In January, Kraft announced that it would be reducing its advertising of junk food products to children by not advertising to children under age 6 and by not advertising unhealthy products like Oreos during TV programs aimed at children ages 6-11. Kraft was celebrated for taking seriously the childhood obesity epidemic and self-regulating the advertising of its unhealthy products to children.
Warning: this post (the topic, not the style) contains more than 45 grams of irony.
Starting this fall, PepsiCo will be providing nearly all of the drinks mandated under the Los Angeles Unified School District’s groundbreaking 2002 Healthy Beverages Motion. I’m not sure how exactly to react or respond. Complexities and contradictions abound. The world’s second largest soda company will be operationally responsible for enforcing a ban on sodas in the nation’s second largest school district, and marketing to a captive audience of students without access to their largest brand.
Following the LA Unified School District’s ban of sodas sales in school vending machines in 2002 and their junk food ban in 2003, hundreds, if not thousands of schools nationwide have followed suit. Seen as a way to help curb that rapid expansion of youngsters’ waistlines, parents, school boards, and teachers alike have taken their soda-free agenda as far as state supreme courts. Now, other institutions are following suit.
Continue reading "Healthy Vending Starts Making the Rounds" »
I recently visited Australia, staying in and near Brisbane and Sydney. We had fun; it's an interesting place, similar enough to the U.S. (and So Cal in particular) that the differences in culture, landscape, population, wildlife, and history knock you for just enough of a loop to make you think. It was a personal trip, but I had the chance to talk to some public health officials there about the school food campaigns we are doing in L.A. I was surprised to learn that there is no equivalent of the U.S. national lunch and breakfast programs in Australian public (state) schools.
Shortly after the
June 17th mayoral election, Antonio Villaraigosa appeared as a
keynote speaker at the Congress for New Urbanism convention in Pasadena and
proclaimed that he would appoint a new Planning Director (the previous
Director, Con Howe, had announced he was stepping down six months ago) who
would be 100% in accord with the smart growth and livability positions of the
New Urbanists. No word yet on how such a decision is going to be made, nor what
planning issues the mayor sees as crucial, and perhaps most importantly whether
the Planning Department or for that matter Planning itself will have any
special role in the Villaraigosa Administration.
The possibilities are
there to take Los Angeles down a very different road from the past when
planning at best was an afterthought, the Department was understaffed, and its
priorities skewered towards the latest big development. For Los Angeles has no
pedestrian plan, no bike plan, no transit-oriented development plan, no broader
commitment to a livability agenda at either the regional or the neighborhood
scale. Social and environmental justice advocates, filling out the smart growth
agenda with a commitment to equity and sustainable community economic
development, have laid out the road map for a planning vision and a vision for
planning for Los Angeles.
Mayor Villaraigosa, please take note!
“An army marches on its stomach” - Napoleon
Except for the occasional military recruiting poster, public school cafeterias may seem far removed from the carnage-strewn streets of Iraq. But all those school lunch lines, subsidized meals, and little milk cartons are calibrated in an unexpected way to the body weight of the American G.I.
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