‘The Man’ vs. Food

Broadly speaking, the right tends to see government (the public sector) as oppressive to freedom, and the left tends to see corporations (the private sector) that way. Therefore, many leftists think that society’s dietary woes are the fault of what they call “Big Food,” “the food system,” “The Man,” etc. The Rainforest Action Network recently held an Occupy Our Food Supply Day to “confront corporate control of our food supply and take action to build healthy, accessible food systems for all.”

Fight the system, man!

The Occupy Our Food Supply actions included setting up a “seed bank” in front of a Bank of America (easy target), protesting Monsanto, and the ACORN-like tactic of turning a bank-owned lot into an urban garden. Hey, if the Occu-hippies want to plant a garden, fine—no corporation is going to stop them from planting their arugula, provided they do so legally.

By the way, one of the celebs involved with Occupy Our Food Supply is Willie Nelson, who we last noticed wearing his food-activist hat making commercials for Chipotle, a restaurant chain which until 2009 was owned by big, bad McDonald’s. We suspect Nelson is more worried about his weed supply than the food supply. (Or maybe he thinks weed is food?)

The corporate food system is also the focus of a buzzed-about new book by journalist Tracie McMillan, The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table. The book is a critique of America’s food culture along the lines of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollen’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. As part of her “groundbreaking undercover journey to see what it takes to eat well in America,” McMillan labored as a field worker in California, but also did two jobs that millions of average Americans do in their high school or college years: working at Walmart and Applebee’s.

While working in an Applebee’s kitchen, this intrepid reporter discovered that manual labor is, like, hard. McMillan writes: “Let’s be clear: I’m no pro. For one thing, I don’t have the hands for it, a function of not yet having enough calluses. My hands are so tender that I yelp in pain regularly during service …” Yes, a lot of us have been there, done that, and we didn’t even have a book deal. This sheltered thirty-something reporter also dwells on the non-news that Applebee’s customers are mainly middle-class families while its workers are mainly lower-class. It even turns out that many food workers are immigrants!

Spoiler: the author doesn't entirely approve of America's way of eating.

The author’s liberal obsession with class and general naivete show through in other ways. “Ms. McMillan seems genuinely puzzled by the fact that high-crime, low-income areas, like many of the neighborhoods in Detroit, are ‘underserved’ by supermarket chains and food merchants in general,” write Walt Street Journal critic Aram Bakshian Jr. in his review of the book. “But surely the scarcity of supermarkets in such areas—like the blocks of boarded-up, abandoned housing, the neglected, underperforming schools and the corrupt local authorities—are surface symptoms of an underlying social dysfunction …You don't have to be a Nobel economist to understand that bad neighborhoods are likely to attract bad stores or no stores at all.” This reality helps explain the existence of what progressives call “food deserts.”

Bakshian also notes the irony that McMillan suggests that a Henry Ford mass-production approach to food might change the way America eats. “Only it has already happened.  Stripped-down, mass-produced ‘affordable,’ ‘convenient’ food turned out en masse—like the Model T—by laborers rather than craftsmen is exactly what Ms. McMillan encountered at every step along her journey from a California garlic field to a Midwestern big-box store and a New York family-style restaurant. She deplored it all.”

The book gets a more sympathetic review in the L.A. Times, although reviewer Carolyn Kellogg finds that “McMillan's efforts to tell macro and micro stories never cohere into a complete picture.” Also, Kellogg is strangely provoked by a seemingly innocent element of McMillan’s accounts, “I'm no food saint, but I want to shake her for drinking soda everywhere she goes.” Wow, you just can’t escape the soda haters these days. Someone needs to write a book about that.

Hands Off

The North Carolina lunch inspection incident, in which a state inspector replaced some elementary students’ homemade lunches with chicken nuggets, has quickly stirred up national outrage, media coverage, and now a “lunch-in” protest in D.C. hosted by a conservative think tank.

"Hands Off My Turkey Sandwich!" (Photo: weeklystandard.com)

Could this be the birth of a movement?

When you look across to the country, you can see how lunch-tampering can ultimately backfire. Since the L.A. Unified School District stopped serving flavored milk, pizza, and various fried foods, students have gone around the system and created a black market for junk food. (Capitalism at work.) The new lunch menu has flopped so badly that the district ended up bringing back some of the foods it canceled.

Of course, LAUSD is the same district that was somehow employing pedophiles as teachers for years. As we now know, some LAUSD students were forced to ingest things much, much worse than sugary drinks and greasy fries. It’s time for public schools to refocus on educating and protecting students and to leave food decisions to the parents.

(Anti-) Sugary Drinks Summit

In a new survey of nearly 600 adults across the U.S., 64% of respondents said they would oppose a tax on soda and other sugary drinks. But we know that a little roadblock like the will of the people won’t stop the food police from trying to tax soda anyway.

In fact, the CSPI recently announced that it will hold the first-ever Sugary Drinks Summit of 2012 in D.C. this June. (Yes, we’re serious. this is a real event, and apparently unrelated to Obama’s Beer Summit of ’09.) The keynote speaker at this groundbreaking event will be Philadelphia Mayor Michael A. Nutter, who has proposed soda taxes and has put limits on vending-machine soda sales in Philly. The sessions will include such hand-wringing topics as the evilness of soda advertising and its super-evil effects on minorities*, how to limit soda consumption by means of policy, and “Emerging Issues in Soda Politics” (maybe they’ll talk about how their own summit politicizes soda).

With such a meeting of the soda-hating minds on the near horizon, we advise you stock up on soda now.

Are there any soda-loving, freedom-loving protesters out there who can go ‘occupy’ this special event? If we didn’t have a full-time job we’d be very tempted show up at this summit with some “body advertising” for Coke or Dr. Pepper.

*See also: "Are Soft Drinks Racist?" at the Daily Caller

Walmart's Pointless New Labels

I think this comment about Walmart’s new labeling system by clinical nutrition professor and Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics spokeswoman Lona Sandon says it all: "People already have the information they need on the food label. Just turn the box around and take a look at the Nutrition Facts Panel. You do not need a special rating system to tell you that fruits, vegetables, whole grains and lean meats are good for you."

Either Walmart doesn’t think its customers are smart enough to realize the obvious or the company is willing to make lame concessions to get Michelle Obama off its tail. Neither scenario makes me eager to shop there again.

What's more, the new labeling system simply doesn't fit the Walmart brand. Walmart came to rule the retail industry because of its low prices; it's not an "aspirational brand" that anyone has ever looked to in order to improve their health or image. The price tag is the only label that really matters to its loyal shoppers.

Inspector Nugget

In what world would a lunch with chicken nuggets be considered healthier than one with a turkey sandwich? A world where state food inspectors get to scrutinize elementary students' brown-bag lunches.

In Raeford, NC, schoolkids have reportedly been forced to eat school lunches after a government inspector determined their home-made lunches didn't meet the nutritional requirements of a state-funded education program.

In one case, a girl who brought a lunch containing a turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, apple juice and potato chips was forced to also take a school-prepared lunch consisting of chicken nuggets, milk, a fruit and a vegetable to supplement her sack lunch. Why? Because her lunch from home didn't have a vegetable (sadly, potatoes don't count).

The school lunch doesn't sound much healthier than the one the girl brought from home, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to spend money to give a meal to a child who already has one. The real agenda behind the inspection and monitoring of school cafeterias isn't nutrition; it's more about conditioning kids to think that government should provide and approve of the food they eat.

School cafeterias are becoming the front lines in America's food wars. The food cops and the liberals running the public schools (and those groups overlap quite a bit) are trying to use kids as a way to get to their parents. As "First Lunch Lady" Michelle Obama has said, “That's why we start with kids, right? We can affect who they will be forever ... They're changing the way they think about their health and they're trickling that information down to their families.” In the real world, parents try to educate their kids and shape their "habits and preferences," not the other way around.

Forbidden Concoction: Bacon Shake

I thought the bacon craze had died down temporarily (like rock n' roll, bacon will go up and down in popularity but never die). But Jack In The Box is now selling bacon-flavored milkshakes, which reportedly contain no real bacon but do contain 1400-odd calories. 

With this shake, Jack In The Box joins KFC and Carl's Jr./Hardee's in the proud ranks of fast-food chains that have launched products intended to provoke the food police. We salute that sentiment ... even if we're not sure we would actually try one ourselves. Can Jack In The Box actually pull off such a delicate balance of flavors?