Before anyone thinks I’ve done so many new articles lately that they’re running together and I really meant this to appear in the debate section, let me assure you I haven’t made a mistake (this time). As I pointed out last week while recapping the lessons I’d learned doing all of the different segments, something very drastic has happened to not only the way we eat food in the last 50 years, but also in the way we argue about food.
Many are probably familiar with the line in Food Inc. that says “Food has changed more in the last 50 years than it has in the last 5,000 years” referring to the dramatic rise in chemicals in food, the way food is now grown in a laboratory instead of the ground, and the changing practices of agriculture where a chicken is shot up with more steroids than an NFL player. But I’ve discovered that it’s not just the food itself that’s changing, but the way people are divided on it. That’s right, like just about everything else in America right now, even FOOD has a political divide.
Somehow or another, things have gotten so screwed up that only liberals seem to care that their kids are eating pure lard in the form of fast food hamburgers or genetically toxic sugar in the form of almost anything marketed to kids at the grocery store. [Check out the documentary “Killer at Large: Why Obesity is the Greatest Threat to America” to see all the ways Reese’s Pieces, Oreos, fast food, Cheetos, etc. is marketed to kids to get them to bug their parents to buy it.] And it isn’t just concern for what kids are eating as red states are also much more likely to have higher obesity rates, and Alabama is part of “The Stroke Belt” and “The Diabetes Belt.”
So what gives? Why is “Whole Foods” (which proudly boasts that it sells nothing with high fructose corn syrup) seen as a “liberal” company? [Especially since there’s nothing socialist about its extravagant prices.] Why is Michelle Obama booed at NASCAR events because she’s said kids should eat a vegetable every once and a while? How is it particularly Democrat to not want to die of a heart attack at age 60?
I think it’s all part of the growing propaganda corporations have put out there that if you stand in there way, on anything, you are somehow a liberal. “You don’t think your kids should eat McDonald’s daily? Liberal.” “You don’t think Happy Meals ought to be marketed to kids? Liberal.” “You think restaurants should be forced to provide their calorie information? Fucking liberal.” “You think high fructose corn syrup shouldn’t be in everything? Get the hell out of America communist!”
Just like clean drinking water and clean air shouldn’t be a partisan issue—-I’m pretty sure red states aren’t wanting to get cancer from poisoned ground toxins leaking into the reservoirs anymore than “liberals” are—-it’s become one for the exact same reason of it will cost corporations more money to properly dispose of their pollutants instead of letting them seep into the ground or billow up into the sky. So those for clean water/air/food-that-won’t-kill-you have become branded as fro-fro liberals that should shut up and go save the whales.
But what red stater honestly goes out looking for diabetes or a heart attack or ten years cut off their life because of the foods they’re eating? Why is it celebrated that I had heartburn every night I was a teenager because of the amount of fried food I was eating instead of, you know, eating “liberal” food? I guess I don’t get it, but then again, I’m a liberal.
Great post!