If you follow TLT’s Facebook page, you might remember reading about a competition held by USDA seeking videos to promote fruit and vegetable consumption. As it happens, TLT friend and school food reformer Dana Woldow, along with her videographer son, Max Schreiber (who once created a great little video for this blog) won a prize for their video, along with thirteen other entrants chosen from hundreds of submissions.
In an article she wrote about the experience, Dana recalls:
We were excited to win and had high hopes that our little video might be used in some way to help encourage kids to eat more fruits and vegetables. That, after all, was the purported goal of the competition – to show how people could add more fresh produce to their diets in an affordable way.
But, surprisingly, USDA actually has no plans at all to use the videos to promote healthy eating to the general public. Instead the videos will just be parked on agency’s Choose MyPlate website (and might also get some use internally by USDA).
But of course, if you’re surfing around Choose MyPlate, you probably already know about healthful eating, or are at least motivated to learn more. What about the millions of kids and families who desperately need the education and inspiration these videos and similar ads could provide?
I once threw out a startling statistic on this blog that I’ll share again here:
The Roberts Wood Johnson Foundation is by far the biggest funder of work on childhood obesity, and it’s now spending $100 million a year on the problem. The food industry spends that much every year by January 4th to market unhealthy food to children.
[Emphasis mine.]
As I talked about in my winning essay for the Slate magazine anti-childhood obesity Hive last year, if we ever want to reverse current health trends, we’re going to have to get serious about countering the onslaught of messages from Big Food to which kids are exposed multiple times a day. Don’t these fruit and veggie ads, already solicited and approved by USDA, seem like a good place to start?
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thank you for your inspiring work and observations. This connection between healthy children and a commercial-free childhood is vital.
Thank you for that! I agree – I wasn’t so attuned to the issue early on, in part because my kids were pretty sheltered from commercial t.v. when they were little, but now I see how widespread and insidious those messages are.