They want to help the kids, I get that. We have a childhood obesity epidemic in America. But Kellogg's decision last month to stop advertising sugar cereals to kids under 12 is a disastrous mistake. I learned everything I needed to navigate our consumer culture from my close parsing of TV commercials for sugar cereals. If it weren't for those commercials, I'd have a garage full of HeadOn right now.
In a world where I had no control over where I lived, when I went to sleep or if I played soccer, Kellogg's empowered me. It wooed me. It cared what I thought.
Each year - as a respite from my life of Rice Krispies - I got to choose one sugar cereal to eat during our one-week family vacation on the Jersey shore. I spent the previous 11 3/4 months parsing data I collected from the marketing campaigns of each brand.
Even in third grade, I knew that as lyricists, the Honeycomb team was no competition for Bob Dylan: "Honeycomb's big. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not small. No, no, no." Still, once I recovered from the insult to my intellect, I could tell I was being peddled value, which was not what I was looking for in a once-a-year purchase.
I liked the anti-authoritarian feel of the Trix rabbit, but the fact that he was told, in a cruel, apartheid-like way, that he couldn't enjoy a bowl because "Trix are for kids" clashed with my aspiring aims toward adulthood.
Lucky Charms claimed to have some kind of magic that made things delicious but clearly relied on the cheap prestidigitation of repackaging dehydrated hot chocolate marshmallows in different shapes and colors.
While I appreciated the honesty of Sugar Pops, it seemed too desperate and bland. The Froot Loops mascot baffles me to this day.
An entire industry - with serious names such as Post and General Mills - was desperate to win me over, and I took that responsibility seriously. Sure, my base desires screamed Cookie Crisp - the genius of tricking adults into letting you eat cookies for breakfast - but I wanted to be more sophisticated, smart, subtle.
What I wanted was something that would simply "tempt your tummy with a taste of nuts and honey." I got my parents to buy me Honey Nut Cheerios.
All my product research didn't go to waste. I used it to size up other kids when I went to their houses, the elementary school equivalent of looking through someone's medicine cabinet. And it proved invaluable years later when I finally discovered those variety packs of single-serving boxes. Forced to share them with my sister, I mastered how to trade and connive and follow the NBA draft. Sure, Lisa was 7 1/2 years younger, but there was still a certain satisfaction to using reverse psychology to get a 4-year-old to waste her No. 3 pick on Frosted Mini-Wheats.
Protecting kids is a natural instinct, but as soon as they learn to type, they're going to be exposed to more temptations - edible and otherwise - than their parents can control. I'd rather risk some fat kids than a whole generation so naive about marketing that by middle age they can still be manipulated by a dancing leprechaun.
Joel Stein is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, where this article originally appeared.