The Fast-Food Marketing Backlash

Recently, sev­eral health and food safety orga­ni­za­tions banded together in protest of these tac­tics, sin­gling out McDonald’s sim­ply because it estab­lished the fast-food mar­ket and today remains the fast-food leader. “We focus on McDonald’s because they are the indus­try leader by far,” Sara Deon, direc­tor of Corporate Accountability International’s Value [the] Meal Campaign, told Organic Connections. “We have often seen in cor­po­rate cam­paign­ing that when you work on the indus­try leader, you move the whole indus­try. McDonald’s cre­ated and devel­oped these preda­tory mar­ket­ing tech­niques, and other fast- food and larger cor­po­ra­tions have emu­lated them.”

In May of this year, to coin­cide with the annual meet­ing of McDonald’s share­hold­ers, an open let­ter signed by over 500 health pro­fes­sion­als was sent to McDonald’s CEO, Jim Skinner. It read, in part,

“Our com­mu­nity is devoted to car­ing for sick chil­dren and pre­vent­ing ill­ness through pub­lic edu­ca­tion. But our efforts can­not com­pete with the hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars you spend each year directly mar­ket­ing to kids. . . .

“The rise of health con­di­tions like dia­betes and heart dis­ease mir­rors the growth of your business—growth dri­ven in large part by children’s mar­ket­ing. Although the American Academy of Pediatrics deems such mar­ket­ing ‘inher­ently decep­tive to chil­dren under 8,’ you con­tinue to use it as a vehi­cle to grow your enterprise.”

CAI has been involved with numer­ous suc­cess­ful cam­paigns in the past, includ­ing oppos­ing the mar­ket­ing of tobacco to teens with char­ac­ters such as Joe Camel in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, CAI has seen sim­i­lar­i­ties between fast-food mar­ket­ing and the Camel cam­paign. “We have described Ronald McDonald as the deep-fried Joe Camel for the twenty-first cen­tury,” Deon said. “If you con­sider things like Joe Camel, cig­a­rette vend­ing machines, cig­a­rettes being in movies—methods that we think about now as com­pletely egregious—that’s where we’re mov­ing to with food.”

One of the pre­em­i­nent author­i­ties to sign the let­ter to Skinner was author, food activist and NYU pro­fes­sor Marion Nestle, PhD. “Marketing to chil­dren is uneth­i­cal,” Nestle told Organic Connections. “Children can­not be expected to under­stand its sig­nif­i­cance or how to deal with it. It makes kids think that adver­tised foods are what they are sup­posed to be eat­ing, and that they know more than their par­ents do about it. It is morally and eth­i­cally wrong and should be stopped.”

One orga­ni­za­tion that signed on as a co-sponsor of the let­ter was the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). Dr. David Wallinga is IATP’s Senior Advisor in Science, Food and Health, as well as being a med­ical doc­tor. “I think that what you are see­ing is a new move­ment around food and the impacts of our food sys­tem on us,” Dr. Wallinga told Organic Connections. “I see it as akin to the envi­ron­men­tal move­ment or other move­ments that have defined the last hun­dred years, where peo­ple just weren’t aware before. They kind of went to the super­mar­ket and blindly chose prod­ucts with­out really under­stand­ing how those prod­ucts were pro­duced and processed and distributed.

Now that con­sumers are becom­ing more aware, they’re look­ing for out­lets to lodge their con­cern, and some of that is peo­ple writ­ing to Congress or the admin­is­tra­tion. Some of it is also writ­ing to big com­pa­nies like McDonald’s; and—let’s face it—single com­pa­nies like Coca-Cola or McDonald’s by them­selves are spend­ing many more bil­lions of dol­lars to mar­ket foods that aren’t so healthy than, say, the USDA spends to help pro­mote foods that are healthy. So I think that’s sort of the broad gen­e­sis of this move­ment that results in so many signatures.”

In response to the noti­fi­ca­tion that we were writ­ing this arti­cle, McDonald’s cor­po­ra­tion told Organic Connections, through a pre­pared state­ment, “McDonald’s does not adver­tise unhealthy food to chil­dren. We are com­mit­ted to respon­si­ble adver­tis­ing and take it very seri­ously. We were among the first in 2006 to sup­port the U.S. Better Business Bureau’s adver­tis­ing guide­lines for kids. We fol­low system-wide guide­lines on how we respon­si­bly com­mu­ni­cate with chil­dren about bal­anced food choices and being active. We offer a vari­ety of Happy Meal choices for fam­i­lies. We believe it’s all about choice.”

Find out more about CAI’s Value [the] Meal Campaign at www.stopcorporateabuse.org/value-meal.

You can view and sign the open let­ter to McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner at www.lettertomcdonalds.com.