The San Francisco Chronicle reports that in Arizona and Florida, legislators are responding to the decision by San Francisco’s civic leaders to ban the offering of toys in children’s meals that do not meet certain nutritional standards by proposing their own kind of ban.
They want to ban cities and counties from passing their own bans, which are designed to impact the selling of things like McDonald’s Happy Meals to kids.
According to the story, “Legislation recently passed the Arizona House to bar cities or counties from banning any kind of incentive offered by restaurants. That includes not just toys, but a very long and detailed list of other goodies including contests, coupons, trading cards, coloring books, admission tickets, ride tokens and crayons.” And Florida is considering a similar proposal.
What makes this interesting is that apparently there have been no proposals in any city of county in either state to even consider a San Francisco-like ban.
They want to ban cities and counties from passing their own bans, which are designed to impact the selling of things like McDonald’s Happy Meals to kids.
According to the story, “Legislation recently passed the Arizona House to bar cities or counties from banning any kind of incentive offered by restaurants. That includes not just toys, but a very long and detailed list of other goodies including contests, coupons, trading cards, coloring books, admission tickets, ride tokens and crayons.” And Florida is considering a similar proposal.
What makes this interesting is that apparently there have been no proposals in any city of county in either state to even consider a San Francisco-like ban.
- KC's View:
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The Chronicle points out - correctly - that the best criticism of the Happy Meal ban was done on “The Daily Show.” It doesn’t sound entirely unlikely that Jon Stewart and his gang will find this new development - or non-development - intriguing.
You’d think these state legislatures would have better things to do. Like, for example, work on their high school graduation rates. Just for the hell of it, because I was curious, I checked to see what high school graduation rates are for these two states - and they are both below the national average of 70.06 percent - Arizona is at 67.13 percent, and Florida is at 59.56 percent (45th out of 50 states). Maybe this would be more worthy of their time and attention than thinking about banning bans that haven’t happened yet.
Just a thought.
