Food

As mentioned previously, I’ve become quite interested in the topic of food, something I know very little about, but am trying to learn (and I hope readers here will chime in to help). To a layperson who is taking food – and cooking for my family – seriously for the first time, it’s a surprisingly complex topic (cue foodie commenters to respond with some variation of, “No kidding, you fool!” ). Something as seemingly mundane as popcorn has not only nutritional but even cultural/political subtleties that I barely imagined. So this is both helpful, and encouraging:

In her first weeks in the White House, Mrs. Obama has emerged as a champion of healthy food and healthy living. She has praised community vegetable gardens, opened up her own kitchen to show off the White House chefs’ prowess with vegetables and told stories about feeding less fattening foods to her daughters.

White House officials say the focus on healthy living will be a significant item on Mrs. Obama’s agenda, which already includes supporting working families and military spouses. As the nation battles an obesity epidemic and a hard-to-break taste for oversweetened and oversalted dishes, her message is clear: Fresh, nutritious foods are not delicacies to be savored by the wealthy, but critical components of the diets of ordinary and struggling families.

That sounds exactly right. Unfortunately, as Britain learned, it’s not easy to get people to change their diets, even if what they’re eating is just one step above garbage:

Five months after the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver succeeded in cajoling, threatening and shaming the British government into banning junk food from its school cafeterias, many schools are learning that you can lead a child to a healthy lunch, but you can’t make him eat.

The fancy new menu at the Rawmarsh School here?

“It’s rubbish,” said Andreas Petrou, an 11th grader. Instead, en route to school recently, he was enjoying a north of England specialty known as a chip butty: a French-fries-and-butter sandwich doused in vinegar…

“Parents are giving their children packed lunches, which are invariably inferior from a nutritional point of view to the school meals from which they were recoiling,” [Professor Kevin Morgan] said…

Andreas Petrou insists that no amount of explaining will convince him that a French fry sandwich is not a decent meal. If confronted with the school food, he said, he will do what all his friends do: gather as much bread as he can, “put half an inch of butter on each slice,” and call it lunch.

Mmmm…

It’s probably not feasible – yet – to ban trash from public school lunches here in the US, let alone provide American kids a genuinely healthful lunch. After all, there’s a lot of money available to create one more phony culture war, this time over corporations’ right to inflict epidemic levels of diabetes and heart disease on the American people. But Michelle and Barack Obama’s example can only help encourage a change for the better.

PS As an aside, the article about Michelle Obama notes:

It is a notable shift in direction. The former first lady, Laura Bush, insisted that fresh, organic foods be served in the White House, but did not broadcast that fact to the public, according to Walter Scheib, who served as executive chef under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

“She just didn’t talk much about it outside the house,” Mr. Scheib said of Mrs. Bush. “Mrs. Obama is taking a higher profile.”

Clearly, eating organic [translated: Dirty Fucking Hippy] foods conflicted with Bush’s well-earned image as First Lout. And nothing Laura Bush did publicly could be permitted to interfere with that. Meanwhile, obesity levels rose to alarming levels during the past 8 years.

Man, how I hated Bush being president.