The New Paragon of Smooth?

Defrosting McDonald’s “Real Fruit Smoothies”

Photo: McDonald’s

Shortly after my prodigious return to the U.S.A. a few weeks ago, I began noticing a curious phenomenon.  Rather than advertising BigMacs and McFlurries, the McDonald’s in my city were seemingly wallpapered with announcements of the new McDonald’s Smoothie, made with real fruit!

Now, as I’ve mentioned before, I am making an effort to be practical, not ideological, about food choices.  So while I am obviously no fan of McDonald’s (generally frightening) offerings, nor their marketing practices, I felt it was worth looking into.  If they’ve got a product out there that is actually 100% fruit with no corn syrup or other mysterious chemicals, I could get down with that.  In fact, I’d be thrilled.  Let’s start getting fruit out into the community in the most mass-market way possible, and further changes will follow.  Right?

Ellen Gustafson, You are Ambitious

Can we fix our flawed food system in 30 years?

One of the developments I missed out on during my travels was the launch of the 30 Project, an initiative by Ellen Gustafson of the Feed Foundation which was announced at this spring’s TedxEast Conference (her Ted Talk video is above).

The premise of the 30 Project is the following:  there are a billion hungry people on this planet, and a billion who are overweight.  These two problems are about food and are attributable to the same source, which is our global food system.  So in order to address both hunger and obesity/overweight, we need to change the food system.  And since the changes in the food system that have happened in the last 30 years are largely at the root of the problems we see today, the objective is to achieve changes in the next 30 years that will scale back, or undo the negative consequences of our industrialized food system.

The reason I say this is extremely ambitious is because it requires diving headfirst into the equivalent of a political and economic death match.  In order to make a real impact, even over the course of 30 years, the changes Gustafson needs to make are radical.  And the opposition has great quantities of money and power invested in ensuring that the impact of reforms are minimal.

In order to achieve true changes to our food system, Gustafson and all those who are fighting the same mission must mobilize enough social and political capital in order to overcome these interests.  Whatever she does, it will have to be Big.

The 30 Project

The Feed Foundation

Ellen Gustafson Bio

Earlier: Cheap Food is Expensive

This is a Twinkie

Photo:  Hostess Twinkie: 37 Or So Ingredients by Dwight Eschliman

An astute reader has pointed out that though I make many mentions of processed food in this blog — with reference to how it should be avoided — I have yet to define what exactly I think falls into that category.  I plan on doing that very soon, but for the time being I’d just like to point you to this genius visual depiction of the ingredients in a Twinkie by photographer Dwight Eschliman.

The Twinkie (for those who don’t know) is the “Golden Sponge Cake with Creamy Filling” — in Hostess-brand marketing lingo — which has become the icon for highly processed food.  I like to use Pollan’s term, “edible food-like substances” because it highlights the fact that something like a Twinkie can hardly really be called FOOD.

Here are the ingredients of a Twinkie.  How many of these can you recognize or picture in your mind?  Not very many?  That is a processed food.

Cheap Food is Expensive

It’s not our fruits and vegetables that get the major subsidies

I strongly suggest checking out Tom Laskawy’s post today over at Mark Bittman’s blog, where he points out the way simplistic economic portrayals of our food costs conceal the high price we pay for cheap food.

He especially takes issue (and I agree with him) with the following quote from an NPR interview with Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack:

“I would say consumers do benefit from the way in which we structured our farm programs, at least as of today, because of the fact that our food is less expensive than it is any place else in the world. Folks in America have a great deal more discretion of what to do with their paycheck.”

While it’s true that food is “less expensive” in the U.S. — Americans spend less of their income on food than any other country — it conceals the truth of why and what kind of food is so much less expensive.  Namely, it’s the highly processed (mostly corn- and soy-based) packaged foods, which are also the least healthy.  And why are they cheap?  Because our government pours huge subsidies into these crops, encouraging industrial farms to overproduce, which artificially depresses the price.

Jim Gaffigan: Hot Pockets

This hilarious comedy skit does a great job of illustrating the horrors of processed food and the marketing schemes that convince us to consume it:

Jim Gaffigan.com