Fast Food Nightmare: Kids With Good Grades “Win” McDonald’s Happy Meals in Florida

In school, kids are supposed to learn reading, writing and arithmetic. Is it too much to ask that children also begin to get some nutrition basics from at least one of their teachers?

Apparently, in Florida’s Seminole County, the notion of teaching kids about healthy eating and good food is a foreign one.

The school board there struck the most ill-conceived, nutritionally horrific, jaw-droppingly bad deal with McDonald’s restaurants in Seminole County: For the 2007-2008 school year, elementary school kids with good grades and near-perfect attendance are rewarded with Happy Meals.

That’s right. If you’re one of the 27,000 school kids from kindergarten through fifth grade who does well in school and comes all but one or two days to classes, you get a “food prize” — nutritionally lacking, fatty, sugar-or-culprit-carbs laden, calorie-packed junk food.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, as part of this so-called “report card incentive” program, the Seminole County schools also are allowing McDonald’s to turn report cards into advertising vehicles. In fact, Stuart Elliot of the New
York Times so aptly puts it, the Florida schools are “using children’s report cards to help stimulate sales [at McDonald’s].”

So, if you’re a parent, your kids’ report cards will be delivered to
you, placed inside envelopes that literally force you to think about
the fast-food giant. The report-card jackets feature a cartoon of
Ronald McDonald, the chain’s brand mascot for children, the McDonald’s
golden arches logo and ohotos of Happy Meal menu items such as Chicken
McNuggets.

This junk-food-for-good-grades program has understandably raised the ire of such groups as the Boston-based advocacy group, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which is demanding McDonald’s stop advertising on children’s report cards.

“This promotion takes in-school marketing to a new low,” pronounced Susan Linn, director of the organization, in a press
release.

What Linn finds especially appalling is that this
McDonald’s-sponsored report card program “bypasses parents and targets
children directly with the message that doing well in school should be
rewarded by a Happy Meal.

“Turning report cards into ads for McDonald’s undermines parents efforts to
encourage healthy eating,” she adds.

Incidentally, McDonald’s counters that the envelopes aren’t advertising, but “support” for
the schools,  according to reporter Dave Weber of the Orlando
Sentinel. (Oh, please. I just love that explanation.)

Meanwhile, as Weber of the Orlando Sentinel, notes, McDonald’s has promised to stop advertising in elementary
schools after Jan. 1, 2008, but the McDonald’s report card jackets will be used until the school year ends in June.

So what exactly do good grades and good attendance get the kids? Well, kids can choose from a number of Happy
Meal options, such as:

• 4 Chicken McNuggets, Small French fries and a 12-ounce Sprite. (The drink has 28
  grams or about 7 tsp. of sugar, according to the McDonald’s website.)
• A hamburger, small fries and an 8-ounce jug of low-fat chocolate milk. (More culprit carbs and sugar.)
• A cheeseburger, Apple Dippers with a low-fat caramel dipping sauce, and a
  6.75-ounce container of apple juice.

As the CCFC points out, although “McDonald’s has pledged to only advertise its healthier options to children under twelve, the Happy Meal promotion explicitly mentions cheeseburgers, French fries, and soft drinks as options.  Happy Meals featured on the report card can contain as many 710 calories, 28 grams of fat, or 35 grams of sugar. ” (According to my calculations, when you add in the processed, much-like-sugar carbs from the buns and French fries, kids are getting way more sugar.)

Aside from the fact that learning should be its own reward, isn’t it also obvious that schools should never encourage kids to eat fast food, especially when almost 19% of kids aged 6 to 11 are too
heavy?

As Stuart Elliott of The New York Times observes,
the “commercialization of educational culture, particularly in
elementary schools, has long been a contentious issue. It has become
more clamorous in the last decade as hard-pressed school districts seek
to raise money for academic programs, sports and extracurricular
activities without raising taxes.”