Fast food chains and junk food makers in the USA are given until 2013 to voluntarily stop advertising to preteens or face government regulation. Michelle Obama’s Task Force on Childhood Obesity said the current advertising self-regulatory body, the Children’s’ Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (whose members included McDonald’s, KFC, Mars, and so on … ) is completely ineffective.

It would be a signal that says the public interest trumps private interest. That the freedom to be fully human, and not just be subjected to an endless onslaught of adverts, should come first. That we are citizens more than we are consumers.