Recanting

Last summer I posted a few sentences pointing to a piece on child obesity and marketing.  To go with it, I randomly grabbed a picture off of the web, a shot that was circulating around on various other websites of a portly young kid sitting in a McDonald's.  I didn't really think twice about it.  But apparently that post became one of the top results for a Google image search for "fat kids" and recently I've been inundated with things like requests from elementary school kids for permission to use the picture in their reports on obesity.  And all of a sudden I felt quite rotten. 

This made me belatedly realize two things: I shouldn't have lifted a picture in the first place without attributing it or determining its source; and that this was a picture of an actual kid, someone with feelings and stuff, who I'd very thoughtlessly tagged as the epitome of fat kids for the sake of having a funny picture to go with a blog post.

Anyway, I've removed the picture from that post.  And I'm sorry it was ever up.