I really enjoyed this Spiked Online review of the anti-McDonalds documentary Super Size Me. Here’s a sample:
Super Size Me chimes with the times. On both sides of the Atlantic there’s a large portion of moralising in the panics over obesity, school dinners, junk-food-guzzling and the rest. What is presented as straightforward medical concern for our health and wellbeing is often really a judgement on lifestyle and behaviour – and especially the lifestyle and behaviour of a certain class of people. In debates about ‘bad’ foods (McDonald’s), fast foods (microwave meals), and fat mums in clingy leggings who make their kids fat too by feeding them ‘junk’, there’s a barely concealed contempt for the working classes, who are presumed to be lazy, feckless and not sufficiently concerned with healthy cooking and fitness.
Via Arts & Letters Daily.
Great article!
I grew up in a very fat-phobic family with the vague sense that I was somehow morally inferior to my thinner peers and family members. It’s really disturbing to me to see how this dysfunctional attitude has spread to the culture at large.
I’ve said many times that food and weight have become the new moral barometers in our society. It’s good to see articles and books challenging this equation of thin=morally superior.
What bugged my about that film was how it missed it’s own point: the problem isn’t obesity per se, obesity is (for many) a frequent but not necessarily present side effect of poor nutrition, overeating, and most importantly a lack of exercise. Indeed, at the end of the film, Spurlock was medically a bit of a mess, but he wasn’t obese. Indeed, his final BMI is similar to mine, but I’m in very good health, because I exercise regularly and eat pretty well (and never go near McDonalds). An overweight person with a healthy lifestyle is far better off than a skinny person who eats poorly and doesn’t exercise. Spurlock’s film makes this point rather dramatically, but Spurlock himself misses it. The ideological power of our fat-phobic society at work.
Still, I’m hesitant to reduce all this concern to classism, even when that’s an ugly element. All people concerned with justice should be concerned about the diets of children, especially with regards to the gawd-awful school lunches they’re being fed in much of the country (by far the be, and most depressing part of the film). Indeed, if the food consumed by the poor is bad for them, that’s an appropriate concern for those who are offended by the injustice of class stratification. Because expressing that concern requires we navigate a fine line between paternalism and legitimate concern doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.
In a similar vein was this review from Heather Williams:
McMissing The Point
Sorry. One more time:
McMissing The Point
Also, Commercial Alert has a gold mine of articles about fast food and other lovely things marketed to kids.
Parents Bill of Rights, and related resources.
I thought the article looked for class objections where there are none.
While there is moralizing on weight and eating trash-foods, the target is not the working class, but people who eat the food, who often happen to be working class. Just because many of the people that eat industrial food are poor, does not mean critisizing the consumption of industrial food is aimed at the poor.
I think many visiting this blog would critisize those who drive hummers without thinking they were simply disgusted with people with high incomes.
Sure, advertizements deserve blame, but don’t think just because a person is poor means they are forced to eat and feed their children cola and french fries.
How many people out there really work at multiple minimum wage jobs? I suspect it is not anywhere near the number that feed their children fast food daily. There are plenty of well off obese people with obese children.
We should all try to protect children from parents and schools who feed them liquid candy in the form of soda and french fries on a daily basis.
I think this article is really about trying to shut up and shame “elite liberals” upset about the disgusting industrial food which is everpresent.
Good point, Alsis. One of the more chilling topics in “Fast Food Nation” was the shameless focus of the fast food industry on programming children. Ronald McDonald is marketed to them as a fucking god. McRetch.
This discourse reminds me of George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1938).
He documents, in agonizing detail, the overcrowding and lack of running water and sanitation among the working classes in the Wigan coal mining region (north England, I think). He then discusses the formation of class prejudices: the English middle and upper classes at this time regarded working class and poor people as “dirty.”
Why were they dirty? They did hard physical labor (of the sort now usually outsourced to Third World countries) and they didn’t have running water or private bathrooms in their homes. Duh.
Nonetheless, this “truth effect” of physical and moral squalor was used to justify snobbery and anti-labor policies.
Orwell discusses the element of disgust: that “the lower classes smell” was impressed on him in childhood. The attitude to dirt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is rather like ours to unhealthy food and being fat; you are supposed to regard it with horror, and if you indulge in it, when you could be clean (as is assumed), you are “degenerate.”
It’s alarming the way these past discourses seem to repeat themselves again, only with a different focus of panic.
Related news from across the pond to be found here:
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1314770,00.html
Cites the film as a contributory factor.
Thanks, bilbo. :o Only I didn’t write the Counterpunch article or any of the stuff at Commercial Alert. :o More’s the pity. Hoever, I do believe CM is headquartered in Portland. I’ll take whatever reflected glory I can get from that. [preens]
Sara: Orwell noted that when they were talking about council houses (public housing) for miners, the upper-middle class people said that miners wouldn’t even use the bathtubs for bathing – “they’d just store coal in them.”
Not only were poor people dirty, the well-off thought the poor liked being dirty.
The analogy nowadays would be the snobby thin upper-middle class person explaining that if you put a bento place and McDonald’s next to each other in a working-class area, the bento place would go out of business because the fat white trash want to eat McDonalds and want to be fat.
Of course, smoking and obesity happen to be both gauche and unhealthy, and the media tends to conflate them. The fact that they’re unhealthy gives the media the self-righteousness of the Prohibitionist preachers of the turn of the last century.
I want to be self-righteous, but instead I’m trying to get everyone in my office to buy the chicken garden salad at the B*r*g*r K*ng across the street. It’s actually not bad. And when you work in a culinary wasteland w/only 30 mins for lunch like I do, “salad + not bad” is nothing to sneer out, no matter how evil and corporate the source. So I want the damn things to sell so they won’t discontinue them.
Spurlock and others, however, are right when pointing out how the bastards operate. The B*rg*r K*ng over here, f’rinstance, does indeed post nutrition information… on a board at the END of the food line. So if you suddenly feel remorse at ordering that Whopper with bacon, cheese, and mayo becuase you realize that it has 70,000 gs of fat, it’s just too bad. You paid for it. You’ll eat it. Sucker.
That garden salad I was guardedly singing the praises of was clocked at about 230-250 cals., if IIRC. But the bag they hand you at the end of the line contains a salad, a little thermo-bag of grilled chicken, a bag of croutons, and a bag of dressing. Nowhere on the nutrition chart does it tell you whether or not the salad’s calorie count is for the salad with ALL the acoutrements tossed in, none of them tossed in, or some gradation in between. Frustrating, and doubtless meant to be. Grrr…
I try to avoid fast food salads: it seems like the kind of thing where if you asked for nutrion info on them, a man in black robes, wearing some frightening looking mask would step out of a smoke filled back room. “that’s not for you to know. for the truth, would mold images of horror into your mind the scale of which is not comprehended outside of an HP Lovecraft novel.”
Actually, karpad, it’s really not that bad for a salad. Trust me, if you worked where I did, you’d know that it was nowhere near as Lovecraftian as some of your other options. :D
it reminds me of an onion article, really.
I’m to lazy to link, but the jist was “salad made unhealthy in 3 short steps”
they took a salad, added fried chicken strips, cheese, and ranch dressing.
was funny, yes…