Eat This! ─ How Fast Food Marketing Gets You to Buy Junk - and How You Can Fight Back

A provocative follow—up to the bestselling What's for Lunch?, Eat This! Focuses on the impact on children of fast food advertising — an immense industry worth billions of dollars. Andrea Curtis shows how corporations who market to kids embed their sales pitches in all sorts of media to persuade young consumers that they have to have the foods they are manufacturing. Of course, most of this food has the potential to negatively impact the health and well—being of children. The author explains what advertising is, discusses product placement, the use of video games to sell food, the use of cartoon characters to sell products as well as acting as agents for apparently charitable fundraising ventures. In each page spread, Andrea Curtis provides insights that come from research into all aspects of the fast food industry and in the end suggests ways in which young people can push back.

Andrea Curtis, writer and editor, has written about everything from women's health to neighborhood change, from personalities in the literary world to those in the urban forest. She is the author of the acclaimed What's for Lunch: How Schoolchildren Eat Around the World for younger readers. Her critically acclaimed Into the Blue: Family Secrets and The Search for a Great Lakes Shipwreck won the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non—Fiction. Her writing has also appeared in Toronto Life, Chatelaine, Canadian Geographic, Explore, Utne Reader, The Globe & Mail, Today's Parent, cbc.ca/arts and others.
A graduate of McGill University in Montreal, Andrea now lives in Toronto with her husband and two sons, and volunteers for the Toronto non—profit, Word—Play.