On Wednesday, Rep. Matt Salmon introduced a bill to cut federal funding for the Kiddio: Food Fight video game grant. The bill is the last in his 2015 Shrink our Spending Initiative, focused on highlighting and cutting wasteful, taxpayer-funded programs.
Kiddio: Food Fight – Training Vegetable Parenting Practices is a video game being developed by Archimage, Inc. to train “vegetable parenting practices”. According to Archimage President Richard Buday, Kiddio Food Fight is one in a series of “serious video games” to help fight childhood obesity. The premise of Kiddio Food Fight has players assume the role of a mother and places them in situations where eating occurs in an effort to get a child to taste a vegetable. Funding for the game was provided by two grants totaling $1.55 million through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Past federally-funded Archimage video games include a $10 million grant for a video game about escaping a fat town.
“This week’s bill is one that is near and dear to me. As a strong fiscal conservative and ardent supporter of medical research, I firmly believe that we must prioritize our spending to ensure that we are getting the most bang for our buck. That is why I have and will continue to highlight obvious waste of your tax dollars. Take Kiddio: Food Fight, for example, where taxpayer dollars are being used to develop a video game that trains parents to feed their children a certain way,” stated Salmon.
“Believe it or not, one of the justifications offered for using your tax money to fund the development of this video game is: “parents may want the kids to eat better…but lack the understanding of how to do that.” I, for one, believe that parents are capable of knowing what is best for their children, and if this game would generate interest that remotely justified a $1.55 million investment, any of the plentiful video game companies would have gladly funded its production,” continued Salmon.
“This project does excel at giving government bureaucrats the momentary good feelings that go along with approving a grant that purports to encourage healthy eating, but the answer to childhood obesity rests with involved mothers and fathers, proper nutrition, and an active lifestyle—not wasting time in front of a screen playing any video game,” concluded Salmon.