Happy Meal?

I finally got around to seeing the movie “Super Size Me” last night. What an eye-opener. I don’t eat fast food too often, but I have to admit I really enjoy it when I do, even though I have full knowledge of how horrible it is for me.

One of the parts that really resonated with the social psychologist side of me was the discussion of how McDonald’s has conditioned the younger generation to associate happy times with their food. We usually think of classical conditioning in other types of advertising, such that purveyors of products attempt to associate the product with something good in order to persuade people to buy it. But McDonald’s really is the master of this technique. They play a lot on these associations in childhood and these things become so indoctrinated in our youth that we continue the associations well into adulthood.

I think back to my own childhood and how my brother and I had a McDonald’s playset–a full restaurant equipped with plastic food and figurines of Ronald McDonald et al. I went to several birthday parties in the red caboose attached to the McDonald’s in Boulder. I even got Happy Meals way after I should have graduated past them just so I could get the cool toys that were included with them (but, for the record, I did the same thing with Burger King in college when they were offering Pokemon toys in their kid’s meals). Eek! This indoctrination happened to me, and we hardly even went to McDonald’s when I was little.

So a lot of products try to make people think of their own childhoods and get a sense of nostalgia in order to sell more, but McDonald’s actually starts in early enough to become part of the nostalgia. Very clever. But that doesn’t make it right.