Ba da Ba Ba Ba

I read a study online this morning that was conducted by interviewing 63 low-income pre-schoolers (certainly this means they hail from low-income FAMILIES… I don’t think my ego could ever take hearing of a HIGH-income pre-schooler individually…) between the ages of 3 and 5, which asked them to rate food – 3 items from McDonald’s and then regular vegetables and fruits… some of which were served on a tray and some of which were wrapped in McDonald’s packaging – based on taste.

The food that was not wrapped in McDonald’s wrappers lost ALMOST EVERY. SINGLE. TASTE TEST. Even carrots, milk, and apple juice tasted better when wrapped in McD’s wrappers. In fact, 77% of the kids preferred the McDonald’s-wrapped French fries to the McDonald’s-UNWRAPPED French fries.

The results of this taste garnered a wide variety of reactions, most notably the lambasting of McDonald’s advertising for hooking these kids at such an early age, while the other camp hung the parents of these kids out to dry for not practicing responsible parenting.

The fact of the matter is, not one single reaction asked the largest question that popped out at me: Is this really a smart study? By asking that, what I really mean is – are 63 kids truly representative of the overall? Not only that, but the study clearly indicated that these were low-income families, and only 2 (2!) of the kids had never eaten at McDonald’s, while one-third ate at McDonald’s once a week.

I’ll go right out on a soapbox here and say that McDonald’s is not to blame. But everyone else is.

I say that not because I am a marketing professional and thereby make my living creating marketing and advertising campaigns (though not to sell French fries or hamburgers), but as a marketing professional who understands pricing structures and business models to know you can’t hold them responsible when they’re doing business.

Granted, it’s subsidized business, and therein lies the problem.

I don’t eat at McDonald’s, with the sole exception of road trips to Ohio and a somewhat-ritualistic swing through one at the Breezewood, Pennsylvania changeover. However, right before I entered into my Renaissance Year here and made a pact to eat crazily healthily, I considered a ceremonial stop right before as a send-off… if only because I realized that of all my choices, nothing would signify “unhealthy” quite as powerfully as the Golden Arches. I never made it… and I can’t remember what I even settled for.

I think the problem isn’t McDonald’s doing business and advertising their products; I think the problem is the fact that in order to eat as nutritionally as possible, your budget for food needs to be considerably larger than if you’re going to take advantage of a well-publicized dollar menu.

This is highlighted pretty strongly by the fact that the potato industry is highly subsidized – the entire industry is assisted enough by the government that McDonald’s is able to sell French fries at artificial (read: affordable) prices. (The counter argument is that the ENTIRE industry is subsidized, so places like Whole Foods or Kroger also pay artificial prices.) The kicker of course is that then again, the items available at McDonald’s versus a wholly nutritional diet are all presented at less than market prices.

This is pretty relevant to me these days… Fresh foods and fruits don’t seem to last as long as sodium-charged soups or snacks. Convenience is inexpensive when held up against the right diet. Hey – Styrofoam takes a while to break down in the environment… can’t we just start throwing strawberries and grapes and asparagus into McDonald’s old Styrofoam packaging and let it keep for a month or so?

SIDENOTE: One of my recent birthday purchases for myself was – via the power of Ebay – a complete set of all 8 McDonald’s Happy Meal toys of the Legion of Super-Heroes. It’s a sharp, rare day that the Legion of Freakin’ Super-Heroes is available as a toy at McDonald’s, but not enough of a rare day to get me to eat there during Renaissance Year.

And I do very well when I don’t think about how those same toys were intended for the same pre-schoolers surveyed above.