Food & Drug Law Prof Blog

Jonathan Safran Foer on the Colbert Report

It's not quite law, but I'll grab any excuse to link to the Colbert Report.  One of my favorite authors, Jonathan Safran Foer, appeared on the Colbert Report last night to promote his new book, Eating Animals.

Here's a link to the interview with Stephen Colbert.

From the Eating Animals website:

Like many others, Jonathan Safran Foer spent his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood—facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child’s behalf—his casual questioning took on an urgency. This quest ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong.

This book is what he found. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir, and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many stories we use to justify our eating habits—folklore and pop culture, family traditions and national myth, apparent facts and inherent fictions—and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting.

Marked by Foer’s moral ferocity and unvarying generosity, as well as the humor and style that made his previous books, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, widely loved, Foer’s latest tour de force informs and delights, challenging us to explore what is too often conveniently brushed aside. A celebration and a reckoning, Eating Animals is a story about the stories we’ve told—and the stories we now need to tell.

Posted by Professor Donna M. Byrne, William Mitchell College of Law

Risque TV Ad for donut holes -- Careful, this is PG13

It made me chuckle.  It's not really law, but every now and then something that's slightly off is just, well, funny.  Hardee's got some grief about this from one of it's store owners (a company that owns over 300 of its stores).  See Hardee's Ad Rejected in the NY Daily News.

More on the TV ad study and Free Will

A few days ago, we blogged a New York Times article about a study of TV ads on snacking.

Snack Ads Spur Children to Eat More
By ALEX MINDLIN

Psychologists recognize that certain behaviors can be automatic. For example, unrecognized external stimuli can unconsciously stir us to anger, spur us to loyalty or incite us to rudeness without our knowing it. . .  continue reading

The study, Priming Effects of Television Food Advertising on Eating Behavior, was published in Health Psychology.  It examined the effects of TV ads on children as well as adults.

The study is described in an interesting discussion of free will and the role of external stimuli on behavior on the Psychology Today blog, The Natural Unconscious, by John Bargh, one of the authors of the study:

The following is another installment in an ongoing Psychology Today blog debate with Roy Baumeister concerning the existence of free will, for which the new study on automatic effects of TV ads is highly relevant. . . . 

Television and other forms of advertising is expressly directed at getting us to do something that is in the best interests of the advertiser, but not necessarily our own.  We have already recognized this in the case of cigarette (tobacco smoking) advertising and as a consequence it has been banned now for many years.  In the new study, Jennifer Harris and Kelly Brownell of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale and I showed that passive exposure to food advertising on television may contribute to the ongoing obesity epidemic by automatically triggering eating behavior, right then and there while watching TV. 

TV Snack Ads Make Us Eat More

From the New York Times:

Snack Ads Spur Children to Eat More
By ALEX MINDLIN

Psychologists recognize that certain behaviors can be automatic. For example, unrecognized external stimuli can unconsciously stir us to anger, spur us to loyalty or incite us to rudeness without our knowing it. A new study finds that seeing food ads on television can induce people to eat more snacks while watching.

continue reading