Food and toys.

Following preliminary approval by the Committee on the Environment and Consumer Defense, the Brazilian Senate is currently analyzing a bill of law with a pedagogical, political, and ethical scope and implications that could ensure it an important role in consolidating principles, standards , and practical measures in the process of food and nutritional security for the Brazilian population. The bill places a ban on so-called " promotional tie-ins " , or the combined sales of food products with toys, an advertising device that specifically targets children. In other words, kids receive toys as " presents " or " prizes " with the purchase of certain food products, so that in their natural urge to play or have fun, their instinctive and physiological expression of hunger (appetite) is displaced by a marketing ploy: toys as gratifications or rewards, as souvenirs tied to the purchase of chocolate, candy, breakfast food, snacks, and soft drinks. Sometimes the food itself is the toy or game, the point of departure or outcome of childhood fun, in which siblings, other children, and parents themselves play the role of bit actors in a game with a stacked deck. In other words, the winners and losers are known ahead of time. The winners are industry and commerce. The losers are the children and their families that agree to play the game. Yet this is only the most visible part of the problem. Dissimulated (or even more osten-sive) marketing ploys are pervasive: in the pack-ages' appearance, on radio and TV, on the supermarket shelves, in many schools' snack bars and dining halls, and in the seemingly innocent games at kids' clubs. In 2011, a PhD thesis 1 presented at the School of Public Health of the University of São Paulo called attention to the effect of food advertising on a cluster of low-income families (actually from a slum, half-urban, half-rural) in Garanhuns in the semiarid area of Pernambuco State, Northeast Brazil. This eth-nographic study demonstrated the marketing control over children's eating preferences and habits, forcing mothers and grandmothers to violate traditional dietary habits and purchase the products advertised on local TV. The most ma-chiavellian part was a game of figurines hidden in the packages, stimulating kids to make complete collections in order to win a prize. Goaded on by the rules of the game in the attempt to complete their collections, the children were enticed into more food purchases, …