Check out Amy Goodman interviewing Michael Pollan here.
The food companies are so clever--I love how Pollan points out that they're now marketing "pure sugar" as a health claim. Hey, our products contain sugar--not HFCS--so stock up; sugar is great! Yet just last summer I saw a commercial (paid for by the corn lobby) talking about the greatness of HCFS as a "natural" sweetener (it's made from corn! Corn's a vegetable!).
Here's another good link--an article from WaPo on the cost of being poor. I think it's related to the Pollan interview in the sense that some of the most nutrition-less food (Pollan calls it "food-like substance") is marketed to the poor. I heard a radio commercial about Kool-Aid the other day; it touted Kool-Aid as a cheaper and tastier alternative to fruit juice. Gross. Fresh food is hard to come by in poor, urban areas, but it doesn't have to be: community gardens are inexpensive and relatively easy to create. A stickier problem is the pursuit of profit by food giants, corporations that will say virtually anything in order to sell a food product. And don't get me started on Monsanto, which has taken over huge amounts of farmland all over North America with its genetically-modified, pesticide-resistant products.
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1. Agreed on Michael Pollan. That bit made me want to be a vegetarian again. Damn you Red!
ReplyDelete2. On the poverty front, I hate articles/books on the subject because it is incredibly difficult for an author not to sound patronizing. However, I guess I have to say, "Duh." It's appalling and frustrating, especially for the working poor. Another example of predatory lending is tax places like Jackson Hewitt and Tax People and all the rest, who will give you an advance on your refund for a sweet rate of 78% interest. It's terrible and immoral. I feel that the only way to prevent these places from succeeding is educating the public on why it is a terrible investment, and even then, I worry that short-term need will trump long-term logic.