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 | | | | | Food Fight | | | Our columnist weighs in on the fat-in-fast-food matter and the ongoing debate over government action vs. personal responsibility | |
| | | Dec. 9 — How dumb are you, anyway? And, more important, whose fault is it? In the past couple of months, it has become clear that these two questions are increasingly central to understanding the American experience. | |
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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.
Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His Web site is at http://www.gersh.tv
© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.
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