Recently, City Councilman Leroy Comrie Jr. floated the idea of requiring fast food meals to meet certain nutritional standards if they include toys. However, his mission is being thwarted by...free will! In a lawsuit, Sacramento mom Monet Parham accuses McDonald's of luring children with toys, but the fast food chain says the case should be dismissed because parents can always choose not to buy the meals for their kids. "In short, advertising to children any product that a child asks for but the parent does not want to buy would constitute an unfair trade practice," they said in a statement. However, not everyone is buying it.
Stephen Gardner, litigation attorney for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said, "What is different about this motion is that McDonald's has chosen to blame the victim—saying that it's all Monet Parham's fault if she doesn't force her daughter to ignore the onslaught of McDonald's marketing messages." Maybe she can't keep her daughter from seeing the ads, but it is her responsibility to own up to the consequences of buying her kids fattening meals. And since when are parents incapable of explaining their decisions to their children? Or has "Because I Said So" gone out of fashion?
In the suit, Parham admits that she often tells her children "no" when they ask for Happy Meals, which should logically be the end of this whole fast-food-is-trying-to-make-my-kids-fat conversation. But as Comrie Jr. argued previously, "Children, lured in with toy giveaways at an early age, are more likely to develop a habit of eating unhealthily." Whatever, we've been eating Happy Meals since we were kids and we have absolutely no problem being mysteriously drawn into buying an extra large fries whenever we see a McDonald's.
