Parenting & Family Quote by Jim Cantalupo

The sentence is engineered to sound like restraint while quietly preserving the right to keep doing business as usual. Cantalupo starts with “the code,” a phrase that smuggles legality and self-regulation into what’s really a reputational defense. Codes are comforting because they imply boundaries without requiring hard commitments; they’re flexible, internally enforced, and conveniently vague.

Then comes the rhetorical pivot: “in terms of… it’s not…” He narrows the charge to a single caricature of wrongdoing: “telling kids to supersize.” It’s a clever choice because “supersize” is both culturally infamous and easy to deny as an explicit instruction. By framing the ethical question around a literal command, he dodges the more obvious critique: that advertising can nudge, normalize, and habituate without ever issuing orders. Marketing to children rarely looks like “Buy X now.” It looks like mascots, toys, sponsorships, placement, and the steady construction of desire.

The real work is in the hedge: “generally.” That word functions like a trapdoor. It concedes exceptions without naming them, preserving plausible deniability if someone brings receipts. “Products, in the advertising we do to them” is also a tidy little firewall: he’s defining “selling” as direct product-pushing, not brand imprinting, emotional association, or turning a restaurant into a reward system.

Context matters: this is early-2000s fast-food America, when childhood obesity and marketing ethics were becoming public battlegrounds. The intent isn’t to confess or reform; it’s to reframe the indictment into something narrowly refutable, then declare compliance with a standard the industry largely wrote itself.