Happy Meals: Banned in San Francisco

last updated 8 January 2015

Once again, the Nanny State is “mobilizing to save us all from ourselves,” said Investor’s Business Daily in an editorial. In the latest example of “how far elected officials will go if we let them,” San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted last week to ban McDonald’s from offering the free toys in children’s Happy Meals, because the trinkets might entice kids to eat food loaded with fat, salt, and sugar. From now on, fast-food joints can only offer a toy if the accompanying meal is relatively low in fat and salt, and includes half a cup of fruit or three-quarters of a cup of vegetables. While they’re at it, why don’t the city’s do-gooders send social workers to every home, to “force-feed kids Brussels sprouts and broccoli?” The decision about what kids eat rightly belongs to parents, “not the government,” said the Los Angeles Times. Rather than “micromanaging the ingredients of Happy Meals,” San Francisco might encourage exercise by setting up “tempting new recreational offerings at its parks.”

It’s easy to be snide on this topic, said Barry Saunders in the Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer, but most American kids really do have horrible diets. And “when a Happy Meal is so cheap, so accessible, so darned tasty—and comes with a toy—it’s hard to tout the benefits of a Brussels sprout.” A dismaying 20 percent of American children are obese, placing them at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Fulminate about the Nanny State all you like, but the reality is that when people choose unhealthy or dangerous options, the rest of society is forced to pick up the tab when these nitwits get sick or hurt. Considering the “enormous” social cost of the national weight problem, banning Happy Meals isn’t “governmental tyranny.” It’s “good sense.”

As a mom, I reluctantly have to agree, said Lisa Wirthman in The Denver Post. Obviously, the burden of steering kids to healthy food belongs to us parents. But after 11 years of parenting, I’ve learned that “busy moms should take all the help they can get.” Giant food and beverage marketers like McDonald’s spend $1.6 billion annually to promote soft drinks, sugar-filled cereals, and fat-laden fast food to children, forcing parents like me to spend a lot of our time saying “No!” Wouldn’t life be “just a little easier” if McDonald’s Happy Meals were also healthy, so that “parents get to say ‘yes’?”