U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin Thursday said movie characters like Shrek that market candy and junk food to American children are fattening up their audience members and killing them.

In a line of questioning from Iowa Independent's Douglas Burns, Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, dismissed challenges that his approach on the matter amounted to creation of a “nanny state” that would go so far as to prevent a cartoon character from selling candy to kids. Here is the Q&A:


Iowa Independent: On junk food and smoking and trans fats if you create this nanny state how will anyone be able to develop any self-discipline in a temptation-free world?

You are blaming the media and the entertainment industry and tracking obesity with that, but it also tracks over the years with more women entering the work force and parents feeding their children junk food and preservative-filled frozen dinners.

At some point don’t you just have to say it’s not such a bad thing if Shrek sells M&Ms to kids?

Sen. Harkin: Why can’t Shrek sell healthy snacks to kids? I answer your question with a question. Shrek can sell healthy foods just as easy as he can sell bad foods.

Iowa Independent: But shouldn’t the market decide?

Sen. Harkin: We know that we can regulate this. The FTC has the authority to regulate. They do with advertisng to adults.

It’s interesting that you picked that choice of words, Doug, “The Nanny  State.”

When this came up in the 1970s the FTC was going to promulgate a rule on advertising to kids. The advertising industry and the food industry went bonkers and there were all these speeches. It was “nanny state." That was the big thing: “we don’t want the nanny state, government being the nanny.” That sort of took on a rolling kind of a moniker.

Times are different now. We have a major public health crisis that we have to respond to. What if we had an outbreak of Polio or Small Pox or Measles or Child Influenza?

When these kids get diabetes at an early age, when they are obese, it’s not just them. It’s all of society. All of us pay for it. So all of us have some kind responsibility to protect society at large.

We don’t have a situation where maybe mom is home every day and the kids come home and every meal is sit down at the table. We don’t have that anymore.