The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has “passed an ordinance that will require meals to meet certain nutritional guidelines if restaurants wish to include a toy with the food purchase.” Meals with toys must meet nutritional requirements with respect to fruit, vegetable and multigrain content. The ordinance passed by an 8-3 vote, enough of a margin to override a promised mayoral veto. Which comes first: a McDonald’s capitulation or a black market in happy meals? (HT: The Plan) [%comments]
San Francisco Passes a Happy-Meal Ban
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I wonder how far one city’s ordinance can affect positive change in a large corporation.
That being said I appreciate local government working for the actual good of their constituents and I’m especially appreciative of politicians enacting change to help those with no voting power (the children.)
@The Quietist, they lived well.
@UnhappyMeal, you must not have heard… it’s called “corn sugar” now.
BTW, San Francisco is rated #3 healthiest US city, with San Jose (close by) #1.
If you’ve ever walked around SF you’ll know why. Most people have a butt that looks like stair-stepper-addicts gone wild.
How about a bag of “Freakonomics swag” for the first poster to correctly identify ten likely unintended consequences of this nanny state ordinance.
Ah, the conundrum of the democrats: if you treat people like they are too stupid to be trusted to make their own decisions at McDonalds, then why do we let them have a vote in political elections?
Excellent — this is a terrific research opportunity.
Anthropologists, economists, public health researchers,and food industry trade bodies should launch a longitudinal study examining the potential impact of such localized legislation.
Primary funding should come from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, with additional funding from California state agencies, and federal sources. (But no industry or activist group money — either would fatally infect the credibility of the research findings.)
First, a baseline should be established, prior to the law’s implementation, regarding the prevalence and incidence of the relevant childhood diseases (obesity, diabetes, etc), as well as reliable data on food consumption habits, use of medical and public health services, and other relevant variables.
These data need to com from a broad sample that is both statistically significant, as well as representative of the greater San Francisco area.
Control groups could easily come from either outside the San Francisco city limits (and therefore unaffected by this proposed legislation), or a similarly sized city with comparable demographics.
The food industry’s role would be to provide actual sales data. Yes, there would need to be some protection against disclosure of confidential same-store sales data.
Once the legisation goes into effect, the study would need to continue tracking the individuals involved in the study, for a period of time that would be sufficiently long enough to draw meaningful conclusions about short, medium, and long term effects.
The value of such a study would be to document the long term health effects of individual dietary choices in a controlled, scientific way. These individualized choices, when aggregated over a significant population size, are precisely what makes the term “public health” relevant.
In short, a longitudinal study that quantifies how much influence a food industry products have on an individual’s food choices would go a long way toward understanding what policy interventions are effective in helping improve public health.
That’s an easy fix, they sell a Kid’s Value Meal and charge extra for the toy…