We all know that junk food is bad for our health. It’s no secret, and it’s the reason that those cheap meals often come with a free dose of guilt on the side, but it doesn’t stop us from eating rubbish every so often. And so we should – life is for living after all.
Children, however, do not understand what is so bad about eating exclusively chocolate or takeaway burgers. In fact, depending on how old they are, they might consider dirt with a side of gravel to be a balanced meal. Needless to say, we’ve got to keep an eye on their eating habits.
Jamie Oliver has famously been on a crusade against unhealthy food for kids for a long time now – you may even have been the victim of some of his successful bids to veg-ify school dinners – and now he’s on a mission to get junk food adverts banned from public transport. He started the #adenough campaign because, in his words, children are ‘constantly bombarded with unhealthy messaging around food’ and ‘we have to make it easier for children to make good decisions’.
And people are taking notice. The ban has already gone through on tubes and buses in London, and from October 2025 no one will be allowed to advertise junk food online or on TV before 9pm. Now, mayor of the North East, Kim McGuiness, has pledged to join eight other locales including Greater Manchester, Liverpool, North Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and the West Midlands, all of which will remove ads for unhealthy eating on buses, trams, and trains.
It seems likely that more councils will follow suit in the coming years, so we may soon never see an advert for a massive hamburger again, which, let’s be honest, will be good for us adults too. Maybe it’ll curb those 2am cravings, and maybe we’ll all actually get healthier. Maybe. Dare to dream.
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