The great debate over how ignorant we all are and who we can blame for it began in earnest in August, when three really fat teenage girls–how fat? Well, one of them stands a mere 5'9" and tips the scales of justice at 270 pounds–sued McDonald’s on the grounds that the fast-food giant’s high-calorie, high-fat, high-sodium food made them obese.
This lawsuit, which is still percolating in the New York City court system, followed another suit against McDonald’s, this time by a really, really fat 56-year-old man who blamed the burger maker–as well as co-defendants Wendy’s, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken–for making him obese, diabetic and possessed of a blood pressure that could levitate a small car.
On the face of it, these made-for-talk-radio lawsuits are ridiculous. We don’t sue razor-blade makers for teen suicides and we wouldn’t sue Black and Decker after a Texas chainsaw massacre, so why should we sue the makers of fatty, high-calorie junk food if its customers eat too damn much of it?
But if we resist that American impulse to just dismiss everything and blame the lawyers for destroying all that is great about this country, there’s a chance we could learn the answers to the questions posed at the top of this column.
The first question is easy. We’re pretty damned dumb. The kids in the McDonald’s lawsuit, in fact, use their ignorance as an argument, claiming that if they’d only known about the nutritional shortcomings of fast food, they certainly would not have gorged themselves so wantonly. (If that’s really true, they should consider a lawsuit against their parents for endangering the welfare of their children rather than a suit against McDonald’s.)
Beyond the McDonald’s Three, Americans are surprisingly moronic about their food choices. Health information is seemingly omnipresent nowadays, yet obesity, heart disease and adult-onset diabetes (which results from high-fat diets) are on the rise.
Beyond the yoga-and-wheatgrass set in Yuppie neighborhoods–where people choose their foods by soy content–information about healthy food isn’t making it to the people who need it, like The McDonald’s Three.
But you don’t have to believe me (I wouldn’t), so take it from McKinley Hightower, who runs a farm program in a rundown part of urban New York, a place where it’s easier to find a flame-broiled Whopper than a fresh watermelon. In this part of the city, when a kid says he wants a Big Mac, he’s not asking for a large-sized tart apple.
“People don’t know what’s in the foods they eat,” Hightower said. “They don’t know that most of it–whether it’s McDonald’s or the packages they get at the food pantry–is just starch and fat.”
Bad political leadership doesn’t help Hightower’s clients, either. A couple of years ago, for example, the Rev. Al Sharpton, a prominent black leader in New York, threatened to sue Burger King because it didn’t have enough blacks in upper management. Sharpton was not upset that Burger King’s food was poisoning his community, just that there weren’t enough blacks supervising the slaughter. (Isn’t that like prisoners of war complaining that they’re never given a shot to become warden of the camp?) Sharpton, still weighing a presidential bid that would energize whole segments of one percent of the electorate, did not return my call.
But lack of information is bigger than the Rev. Al (and that ain’t easy). Next time you stop at your local McDonald’s–as I did the other day (albeit strictly for fact-finding purposes)–just try to find any nutritional information posted anywhere. You won’t. (So, for the record, according to the McDonald’s Web site, a Big Mac, a Supersize fries and a large Coke has 1,500 calories and 63 grams of fat–which is more than half the calories and 70 percent of the fat that an average 20-year-old man should eat in an entire day.) So we’re pretty dumb. But the second question–Who’s to blame?–is much tougher. In fact, a battle over that question was waged in some of the nation’s top newspapers last week as the forces of “personal responsibility” took on those who would sue McDonald’s. Those of us who make our living in the newspaper business love these kinds of full-fledged debates, especially when the full-fledging is done through expensive full-page ads.
One ad was taken out by the Center for Science in the Public Interest–a group that made headlines by exposing such diet-busters as Chinese food (1993) and movie theater popcorn (1994), but is now often mocked as killjoys or “the food police.” Their ad–which was festooned with a frosting-encrusted donut, a Flintstones-sized hamburger and a piece of pizza so covered with pepperoni that it’s tough to remember which is the food and which is the topping–made it clear who’s to blame and what should be done about it.
“McDonald’s spends more than half a billion dollars a year on advertising–four times more than the Marlboro Man,” the ad said, linking fast food companies to Big Tobacco. “Portions are ‘supersize.’ Gas stations have become 24-hour candy stores. No wonder obesity is up 50 percent since 1991! It’s time for the federal government to step up to the plate on nutrition issues. For starters, Congress should provide a minimum of $30 million to Centers for Disease Control for effective campaigns promoting healthy eating and physical activity … If more money is needed, let’s charge a penny or two tax on soft drinks or other junk foods … to fund public-health campaigns.”
That ad was promptly answered by a group called The Center for Consumer Freedom–which, despite its independent-sounding name, is actually funded by restaurants, bars and tobacco companies and has, in the name of consumer freedom, opposed such things as increasing the minimum wage, decreasing DWI thresholds and any challenge to your child’s ability to buy soda and junk food at school.
“You are you too stupid … to make your own food choices,” began the Consumer Freedom ad (also festooned with high-fat foods), “at least according to the food police and government bureaucrats, who have proposed ‘fat taxes’ on foods they don’t want you to eat. Now the trial lawyers are threatening class-action lawsuits against restaurants for serving America’s favorite food and drinks. We think they’re going too far. It’s your food. It’s your drink. It’s your freedom.”
My first thought when I read this ad was, “How come there’s never a food policeman around when you really need one?” I mean, during my fact-finding mission to McDonald’s, I saw a guy hold a Big N’ Tasty up to his mouth and take a huge bite. I ran outside, hoping to flag a food cop, but, alas, they must have all been on other calls.
But my second thought was, what’s so funny ‘bout peace, love and government action? Earlier this year, a California state senator proposed a one-cent tax on sugary soft drinks with the money to be used to offset higher health-care costs associated with obesity and diabetes. When I wrote a positive article about the proposal, I found out what happens when you go against the American consumer’s “freedom” to eat whatever he wants. A conservative talk show in Los Angeles gave out my email address (fair enough) and I received more than a thousand angry missives calling me everything from a “typical tax-and-spend liberal” (again, fair enough) to a “Jew bastard” (which is somewhat less accurate).
Beyond the curses, the central argument was always the same: What about personal responsibility? If fat people get fat because they have no personal responsibility, that’s their fault, isn’t it?
That’s ostensibly the same argument I hear whenever I complain about gas-guzzling SUVs: Government shouldn’t legislate personal responsibility. But such an argument is intellectually dishonest. Eventually, those fat people’s diabetes, obesity and heart disease are going to overwhelm our existing health-care system. And that will cost us all in the long run. So what’s wrong with a one-cent tax that could not only discourage people from drinking sugary soft-drinks, but also create a pool of money that can be used down the road? And why not put a high tax on gasoline if it means that people will drive less, pollute the air less and burn gas less?
The forces of “personal responsibility” like to make it sound as if pro-active government is some newfangled invention of “bureaucrats.” But there’s nothing new about lawmakers trying to use the tax code to encourage behavior that benefits society as a whole. After all, cigarette taxes fund health-care programs, bridge tolls subsidize mass transit, lottery money is often ear-marked for education and some states even tax developers and use the money to preserve open space elsewhere in the state.
Yes, a lawsuit against McDonald’s is absurd on many levels, but if just a few people order a salad instead of a Big Mac after hearing about how unhealthy McDonald’s food is, those evil trial lawyers have done us all a small service.
Because, let’s face it, we’re all pretty dumb.
title: “American Beat Food Fight” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-01” author: “Fredrick Sparks”
Question 2: How do most Americans react when they hear that our nation’s obesity epidemic has gotten worse? Answer: “The government had better stay away from my cheeseburger!”
That’s the kind of week it was in America, as our federal lawmakers voted down a bill that would allow consumers to sue restaurants (specifically fast-food restaurants) for making them fat. A day later, the same lawmakers voted for higher penalties for vulgarity on the airwaves. The mixed message: “The government can’t help your bulging waistline, but we’ll protect your offended eyes and ears.”
Nothing better typified our nation’s do-nothing approach to obesity than Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson’s announcement last week of “renewed efforts” (his words) against the increasing trend in increasing waistlines. Sixty-four percent of Americans are now considered overweight. Obesity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is about to pass tobacco as the leading cause of preventable death. Our society spends hundreds of billions dealing with the cost of obesity and related diseases.
“Overweight and obesity are literally killing us,” Thompson said. “We need to tackle America’s weight issues as aggressively as we are addressing smoking and tobacco.”
So what is the government doing to fight the nation’s deadly obesity problem?Thompson announced it is launching a TV ad campaign and a Web site (imagine, they want you to get healthier by parking your rear on the couch or at your desk) and a new study to be conducted by the National Institutes of Health. (Don’t hold your breath for anything major here; whatever the scientists uncover will be cleansed of any anti-Big-Business recommendations before it reaches any policymaker’s desk at the White House. Just ask the guys who did the EPA pollution studies that somehow absolved the power plant operators).
Thompson is talking the talk by linking obesity prevention to our nation’s historic battle against smoking, but it would be nice if he had actually walked the walk: If we’re really serious about treating high-fat, unhealthy foods the way we treated cigarettes, we need to bring back two major weapons in the public health arsenal: lawsuits and taxes. The “small-government”/“frivolous lawsuit” crowd wants you to forget this, but high taxes on cigarettes and lawsuits against Big Tobacco did much more than silly public service ads to curtail smoking, preventing millions of deaths and saving billions of health care dollars.
Yet every time some legislator proposes a simple tax on high-fat or high-calorie foods, he or she is run out of town on federally subsidized rails. Capable lawmakers like Sen. Deborah Ortiz in California (and many others I’ve profiled here) found that out when their modest “fat tax” proposals earned them everything from ridicule to death threats.
Ortiz’s proposed soda pop tax never made it out of the California legislature. She said she was just happy to get a bill through that would phase out soda pop sales in California elementary and middle schools. But even that obvious step was fought by big business. High schools, where far more soda pop is consumed, were exempted. Now she’s pushing a bill that would require restaurants to provide nutritional information about the meals–much like food producers are required to list the ingredients and nutritional content of everything inside the package.
That bill is also being fought by Big Food (which is pretty ironic, when you consider that the only grounds for these fast food lawsuits is that customers claim that the restaurants are hiding nutritional information. Providing such information, as Ortiz wants, could actually insulate restaurants from such lawsuits).
OK, so you don’t like the idea of the “fat tax” or government regulations? Fine. Get fat. But is it too much to ask that government do something simple like limiting the kinds of advertising your kids are seeing? According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (hey, it has the word “family” in its name, so it can’t be some kind of liberal group because everyone knows liberals are anti-family!), kids see twice as many ads as they did in the 1970s–and that most of those ads are for candy, processed cereal and fast food. Not surprisingly, kids are also three times more likely to be overweight than those who grew up in the 1970s.
As a result, groups like the American Psychological Association (possibly a liberal front group because we all know how liberal wack jobs like Woody Allen revere psychoanalysis) urged the U.S. government to restrict ads aimed at children under 8 because kids that young are particularly vulnerable to commercial persuasion.
But the same people who want to restrict Howard Stern’s ability to talk dirty want to allow America’s fast food industry to sell dirty.
And that’s the larger issue here: Our nation seems to have no shortage of right-wingers screaming about the moral decay in our society. Why is there no outrage about the nutritional version? Could it be because moral decay is caused by Hollywood liberals who tend to favor government programs while nutritional decay is caused by cattlemen, conglomerates and cheese producers who tend to vote Republican and abhor government regulation?
Did I just go after the cheese industry? I did, but with good reason. While everyone likes to believe that McDonald’s now-extinct supersized fries caused the nation’s zipper to bust over the past three decades, you could easily blame cheese consumption, which has doubled–from 15 pounds per person per year to 30–since 1975, says Dr. Neal Barnard of the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine.
The son and grandson of cattlemen, Barnard nonetheless has no sympathy for the “personal responsibility” argument. “It’s complete crap,” he told me. “These food producers can engineer an obesity epidemic by simply lobbying the government.”
No, Americans didn’t suddenly rediscover their love of cheese by themselves. Years ago, the biggest dairy producers lobbied the government for a program that taxes all dairy producers–big or small–and uses the money to promote this vital American industry. The results, according to Barnard, were ads like “Got Milk” or cross-promotions with Pizza Hut on something called the “Ultimate Cheese Lover’s Pizza,” which has a pound of cheese on every pie. Thanks to money collected by the United States government, the cheese industry was even able to convince the Subway sandwich chain to get rid of two sandwiches on their menus that did not have cheese.
And Barnard’s group sued the USDA in 2000 after discovering that six of the 11 people who were in charge of reconfiguring the nation’s dietary guidelines (all those “recommended daily allowances” of thiamine, iron and vitamins that you see on the side of food packages) had ties to the meat, egg or dairy industry. (What’s he complaining about? After all, six of 11 members having ties to the industries they’re supposed to be regulating is practically open government compared to Vice President Cheney’s energy panel.) “It’s bad enough that none of the panelists were from healthy food industries, but you don’t need to have anyone from big business at all. There are plenty of impartial experts at the CDC or the NIH,” he said.
But those impartial guys might make proposals that would actually shake things up, like proposing the outright ban of foods with trans-fatty acids or hydrogenated oils, which Big Food uses because they’re cheaper and extend shelf lives.
“The question is, can the government control these industries or will it continue to be controlled by them?” Barnard asked. “Big Food industries are like the cocaine industry in Colombia. They hawk their product and have political power.”
