This absurd combination of advertisements hangs over the platform on the Lake Merritt BART station.

It's absurd because we're pouring scarce public dollars into private corporate coffers to exhort people to eat better—and at the same time, allowing other private corporations to tell people to eat more fast food.

It's absurd because rather than give our people more resources and better choices, the public health gurus think it makes more sense to put up billboards to tell them how to live their lives.

It's absurd because these self-styled do-gooder ad men (and women) seem to think you can really change these kinds of behaviors through advertising “impressions” — a proposition with scant evidence to support it.

It's absurd because we see the same failed approach in pollution prevention, where — just to give one example — we use advertising to tell people to recycle household hazardous waste, but then we don't make the recycling facilities available at convenient times because we couldn't afford to handle all the waste that would come to the facilities if people actually started to use them.

I'm all for public education, and billboards probably have their place in an overall public education campaign.

But any strategy that produces this kind of absurd juxtaposition deserves a thorough reconsideration.