Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
Weekend reading for kids: Eat This!
Andrea Curtis. Eat This! How Fast-Food Marketing Gets You to Buy Junk (and how to fight back). Red Deer Press, 2018.
This, amazingly, is a 36-page toolkit for fighting marketing to kids, with endorsements from Mark Bittman and Jamie Oliver, among others.
As I read it, it’s a manual for teaching food literacy to kids—teaching them how to think critically about all the different ways food and beverage companies try to get kids to buy their products or pester their parents to do so.
The “fighting back” part takes up just two pages, but it suggests plenty of projects that kids can do:
Do taste tests of fast food and the same thing home made. “Which one is more delicious, more expensive, more healthy? Which creates the least amount of waste?”
Watch your favorite show…Mark down how many times you see product placement.”
“Quick: think of all the fast-food mascots you know by name…Who are the mascots aimed at?”
The illustrations are kid-friendly as is the text. I’m guessing this could be used easily with kids from age 8 on.
