Plenty of "affluent" families take their kids to fast-food places, for better and worse, believe me. So why weren't they included in the mix?

In this Toddler Uber Alles country we live in. Morons.

McDonalds has certainly done it's share of marketing, but they have also spent a lot of money studying how to package their products so that they appeal to a wide variety of people. Any chef will tell you that presentation is a big part of food appeal. Why would we expect food in plain wrappers to be as appealing as food in wrappers that were carefully designed to be appealing?

Maybe they controlled for this in the study, but if they did I didn't read about it. It's an important distiction, though. If carrots get more appealing in fancy wrappers, maybe we should be teaching people how to dress up carrots to be more appealing.

And the bright packaging. I don't believe (as someone who works in the field of marketing and design) that it's specifically the McDonald's logo and/or Ronald the clown. It seems the study used plain colorless packaging vs. bright packaging with vivid colors, logos, clowns, cartoon characters....duh, what would any toddler (and most adults) pick?

You can't overlook the brilliance of McDonald's marketers who started, decades ago, packing children's meals (Happy Meals, LOL) with cute toys. For those who have been on Mars and haven't seen a Happy Meal toy, they are surprisingly well made and often linked to TV shows or movies. They come "free" (OK, technically the price is built into that of the food combo), yet they usually have the solid look of a toy that would cost $2 or so.

Children adore small toys. When I was a tike (avoiding the dinosaurs that roamed the earth back then), there was a shoe company that included a plastic egg with each purchase, the egg containing a small toy of some kind. You better believe I wanted those shoes! and I wanted them for the toy, not the product. Since this was the Jurassic era, my mother firmly said no. This was the historical time period when children were allowed to dictate what adults bought and did. Sigh. Maybe that will come back, you never know.

Anyhow, you don't have to be a genius to figure out that bright graphics, a cute box and a free toy will produce a Pavlovian reaction ("I want it! I want it!") in a 2-6 year old child. Or maybe you do. McDonalds has sold billions of those suckers, after all.

I was also quite dubious of their claims that some large percentage of kids said that they had been to McDonald's in the last week and go every week. I have an almost four-year-old, and he really doesn't yet grasp how time works. He might very well tell someone who asked him that we went to McDonald's last week when in actuality we haven't been there for three months. Unless the parents were contributing to that reporting, I'd be pretty wary of that particular nugget.

This shows that McDonalds could sell carrots. $0.10 worth ought to do it in a french fry box for $1.29.

As a side note: What the heck is this story doing in Broadsheet? Is this a women's issue?

Anyone else read "Blink"? There's a chapter about some sort of booze... I can't remember the details... but in taste tests, which booze was preferred was based almost entirely on which bottle was swankier looking.

Mickey D's should definitely serve carrots. Subway has started to sell sliced apples in little bags. Wendy's serves Mandarin oranges in kid's meals now.

Yes, I know all about the "toy surprise" effect. I'm of an age when Cracker Jack boxes included "real" small plastic toys, not the throwaway paper stuff seen nowadays. I kept them in a "treasure box" that Mom put away in the attic as I grew up, so when we had to dismantle the house recently my box of Cracker Jack collectibles fetched a pretty good price. To this day, nostalgia (and the baseball song, of course) leads me to prefer CJ over other brands of caramel corn.

But it's not just kids who were/are targets of this sort of campaign. Years ago laundry detergent boxes contained pieces of dinnerware or towels. Within a few years of brand loyalty a housewife could have a pretty impressive set of china or linens!

Some years ago, the New Yorker told of an intriguing study that took place when McDonalds was launching its ultimately futile reduced-fat burger campaign. Before the launch, McDonalds fed focus-group participants both regular and reduced-fat burgers in unmarked wrappers, and the participants reported that the reduced-fat burgers tasted BETTER. But when consumers encountered the reduced-fat burgers in the store, openly packaged as a “healthy” alternative, they concluded just the opposite.

A few points which seem fairly obvious, but Price left out:

1) Asking which one tastes better suggests that one does.

2) Packaging which is attractive, whether it's from McDonalds or ACME Carrot, will be more appealing, and create the irrational belief that the product itself was better tasting. That holds for everything from carrots to fine dining and expensive wine.

3) Children's perceptions can be greatly influenced even at a young age. Just because kids are naturally vulnerable to packaging bling, doesn't mean they have to remain that way. Parenting, TV advertising, and schools make all the difference.

My family shopped at the organic co-op, the local bakery, etc. And we were poor, but they were reasonably priced back then.

Everybody was nice and friendly. I still remember bringing reusable glass bottles to the store and it being my job to refill them with things like corn oil, and molasses, which I really enjoyed. We valued quality, not packaging and not junk food. I remember the grocer would always give me a strawberry or something.

The local bakery had cup-cakes in the glass case, with little decorations. They were cheap and not particularly healthy. But the once a week experience of picking my cup-cake, in the store, with friendly people, was something a "Twinkie" in a plastic wrapper could never replace.

I'd like to see tax breaks for small, non-franchise, grocers and other community businesses. I'd also like to see a crack-down on corporate super-markets (benefits, taxes, minimum wage, etc) while banning advertising of junk foods on TV, and totally removing them from schools.