This semester refuses to end. Here in Bulgaria, semesters don't end at winter break, they keep going on into February. This means that the kids come back from break and have to take tests for a month while complaining and begging about grades. It's not what I would normally call fun. In fact, it's a grind. But it all ends in a week or two when a new term begins, so it's a waiting game really. While I'm waiting, I'm grading a lot of papers at home, which means I have the great, mindless drone of Euronews on quite a bit.
Big stories on Euronews lately have followed, first, the smoking bans across much of Europe and, more recently, the apparently strong campaign to ban fatty food ads directed at kids. Now--
On the ciggie bit: Bulgaria recently put into action its own law against smoking and almost a month later, I can't say that it's completely ignored. I've been in one restaurant that actually had a non-smoking room, but the non-smoking section in most bars and restaurants is a table near the restroom, front door, or four smoking tables. The bar near the internet club here keeps its "no smoking" signs stacked in a neat row along the bar along with the upright menus and napkin dispensers.
At school, the situation is a little bit different. The kids still have to go across the street to smoke, of course, and they still do it in plain sight. It's the teachers that really got punished by the new law. Right next to the teacher's lounge was a tiny room with a window, clock, and three ashtrays. If you ever opened the door you needed a gas mask and at least ten seconds to let the door-shaped cloud float away. Now a sign that says all kinds of things about smoking being absolutely forbidden is on the door and all of the smoking teachers are royally peeved. I haven't found where their new hangout is. Not really my business or desire to go around following the smokers. But the saddest thing about it all is the door to that tiny room, which might as well be covered in ploice line tape. It has that condemned look to it.
Stranger than all of these smoking developments in Bulgaria is what may be coming later from the EU if all of this fat food talk turns into anything. On CNN last night, there was a lovely little "analysis" piece that covered it all. The focus of the story was a British nurse, about 76 pounds overweight herself (although that was never mentioned), who insisted that her three kids only want the Happy Meals she buys them every day because of the toys that come with them. "As a nurse," she knows the danger of fatty food, but blames marketing for her kids' weight problems.
Then a doctor came on (I think he was Belgian, but I could be wrong) and said that obesity was rampaging across the EU and that the only way to stop it was to end the ads promoting junk food. Which Euronews (featuring the same doctor) says he describes as processed, fatty, sugary foods that are usually cheaper than the average. The CNN story ended with the news that Kraft foods (See, everything links back to cigarettes eventually) has already agreed to cut out its ads for junk food including, CNN noted, its popular Oreo cookies.
Now, by way of introducing my argument to all this, a question. Has there ever been a kid, who, after getting his $5 allowance, ran straight to the grocery store and snatched up the first package of Oreo cookies he saw because he remembered that great ad where the father and son were sitting at a ballgame and the son eats the cookie wrong so the father shows him how to twist off the top and eat the Oreo correctly? Has that ever happened? How many kids have ever actually bought Oreo cookies? In my experience, parents buy the cookies and leave them up in the cupboard and complain when the kid eats more than three before dinner. Sometimes, Mom packed a few with my lunch. It may have happened--somewhere in Europe maybe--but I don't remember ever seeing four kids hunched behind the playground garbage cans whispering "No, dude, the father in that ad said you should eat 'em this way. Dude. And keep quiet or we'll get caught."
Yes, it's been my view that parents usually buy this stuff, and the chubby nurse in the CNN story bought the Happy Meal and handed it to her kid. And since they buy, doesn't that make them the regulators? Their kids may beg them to buy Fruit Loops because Toucan Sam told them to, but parents are supposed to be a little more powerful than Toucan Sam, as I understand it. They're supposed to be the ones saying "no" when the kids are asking for everything in the grocery aisle. Every kid needs junk food, of course, but giving kids everything they want will usually result in a spoiled, fat kid. Sad but true.
Smoking laws are great--second hand smoke kills, after all--but legislating to keep those without self control from feeding their children into obesity and blaming it on Ronald McDonald is just a waste of money and would mean the loss of some great cultural icons. What would the world be without the Nesquick Bunny? A sad, Bunny-less place.
Posted by Rob at January 25, 2005 04:25 PM