No arugula?
by digby
Apparently Hillary Clinton behaved in a deeply offensive way when she ordered her lunch yesterday. I’m not sure what she did wrong but no less a personage than the exalted David Gergen was appalled by well … something. The surveillance pictures of her in sunglasses placing an order make it look as though she was holding the place up:
This is why people hate politics. Or, hell, maybe it’s what they love about them, I don’t know.
Anyway, here’s a nice tongue in cheek article in the New York Times about Clinton’s Chipotle order and what it says about her.
Let others deconstruct her apparent anonymity or how her visit compared with President Obama’s. Here’s what The Upshot can contribute: Is Mrs. Clinton’s order like the normal Chipotle meals of everyday Americans, or is it polarizing?
(Elsewhere in Monday’s news: Russia may start selling a missile defense system to Iran; Marco Rubio is running for president; the United States may not have followed its own rules regarding drone strikes intended to minimize casualties. So ask yourself: Are you sure you need to be reading this?)
Our knowledge about what is normal and what is not comes from about 3,000 online orders from GrubHub, which some colleagues and I used to find out what people actually order at Chipotle. (All the data is online, by the way, so you also could have done this crucial analysis.)
At the time of this writing, much about Mrs. Clinton’s order was still unknown. We do know that it was a chicken bowl (with guacamole, according to ABC News). Less known, but critical: Did she get rice and beans, which are free with the order? What about fajita vegetables, or more than one kind of salsa? Even more important, from a calorie perspective: Did she include cheese and sour cream? This information, much like the contents of some of her emails when she was secretary of state, we may never know.
[…]
So here’s our potentially presidential order: chicken bowl, white rice, black beans, fresh garden salsa, shredded cheese, lettuce and guacamole.Answer: Mrs. Clinton’s order was healthier than the average American’s order, with significantly fewer calories, saturated fat and sodium than most orders do. Specifically, almost 75 percent of meals ordered at Chipotle had more calories than Mrs. Clinton’s; about 75 percent had more sodium; and about 70 percent had more saturated fat.
As it happens, Mr. Obama also seems to prefer Chipotle orders with many fewer calories than is typical. When he visited one in June 2014, he ordered a burrito bowl with white rice and guacamole, sparing himself the 300 calories that come automatically with every Chipotle tortilla.
If Mrs. Clinton (or Mr. Obama) had ordered sour cream, it would add about 115 calories, 7 grams of saturated fat and 30 milligrams of sodium, making the meal more “normal” but still with fewer calories than 65 percent of meals.
Put another way, the order is kind of normal — but really, who are we kidding? It’s way better than average.
You may resume your lives.
I know. But the fact is that the media watch what some politicians eat like a hawk searching for signs of “elitism.” It’s usually Democrats of course, since the “elite” charge has tended to stick to them in recent years, but they did it with Poppy Bush and Romney too. In their minds, eating a healthy meal and trying to keep from gaining 50 pounds on the campaign trail is a clear signal that you don’t relate to Real Americans. I
I don’t think this article was trying to do that. It was clearly a bit of a lark. But still, it will be taken that way. And the worst thing about it is that if a woman pol tries to eat healthy she’ll be dinged by the right both for being some kind of food snob as they also ruthlessly go after her for being fat. Even if she isn’t.
This is going to be a long campaign … oy.
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