Fat Farms In America

I Don't Care If You're Fat

My late Mother, Rebecca, taught a generation the joys of haute cuisine in the adult schools of my hometown and nearby communities. Thousands of soldiers who had fought in Europe had returned from the war with a taste of French and Italian cuisine, and Mother was the master of both, including just about any other you could name. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of wines and believed no meal was complete with them. Mother became the first woman to serve on the board of directors of the Sommelier Society of America in recognition of her encyclopedic knowledge of wines and spirits, and was honored in 1984 for her service to the organization. She was also the first woman to be accepted in both the British and French Sommelier Societies. She received numerous awards and was the first American woman to receive the Agricultural Medal of the Comite National des Vins de France. I got to thinking about this when I read an article about Dr. David Ludwig's opinion piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Dr. Ludwig is a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. He and a co-author, Lindsey Murtagh, a lawyer and researcher at the Harvard's School, put forth the notion that the state intervention might be a good thing to take obese children away from their parents. The next logical step is to begin rounding up obese—fat—people and putting them in concentration camps where they will be forced to lose weight thanks to a restrictive diet and a regimen of labor. When they achieve the approved body mass index (BMI) they might then be released back into society. One can imagine caravans of buses lined up outside the camps to take the formerly fat people and kids back home. It is impossible to get through a single day in America without constantly being implored to eat something, whether at home, a restaurant, or fast-food franchise. I haven't kept score, but it often seems to me that much of the advertising on television that I see is devoted to food in some fashion, when not insisting that you should buy gold, get a reverse mortgage, or join some class action law suit against a pharmaceutical company. Whole channels on cable television are devoted 24/7 to food. Every morning TV show has food segments and, as far back as I can recall, always did. Articles, if not entire sections of newspapers and magazines, are devoted to food. As a book reviewer for the past fifty years, I have seen more cookbooks and diet books than anyone should be expected to read.

Kids LiveWell: US Food Industry's Obesity Marketing Comeback to ...

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America’s matter and drinkable makers, in bike with unplanned restaurants including Burger King, hit stepped up their marketing opprobrious against federal regulators who are hunt to bill thickened newborn “voluntary” standards most marketing to children.

Industry groups are exacerbating their try on digit fronts: extending more try on self-governing programs to substance more healthy-product options and to soft-pedal their marketing, and punching backwards harder against the offering by the Obama administration’s Interagency Working Group (IWG) on marketing matter to children.[more]

“The IWG offering is genuinely immoderate and unprecedented,” Dan Jaffe, EVP of polity relations for the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), said terminal week. Ratcheting up the group’s past rhetoric, he said, “It calls for a large re-engineering of the full matter industry, supported on nutrition standards that go farther beyond whatever ever authorised by a polity agency.

“The offering calls for comprehensive restrictions on the marketing of a panoramic clothing of flourishing products, not exclusive to children but to adults as well. As such, it violates the First Amendment rights of both marketers and consumers. Worst of all, there is dead no communicating or grounds that these large changes, which would outlay zillions of dollars if carried out, would hit whatever candid effect on reaction immatureness blubber rates.”

In the meantime, the business is actuation discover whatever beatific cops as well. Burger King, Denny’s and Au Bon Pain are among the large edifice brands championship a newborn healthy-kids schedule start titled Kids LiveWell.

An initiative of the US industry’s lobbying arm, the National Restaurant Association, it requires meals carrying the LiveWell trademark to include digit servings of fruits or vegetables, full grains, angle accelerator and low-fat farm – and 600 or less calories. Five another quick-serve brands – notably, not McDonald’s or Subway – and 13 another speech partners launched LiveWell.

And on Thursday, a assemble of food-industry partners – a listing with a Brobdingnagian intersection in body with the ANA, this digit including McDonald’s – said it would reorganise a ordered of intentional standards for marketing to kids according to generalized standards for apiece identify of food, first in 2014.