Anna Lappé - The Insidious Art of Marketing Junk Food to Children - #9

Reinventing the Supermarket

We are joined by author and educator Anna Lappé. Anna is the author of the lauded environmental book Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It. For those not already familiar with her fascinating career, Anna Lappé is a passionate and outspoken advocate for sustainable, real foods and systems of food production. Anna is well known for her television documentary work, and as a featured expert on numerous television and radio shows. As head of the Real Food Media Project, Anna’s major focus is activism as she builds grassroots awareness of sustainability and real foods, using the power of storytelling. In this discussion we’re focusing mainly on issues around commercial messaging, especially for food marketing purposes, and in particular we’ll talk about the issue of targeting children with those messages. We’ll talk about some of the more subtle ways in which messaging is targeted at children, and just how this makes the current public communications environment a very difficult one for those who are trying to parent responsibly.