Hey, kids! Now you can buy food that's bad for you and maybe win you and a 3rd World-kid a laptop! Hope you enjoy the tasty irony!

Now, I've been a fan of the OLPC XO and the premise behind it since
it, and the Non-profit org that created it, first came about back in
2005. I even took part in the Give 1 Get 1 program where you drop
$400 and buy yourself an XO laptop AND a 3rd World kid gets one for
free. I stopped vocally supporting OLPC after they behaved very
oddly, making obviously bad choices in marketing the program and after
I noticed a fairly blatant flaw in the design of the XO. Believing in
the cause, however, I didn't make a big deal about it because,
honestly, 3rd World kids with flaky laptops is better than 3rd World
kids with no laptops at all (after all, haven't we all owned a flaky
laptop?). That said, it's three years later, roughly, and the program
to give One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) in several 3rd World countries is
going pretty well. I wish them continued success. HOWEVER, NOT at
the expense of the health of American children.

Enter the Win One Give One contest from General Mills. All you have
to do is buy Betty Crocker-brand fruit snacks, find codes in them,
enter the codes on the http://www.winonegiveone.com/ website and you
could win your very own XO laptop and a kid in a 3rd World country
gets one, too.

If you don't know what "fruit" snacks Betty Crocker sells, they are
Fruit by the Foot, Fruit Gushers, Fruit Roll-Ups, Fruit Shapes, and
Variety Packs. What you may not realize is that after fruit, the most
plentiful substance in them is corn syrup. The next-most-plentiful
substance is *dried* corn syrup. After that, you have refined sugar.
From there you get partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil. After that,
we're in the "may contain less than 2% of the following" zone. Check
out the ingredients for yourself here:

http://www.generalmills.com/corporate/brands/brand.aspx?catID=11309&groupID=19418#23350

So, yeah, the top four ingredients in the fruit roll-ups that I
checked were either fruit or crap that's bad for you.

So, our kids bodies get unhealthy food while 3rd World kids brains get
education.

There's a couple layers of irony with this. There's the stupidity of
sacrificing our kids' bodies for the brains of poor kids and then
there's the idea of the rich kids getting their, uh, just desserts.

Ha!

Posted via email from thepete's posterous