In which a posh grocery company discovers it sells junk food and McDonalds doesn't.

Chris Snowdon provides an insight into the evidence-free attacks on food advertising:

"...children's 'exposure' to HFSS food advertising has fallen by 37% since 2008 and that the average child sees a mere 11.5 seconds of it per day."

Those people who want to blame a mysterious and mythical thing called the "obesogenic environment" for children being fatter (and in particular advertising) are completely misinformed and, in promoting the myth, are misleading the public.

Doesn't stop 'em though:

Recent early-stage analysis of advertising data for May 2018, also done by the charity, found that on ITV1, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky One, around half (49 per cent) of all food adverts shown between 6pm and 9pm in May 2018 were advertising HFSS products. And that fast food and delivery brands accounted for more than a quarter (27 per cent) of those HFSS adverts.

Now this is truly shocking until you realise that (as one right on company discovered) HFSS covers everything from butter, bacon and cheese to home delivered pizza. And let's also remember that most children aren't ordering take-outs.

The causes of obesity are far more complex than "look at those adverts for junk food" but the media narrative focuses almost entirely on this message. Part of this is because public health people want there to be a convenient scapegoat for fat kids - it is not acceptable to point at parents and say "stop stuffing your kids with snacks and get them running about more". Even though eating too much and exercising too little is absolutely the biggest contributor to the rise in obesity. The poor fat people are victims of evil marketers and sinister food scientists - the advertising sucks them in, they cannot resist.

Of course this is nonsense but it plays to the other parts of the fussbuckets' narrative - snobbery. The "bad" foods are all foods that are enjoyed by the less well off - hence the shock for companies selling to posh folk when they discover that there's a whole loads of HFSS in artisan cheddar and fair trade unprocessed sugar. They thought it was all about McDonald's and cheap pizzas from the freezer shop:

Naturally, we were pretty shocked that a picture of some fresh groceries with a healthy mixture of fruits and vegetables, dairy, eggs and cupboard staples would flout TfL’s new junk food rules. But it turns out that TfL score foods individually according to a nutrient profiling model created by the Government. It’s a pretty crude measure and means that foods you would still think of as junk, like fizzy drinks with artificial sweeteners or low-fat fried foods, could in some scenarios comply with the new regulations.

Proof that anti-obesity campaigns are mostly about snobbish attitudes to "junk food" (defined as the sort of food common people eat) and nothing much really to do with reducing the weight of kids. But it's a delight that the pompous elitists at Farm Drop were really put out:

Last year, the fast-food chain was allowed to run a Happy Meal advert during children’s television and it passed the Advertising Standards Authority’s (ASA’s) standards for healthy food, which are the same standards TfL are now using for the junk food ban. According to the ASA, a McDonald’s Happy Meal is not a junk food product because 80% of the mains, and 100% of the sides are non-HFSS. But swapping out sugar for a sweetener or fruit for chips, doesn’t detract from the fact that this is still a fast food company promoting meals with fried foods to kids.

You have to laugh!

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