Eat This!: How Fast Food Marketing Gets You To Buy Junk (and How You Can Fight Back)

Gr 4–7—Marketing targeted at children aims to sell them junk food, but they can fight back. Curtis, the author of What's for Lunch??, surveys the ways marketers attempt to sell their products to young people around the world in an information-packed title. Her relatively complex text is topically organized into spreads, each describing a different marketing strategy through an explanatory paragraph, followed on the facing page by examples and statistics. Strategies she describes include product placement in films, viral marketing, school fund-raising campaigns, brand name characters, and straightforward "kidvertising." Interspersed are chapters describing ways people have fought back. All are profusely illustrated with images of food and cartoons of young people, mostly eating in groups. Two final chapters, one aimed at students, parents, and teachers and another suggesting appropriate actions, will leave readers hopeful.