THE TEEN CAMPAIGNER
Junk food ads have been junked, and one teenager at least is delighted. Seventeen-yearold Christina Adane chairs the youth board of Bite Back 2030. When she heard the news about the ban, she was “absolutely shocked”.
The victory for Bite Back and Adane has capped a whirlwind six months for the Lambeth teen. In November she was listed as one of the 100 most influential women in the world by the BBC, and in December she featured on Meghan and Harry’s first podcast for their charity, Archewell. “It was mad,” she recalls. “I had 24 hours to think about what to say and record it.”
This Friday, Adane will be appearing in a free online event to close the British Library Food Season. In “The Fast Food Flood”, a film Adane made with Giles Coren and two other Bite Back campaigners, Barakat Omomayowa and Jacob Rosenberg, the three young people show how the proliferation of fast-food joints close to schools, and the cheap appeal of junk food, is an irresistible draw for kids – especially when, as Adane says, “companies spend a fortune making things attractive to us.”
She adds: “We need to reimagine our high streets. Instead of a chicken shop or McDonald’s, we want a place that is safe and dry, with healthy, nutritious food.”
Sounds like an oldfashioned youth club – but good luck finding one, as funding cuts have led to the closure of 763 in the past decade. So we are left with the commercial replacement: fast-food shops. It’s what Professor Chris Whitty calls “a highly obesogenic environment”, or as Nicki Whiteman, Bite Back’s director of communications, puts it: “When you’re in an environment flooded with junk food… behaviour change is nigh on impossible.”
Adane sees cutting back on ads as only part of the solution. “It’s a systemic issue that comes from marketing, advertising and environment,” she says. “All these other things we have to battle with as young people.”
The time between leaving school and going home is the weakest point, according to Bite Back, as young people – who may not have especially appealing home lives – gather. How do you avoid this trap, I ask Adane, who is far from obese. “I couldn’t for a long time,” she replied. “The chicken and chip shop is the only safe and dry place kids have after school when they want to hang out with their friends. When free school meals aren’t that great, of course they are going to chill where there is affordable food, even though it is not nutritious.”
So how does Adane’s reimagined future look? Plenty of clean, attractive water fountains to start with: the one at her sixth-form college is covered in dust so “no one wants to touch it”. Better school meals: as a recipient of free meals herself, Adane is keenly aware of the shortcomings; and her Ethiopian mother was, she says, shocked by the poor quality. And maybe the return of those youth clubs. “Somewhere to go and just be young.”