Fast food tastes better, children agree

Contrary to how the media would have us believe it simply reflects the way things are, I’m predisposed to believe that in reality the media is just as capable of constructing reality.

So it was with some interest that as I read this article about how children perceive the exact same food as being better if it has a McDonald’s logo on it, I came upon this nugget:

“We found that kids with more TVs in their homes and those who eat at McDonald’s more frequently were even more likely to prefer the food in the McDonald’s wrapper”, said Dr. Thomas Robinson [the director of the Center for Healthy Weight at Packard Children’s Hospital and associate professor of pediatrics and of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine].

“Kids don’t just ask for food from McDonald’s,” Robinson said in a prepared statement. “They actually believe that the chicken nugget they think is from McDonald’s tastes better than an identical, unbranded nugget.”

I know McDonald’s is a favorite whipping boy when it comes to obesity, but the reality is that they spend over $1 billion a year on marketing. And although McDonald’s may say that “parents make the decisions for their children”, the reality is that 1) parents are not the target audience for Saturday morning cartoons, and 2) maybe they’ve heard of this thing called nagging…