McDonald's Is Not Our Mother

By Margaret Curtis, PhD

Scientists took too long to conclude that the hand that feeds the chick rules the hen house. Recent research which revealed that fast-food dining imprints children with corporate logos did not surprise anyone familiar with animal training. People function as animals, too, whenever food enters the picture. It always enters the picture for competitive dog handlers.

If you have ever watched a dog show closely, you have seen a handler touch his own mouth and then slip his hand quickly to his show dog. That hand most likely contained a tiny treat, now smeared with the handler’s saliva. This movement completes the oldest trick in the book for show people. It connects the handler with the animal on the most basic biological level.

Just as a mother animal licks her pup clean, so a handler identifies his own body with the body of the creature he takes into the show ring. Together, they go—or they don’t proceed at all. This is only the first of many mind control devices to create a twosome which goes nowhere alone. To be successful in the show ring, each partner must be able to think each other’s thoughts.

Such activity only demonstrates the soundness of ancient philosophy. “A sound mind in a sound body” suggests the parallel at the root of Western thought. The wisest pediatrician known to this writer stated the concept at stake here as simply as possible when he simply said: “Everything in the human body is connected to everything else.” “Everything” includes the brain, of course.

To recognize the fundamental nature of this concept is to challenge the direction of dining practices in America for the last thirty years. Is it really a treat to take a child to a fast-food restaurant where he connects his survival with a corporation? Is it doing that child a favor to instill in him the notion that a corporation can outdo his parents in producing tasty cuisine?

Will that corporation be on hand when he awakes in the middle of the night with a fever or bellyache? Will that corporation read him a bedtime story that he has not heard before? Will that corporation do sound effects to accompany that story so the child giggles with delight? It’s past time to take our children back from invaders, who begin in the kitchen—and dining room, too.

To accomplish that task will take sacrifice and hard work. Forget the stories about invaders from Outer Space. Forget arguments over which diet excels over all the others. Let that kid know that Mom and Dad can cook—and that child can cook, too! S/he need not be dependent on any invader of domestic life to supply the food that tastes like nothing else on earth—home cooking.

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For the latest research, please see "’I'm Lovin' It’: Fast-Food Logos 'Imprinted' in Children's Brains, Study Says” in Medical Daily:
<http://www.medicaldaily.com/articles/12318/20120925/fast-food-logos-imprinted-childrens-brains.htm#l6Ae39k9LsiGeuz3.99>.