Hot Dogs and Toys
My brain was compulsively drawn to the news that the American Association of Pediatrics was recommending the redesign of hot dogs due to their being a choking hazard. I immediately began to conceive of various kinds of shapes for hot dogs; round, square, hexagonal, you name it. The problem was that the minute I envisioned a redesign it ceased to be a hot dog. It just became a weird shaped piece of encased meat.
The hot dog is therefore, in essence, as much about the shape as it is about the taste and the texture. That may be why the news of the call for a redesign was generally lampooned by those who found it funny and fired on by those who saw it as yet another emanation of the nanny state.
The topic interests me, not because I am that crazy about hot dogs (they're okay but I prefer hamburgers) but because it reminds me of the challenges we face in the toy industry. Where does the line fall between parental and producer responsibility for protecting children from danger? Should there be a warning label on food? Should some foods be pulled off the market or redesigned? After all, as a USA Today article put it: "The Consumer Product Safety Commission requires labels on toys with small parts alerting people not to give them to kids under 3. Yet there are no required warnings on food, though more than half of non-fatal choking episodes involve food..."
Grapes are a choking hazard as are peach pits. Should we pull these foods off the market because they are choking hazards or turn them into frankenfoods by altering their DNA so that peaches no longer have pits and grapes are as big as strawberries?
I don't think so. Rather, parents have a job to do. They need to cut up hot dogs, remove the pit from peaches and maybe keep grapes away from small children. In the same way, they need to choose toys that are age appropriate and keep an older child's small parts toys away from their younger siblings.
Yes, the toy industry, like the food industry, has a responsibility to keep children safe. Parents, however, are the front line and no amount of changing the shape of foods or age grading on toys is going to replace that.
Cindy commented:
I think the difference between food and toys in terms of choking hazards is that parents are typically supervising young children while they eat, but may use toys as a distraction while they attend to something else. Thus they are less likely to be able to assist a child who is choking on a small toy.
