Goodbye, Toucan Sam
Goodbye, Toucan Sam, Tony the Tiger and Captain Crunch. Goodbye to all the cartoon characters that cereal companies have used over the decades to sell cereal to children. “The policy changes come 16 months after Kellogg and Viacom, the parent company of Nickelodeon, were threatened with a lawsuit over their advertising to children by two advocacy groups, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, and two
Under the coerced non-agreement, Kellogg may still use cartoon characters if the cereals can be reformulated to meet certain nutritional standards, such as zero trans-fats, less than 200 calories per serving, less than 12 grams of sugar per serving, etc. In other words, the cereal has to be bland.
I grew up eating Sugar Frosted Flakes, which were promoted by Tony the Tiger, Frosted Fruit Loops, promoted by Toucan Sam, and Captain Crunch cereal. As far as I am aware, I suffered no ill effects, mental or physical, whatsoever from eating these cereals. Perhaps part of it had to do with my mother, who encouraged me to play outdoors, and who kept firm limits on snacking between meals. I benefited from a responsible mother (thank you, Mom). But the idea of responsibility, parental and individual, is gone. Instead, we are all treated as a collective of children, nursed over by the
I am sick of it. Thankfully, I had Tony the Tiger in my life and tasty, sweet Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes. What about today’s children? What about all of us? The world is made blander by Kellogg being forced to knuckle under to the Mafia-like tactics of busybodies who use the courts to cudgel us all into living in their soul-less, tasteless world.
I say to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, and the busybody parents who joined the lawsuits: take this spoonful of fruit loops and shove it. Hands off my cereal. Hands off my life.
3 comments:
Nooooooooo!!!!
I still eat Froot Loops! Bastards!
Liberty is lost in small steps, one spoonful of cereal at a time. Really, that is no joke. We lose the right to smoke on private property, eat foods made with flavorful ingredients, ingest medicines of our choice, patronize doctors under mutually agreed upon terms and prices, purchase products that meet our chosen specifications, etc. This is on top of having our wealth confiscated in ways too varied to count to support innumerable causes, programs, and groups that we do not approve of.
Defending Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam is akin to fighting for the right to drink tea freely purchased on uncoerced international markets, or the right to produce documents without stamp taxes.
It is the right to live a joyful life, animated by our own actions taken to further it, freely and without prior restraint from anyone.
Let the joyless busybodies strip all pleasure from their own lives. Let them sacrifice their happiness to beggars. Let them pursue sacrifice as a noble, Christian or Marxist or environmentalist end in itself.
Let them live a life that is a slow death, but don't let them force me to live the same way.
I say to all of them: keep your distance.
"Liberty is lost in small steps, one spoonful of cereal at a time."
Brilliantly put. Kriegsgefahrzustand and I were having a very similar discussion the other day.
I had to write on this, too. It just made me so very angry; that once again they have targeted one of my personal joys for destruction in the name of some collectivist crib-socialist jihad.
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