re young and creating obese customers for life who “reward” themselves with crappy food. When administrators are doormats for corporate con artists and compulsory education laws force kids to be at school, it basically becomes the government forcing parents to force their kids to sit through ads. One wonders why small-government, individual-liberty folks might take up swords for the corporations on this one.
Well, I don’t care for seafood much, so much of Spanish cuisine is not accessible to me. Ironically, in Portugal, which has more seacoast per area, I never have any trouble finding lots of good non-seafood to eat. In Spain, it always seems like it’s seafood or…something else. And I try every time; I’m quite far from the “ugly American” who walks into cafe in Pisa and demands a porterhouse. But what I get in Spain includes almost raw fish, oxtail soup that I wouldn’t feed to my cat, chorizo and RAW egg messes, omelets with bloody pork in them, strange and disturbingly tough cuts of meat, and cheeses that seem to be large semi-sentient slime moulds.
As a result, I tend to eat a lot of vegetables and fruit in Spain. Once I told the client I was vegetarian, so they served me the oxtail soup (with bone chips in it), because that wasn’t meat. That morning, they had a new BSE warning in the papers. Obviously a problem in translation there.
I’m sure someone makes good Spanish food, just probably not in Spain.