Ruth Reichl Quotes

As we confront the child obesity crisis, advergames that promote unhealthy foods to kids are a real cause for concern.

Families are struggling against a tide of junk information on junk food.

Parents are working more than ever before and unable to monitor what kids are eating at home, and schools are selling astronomical amounts of junk food in order to supplement shrinking budgets. It's a ticking time bomb, and America's children are exploding.

It's not just a matter of poor willpower on the part of the consumer and a give-the-people-what-they-want attitude on the part of the food manufacturers. What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort... to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive.

As I see it, fast food outfits have targeted small children with their advertising in a very effective way. You know, it's clowns and kid's toys and bright colors and things like that.

I am very concerned about junk food in the schools.

Health messages are simply overwhelmed, in volume and in effectiveness, by junk-food ads that often deploy celebrities or cartoon characters to great effect. We may know that eating fruits and vegetables is good for us, but the preponderance of the signals we get - and especially the signals children get - push us in the direction of junk food.

The main influence on a child's palate may no longer be a parent but a series of food manufacturers whose products - despite their illusion of infinite choice - deliver a monotonous flavour hit, quite unlike the more varied flavours of traditional cuisine.

There is a deliberate effort to undermine food culture to sell us processed food. The family meal is a challenge if you're General Mills or Kellogg or one of these companies, or McDonald's, because the family meal is usually one thing shared.

I was probably a little bit overweight as a child, being passionate about baked beans on toast and Cadbury's milk chocolate when I could get it.

Let's face it: so much of what we consume is not driven by knowledge but by basic craving and impulse. The process of what we eat starts in our heads. And no one is more in our heads than a food industry that spends billions of dollars in marketing its message in every means possible.

Obesity in children is growing out of control. A big part of this is economic. Fake foods are more affordable. It's enticing people to eat more because they think they're saving money when they're really just buying heart disease.

I've seen so many kids walking to school with these massive high energy drinks, and they are nine or 10. I'm like, 'What?' It was a treat for me. It is still a treat for my family.

For every $1 advertisers spend advertising something healthful like apples, they spend $500 advertising junk food.

We are spending millions, if not billions of dollars every year on programs to fight the childhood obesity epidemic while giving almost $2 billion of taxpayer money to the junk food and fast food industries to make the epidemic worse.

My kids can't eat awards.

We have these weapons of mass destruction on every street corner, and they're called donuts, cheeseburgers, French fries, potato chips, junk food. Our kids are living on a junk food diet.

Unfortunately, the food industry has not yet faced this situation and begun taking measures to avoid exploiting our weakness for not knowing when we have had enough.

But in terms of the code by which we go to market - it's not telling kids to supersize, we're not selling them, generally, products, in the advertising we do to them.

As a chef and father, it kills me that children are fed processed foods, fast food clones, foods loaded with preservatives and high-fructose corn syrup.

Why are kids being inundated with food that is not good for them, when we're suffering from an obesity crisis? Is the U.S. government talking out of both sides of its mouth, promoting bad food while telling us not to eat it?

It distresses me when I take my seven-year-old nephew out. I cook healthy food, and he wants to go to McDonald's. He doesn't even like the food; he just wants the toys, the Happy Meals. I can't stand to see people walking down the street eating fast food.

Every year, the average American eats as much as 33 pounds of cheese. That's up to 60,000 calories and 3,100 grams of saturated fat. So why do we eat so much cheese? Mainly it's because the government is in cahoots with the processed food industry.

I grew up a chubby girl. I had two brothers. My parents loved us, they just fed us whatever we wanted.

I spent my childhood eating. The only exercise I got was trying to twist off the cap of a jar of mayonnaise.