@WillWorkForChocolate I think there’s another cultural problem in the US, and it’s called “blaming the individual” There’s this fantasy of free-will, as if people ought to be rational actors living in a vacuum, somehow impervious to systemic pressures, their culture or their society (and advertising). Actually suggesting that there’s a larger system at play is often is dismissed as some sort of leftist “social justice” rhetoric, or “making excuses” for people.
So when you (not you personally, but probably considering what I’ve seen on this thread) see people making “bad decisions”, acting against their own interests, or harming themselves somehow, you point and mock them for their stupidity. It must be a smug world up there, reproaching the less educated and less rational for their poor decisions.
In this case its obese people eating bad food, or parents taking their fat kids to McD, but I’ve heard the same in various other contexts too. Minimum wage workers, the unemployed, those who can’t afford healthcare, the homeless. etc. It’s this attitude of assuming that individuals have somehow earned and deserved the conditions they find themselves in, presumably because they “chose freely”, right?
What is it about Americans and your Mexican neighbours, the two most obese nations on the planet, that makes so many of them so uniquely stupid and irrational that they continually choose to make bad personal decisions regarding their diet?
And that article you linked was a somewhat lengthy discussion about litigation strategies, what sort of responsibilities the fast food has and should have regarding obesity, whether they’re legally accountable for obesity, how perceptions of their accountability could change in future as current fast-food litigation is dismissed as frivolous—much the same as anti-tobacco litigation was. A far cry from the trite and sarcastic way you framed it in your question.