Tell People They CAN"T DO SOMETHING and What Happens: Deep Fried Pizza!

Scared Vittleless | The American Spectator

The great food harangue has become impossible to ignore. 

By Kyle Peterson – From the July/August 2014 issue

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked UsBy Michael Moss
(Random House, 480 pages, $28)

The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About the Politics of Your PlateBy Jayson Lusk
(Crown Forum, 240 pages, $24)

Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry About What We EatBy Harvey Levenstein
(University of Chicago, 228 pages, $15)

Our great national food harangue continues unabated. A wide cast of characters—politicians, doctors, people who play doctors on television, Oprah—urge us, command us, beseech us to eat less of some things, or more of other things, though the specific diktats are ever-changing and often contradictory. Michelle Obama, who has all but created a Strategic Kale Reserve in her attempt to convince Americans to nosh their leafy greens, was at it again this May in the New York Times,urging Republicans not only to refrain from amending the WIC supplemental nutrition program, but also to heed the wisdom of Kepler and Copernicus. “Right now, the House of Representatives is considering a bill to override science,” Obama wrote, “by mandating that white potatoes be included on the list of foods that women can purchase using WIC dollars.” The first lady’s comrade in arms, Michael Bloomberg—notorious for leading a brigade of Mayors Against Illegal Gulps in a war on oversized sodas—has thankfully exited stage left, although the trans fat ban he championed continues to make New York City donuts, statistically speaking, 8.5 percent less delicious. The paleo diet, whose evangelists once blighted casual conversations everywhere, is giving way in the public consciousness. But the slack has been picked up and then some by the gluten-free diet, favored even among those for whom it is not a medical necessity. “Everyone should try no gluten for a week!” post-teen train-wreck Miley Cyrus exhorted her followers on Twitter. “The change in your skin, phyisical and mental health is amazing!” Even the Girls Scouts have gotten in on the act, recently introducing a gluten-free shortbread cookie to their door-to-door order form. Billions of dollars of this stuff flies off shelves each year, purchased by consumers who believe in the promised benefits of…well, it’s not quite clear.

To be honest, this food fixation has never made much sense to me. I grew up among those amber waves of grain, on a Midwestern corn and soybean farm. If a crunchy conservative, as defined by columnist Rod Dreher in his 2006 book by that name, is one who loves granola and Whole Foods, then I am surely a soggy conservative: soggy like a French fry left to linger in a heaping pile of ketchup. (Hunt’s, not Heinz. Never Teresa Heinz.)

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