An Open Letter to the Scholastic Company

19 November 2007

Scholastic Worldwide Headquarters
557 Broadway
New York, New York 10012

Dear Madam or Sir:

We have just received another invitation to a homeschool book sale event. Sadly, we will not be accepting your invitation, though we have in the past. Nor will we be buying Scholastic books for our home classroom on our adventures in other book stores.

As a mother, grandmother, and home educator, I am dismayed at Scholastic’s decision to partner with Kaiser Permanente to offer The Incredible Adventures of the Amazing Food Detective video game. Although I cannot belive that your company is really aware of it, the hate-mongering and interpersonal intolerance encouraged by this game are extremely offensive to our famiy's values, as is the promotion of the long-discredited pseudo-science on which this game bases its “facts”. I do not and can not believe that the Scholastic Company of my youth, the company that first introduced me to the idea of diversity, could knowingly be a part of distributing the bigotry and misinformation conveyed by this game.

Here’s an example I have borrowed from nutrition researcher Sandy Szwarc:

“The Food Detective game invites kids to click on the ‘AFD Case Files’ of various ‘Suspects:’ children who are supposedly behaving badly. The fat little 10-year old girl is Emily. The game tells kids that Emily is fat because ‘she eats too much and needs to learn portion control.’ The food detective sets up a security cam in her house ‘to catch the culprit in the act’ and she is shown gobbling nonstop a table of fattening foods and a chart shows her eating a whopping 4,550 [kilo]calories.”

My first objection is to the inculcation of the idea that it is somehow OK to snoop in other people's homes or into other people's personal habits with the excuse that one is "saving them from themselves". From there, it is a short step to teasing in the school lunchroom because of what "Emily's" real life analog has in her lunch today. What other people eat should not be the concern of anyone else - - and certainly not of children! My second objection is to point out that there is no scientific consensus about what causes people to get fat. Research has long disproved the idea that people get fat because they overeat; while eating and exercise habits may play some role, research verifies over and over again that the human body is amazingly adaptable and that, given a state of reasonable health, it maintains its weight within a narrow weight range, regardless of activity or nutrition.

Sandy Szwarc again:

The DONALD (Dortmund Nutritional Anthropometric Longitudinally Designed) Study, for example, clinically followed children, actually weighing the individual children and recording their diets (the foods, amounts and eating occasions) at least ten times a year and followed them thusly for 17 years. They found that no matter what the children ate during childhood or adolescence, they naturally grew up to be a wide range of weights. While there were great differences in the children’s diets, these differences weren’t at all related to their weights.

One of the real conclusions drawn by recent research is that the bullying experienced by children who are considered ‘fat’ by their peers results in higher levels of depression, suicide, and disordered eating. A large and growing number of children -- of all sizes -- are at increasing risk of developing eating disorders because they are afraid of getting fat. More than half of women aged 18 to 25 have told researchers that they would rather be hit by a truck or lose a limb than be fat.

In light of this finding, this game psponsoroed the Scholastic Company is not just misguided, it is unethical!

Sadly, the game doesn’t just promote wrong-headed ideas about fat children. (Another child, Cole, is presented as a “weakling” and a problem case because he eats ‘junk food’.) Is there now to be only one 'correct' body type among children? What does this tell our kids about their classmates who are bigger or smaller than they are? And if we can’t tolerate a natural difference in size, how long will it be before handicapped and challenged children are blamed for their differences from the “ideal”?

Good nutrition and an active lifestyle are indeed important things to teach children about, for their future happiness and good health and there are many ways to teach children about eating good food and about loving healthy movement. This game, sadly, is far from one of them. The developers could so easily have used this game as a fun, non-judgemental way to teach kids about good nutrition without demonizing foods or fat kids. Shame does not engender healthful habits and bigotry can not give children a love of good food and joyful movement.

If, as I have long believed to be the case, Scholastic Company truly cares about the children to whom you sell books and other products, you must take a long, hard look at this video game and the bigotry it engenders and reconsider your involvement in it. Look instead, I beg you, to return to your tradition of positive encouragement for diversity and a fun approach to learning.

Until that day comes, I will not buy another Scholastic product and I will urge my fellow homeschoolers to look elsewhere for suppliers for their childrens educational needs.

Regards,
Misti Anslin Delaney
former Scholastic customer