Eat This!: How Fast Food Marketing Gets You to Buy Junk (And How To Fight Back)

by Andrea Curtis, Peggy Collins (Illustrator)

Overview

Eat This! examines how fast food marketing gets you to buy junk and how you can fight back. It shows how marketers embed sales pitches in media to lure consumers to foods that can negatively impact the health of children. The author explains what advertising is, discusses product placement and other tools used to sell products. Curtis provides careful insights into the fast food industry and ways in which young people can push back.

"Kids need to know the truth about junk food, and understand the millions of ways it's pushed on them -- every day. Andrea's fun and accessible book gives them the tools to fight back!"
-- Jamie Oliver, MBE, world-renowned chef and food campaigner

"The title says it all. This is the first and only children's book to tell the awful truth about the way our kids are assaulted by rapacious marketers. But, most importantly, Andrea manages to tell the story to the kids themselves."
-- Mark Bittman, best-selling author of How To Cook Everything

"Eat This! is a well-conceived, well-researched and empowering resource that helps students, parents and educators decode the marketing speak and arm themselves against powerful techniques used by junk food and beverage marketers."
-- Lulu Cohen-Farnell, Founder, Real Food for Real Kids

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780889955325
Publisher:	Red Deer Press
Publication date:	02/09/2018
Pages:	40
Sales rank:	1,070,485
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 9.80(h) x 0.20(d)
Age Range:	10 - 18 Years

About the Author

Andrea Curtis is an award-winning author whose work includes What's For Lunch. She lives in Toronto.

Editorial Reviews

"Eat This!" is aimed towards a youth audience of children age 9-14 in grades 4-8. "Eat This!" is an effective analysis of varied marketing tactics to persuade younger consumers to eat non-nutritious or junk food, with specific suggestions for ways to avoid being overly influenced by media publicity tactics in food choices, and ways to request or encourage food providers to offer a wider range of healthy choices of foods targeted towards kids. A couple of highlighted topic chapters titled Do This! offer specific examples, such as 9 year old Hannah Robertson's talk with McDonald's' executive that questioned the use of toys, mascots, and marketing techniques used to trick kids into eating and wanting unhealthy foods. Although the executive made counterclaims, McDonald's' began to offer more healthy food choices for kids, and media concluded that Hannah was responsible for beginning a meaningful dialogue between kids and fast food marketing. She actually said, "Don't you want kids to be healthy so they can live a long and happy life?... It would be nice if you stopped trying to trick kids into wanting to eat your food all the time." The conclusion is that kids can be a powerful force for change in the arena of fast food marketing. The final "Do This!" pages offer these among other suggestions: Celebrate diversity. Do price checks and taste tests. Lobby for litterless lunches. Advocate for fast food marketing-free zones. Question media. Watch product placement. Use viral video tactics to spur eating healthy foods. Read nutrition labels. Assess food based fundraisers, including the nutritional value of the foods. Watch fast food mascot use, think critically about this. Consider the Retire Ronald campaign and create similar efforts. "Eat This!" is described as a tool kit to fight fast-food marketing to kids. As such it has plenty of empowerment value and appeal for young readers and others. It could be easily incorporated into any math, sociology, or marketing class.

midwestbookreview.com

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.

www.foodpolitics.com - Marion Nestle

★ 03/01/2018
Gr 4–7—Marketing targeted at children aims to sell them junk food, but they can fight back. Curtis, the author of What's for Lunch?, surveys the ways marketers attempt to sell their products to young people around the world in an information-packed title. Her relatively complex text is topically organized into spreads, each describing a different marketing strategy through an explanatory paragraph, followed on the facing page by examples and statistics. Strategies she describes include product placement in films, viral marketing, school fund-raising campaigns, brand name characters, and straightforward "kidvertising." Interspersed are chapters describing ways people have fought back. All are profusely illustrated with images of food and cartoons of young people, mostly eating in groups. Two final chapters, one aimed at students, parents, and teachers and another suggesting appropriate actions, will leave readers hopeful. VERDICT With appealing design and timely, research-based information, this will be a welcome addition to most library collections.—Kathleen Isaacs, Children's Literature Specialist, Pasadena, MD

School Library Journal

★ 2018-02-19
A comprehensive compilation of fast-food marketing practices aimed at youth and ways kids can recognize and combat them.In this slim, 15-chapter book, Curtis begins with the basics, clearly explaining what marketing is: "the art and science of persuasion." The author's upbeat, nonpatronizing tone is a selling point in itself as she explains how fast-food marketers place product brands in entertainment culture—movies, TV shows, and video games—to persuade kids to identify with or become loyal to a type of junk food; how they infiltrate schools by creating fundraisers and teaching resources that feature their product; and how they create kid-friendly spokescharacters such as Ronald McDonald, among many other manipulative practices. The good news is that the book's target audience—kids—will feel empowered as they learn how they are being influenced and are educated in ways to fight back. Segments labeled "Do This!" suggest ways readers can participate in anti-fast-food advocacy and tell stories of real-life kids and parents who exposed junk-food marketing practices. Facts about the unhealthy results of eating fast food based on statistics from countries around the world are included as well as information on what real food is. Collins' snappy designs depict youth of many ethnicities and share space with clear, well-chosen stock photographs.Copious kid-friendly information on a vitally important topic, stylishly presented, makes this book essential. Knowledge is power. (sources, glossary, author interview) (Nonfiction. 9-14)

Kirkus Reviews