What do you do if you want to get your unpopular agenda across to young people? Make a video on Funny or Die and hope it goes viral of course.
That’s First Lady Michelle Obama’s latest strategy to convince knuckleheads —err young Americans– that we should abandon our love of chips, cookies, and soda for carrot sticks and apples at school.
In a spoof of the movie “Divergent,” the online video “Snackpocalypse” features a movie trailer of high school students engaged in a junk food orgy following their class president’s successful campaign to get junk food vending machines placed in their school. The kids quickly go from celebrating their potato chips and pizza to addicts hovering around water fountains that dispense soda and overdosing on Cheetos.
However one student, young actress Chloe Grace Moretz, eats differently (healthy) and takes on the challenge presented by another young actor, Tyler Pose. At the end, FLOTUS makes a cameo on a couch watching this movie trailer with two mom friends and eating carrot sticks.
It’s just another cheap strategy to gain attention but is far from likely to actually change the minds of young people. We get that it’s meant to poke fun at unhealthy eating in schools, but replacing chips and cookies with carrot sticks and apples in vending machines is hardly enough to address the obesity problem in our nation among young people. Teaching good eating habits is admirable but demonizing the food choices young people make to do so turns us off.
The First Lady assumed that young people would go running to the salad bar once they were forced upon schools from the Washington. Kids aren't biting.
New school rules and restrictions on calorie intake or banning sugary and salty food without viable options have left students hungry and unsatisfied. While apathetic on many issues, hunger in schools have driven students to start their own video campaigns and take to Twitter to show how empty their plates are – because of limited food options.
In the press, the First Lady has waged a war with Republican members of Congress who want to legislatively roll back her school lunch reforms.
As the new school year is kicking off, will a Funny or Die video be enough to gain her brownie points with young people? No, but it will up her cool factor a little bit more.