Fun Food: Children’’s Food Marketing and the Politics of Consumption

Fun Food provides a fascinating, sometimes startling, journey through the contemporary landscape of children's food and traces the emergence of children's food products. The book examines the significance of marketing foods to children as well as providing a critical account of the products, promotions, protests, manipulations, and bans related to children's food promotion. From FUN-da-Middles cupcakes and Fruit Gushers fruit snacks to Froot Loops cereal and Cheddarific Cheestrings, Fun Food probes the significance of marketing food, particularly supermarket food, to children as a form of 'eatertainment'.

While the childhood obesity epidemic has drawn the food industry and its marketing practices into the spotlight, there is a real need for research that tackles the broader implications of marketing food as fun to children. Chapters draw insight from focus groups with children and in-depth interviews and surveys with parents. The resulting analysis intertwines child and parental attitudes toward food and food marketing with broader theoretical questions pertaining to identity and childhood.

Placing 'children's food' and its marketing under the microscope, Fun Food provides a lively and innovative account which sets these pressing debates within our contemporary foodscape and conceptualizations of childhood.

Charlene Elliott is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Calgary, Canada.