no ribbons please…

Yoni Freedhoff over at Weighty Matters has posted a timely bit on the connection between health organizations and the Food Industry. Timely, given my recent post about the connection between Walmart and Michelle Obama. CHECK out this quotation from the posting:

The risk is straightforward. Partnerships by definition serve to benefit both parties. For the health organizations the benefits involve some combination of money, resources and exposure. For the food industry the benefits include sales, brand image improvements (which in turn translates into sales) and spin which may serve to help deflect criticism or further political needs.
The increase in sales is problematic in that more often than not, the brands that partner with health organizations are the very brands whose images or products may be considered unhealthy. Moreover, the consumption of more food, even more healthy food, won't help with our obesity problem.

Dude its time to quit clapping for Big Food and their healthy food schemes – lets just admit it – THEY ARE JUST IN IT FOR THE MONEY!

Still unconvinced read Wendell Berry’s article “The Pleasure of Eating” or read his books…

while you are waiting for those links to load think about this…

“This is certainly true also of patrons of the food industry, who have tended more and more to be mere consumers — passive, uncritical, and dependent. Indeed, this sort of consumption may be said to be one of the chief goals of industrial production. The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into our mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so. We may rest assured that they would be glad to find such a way. The ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her stomach…As capital replaces labor, it does so by substituting machines, drugs, and chemicals for human workers and for the natural health and fertility of the soil. The food is produced by any means or any shortcuts that will increase profits. And the business of the cosmeticians of advertising is to persuade the consumer that food so produced is good, tasty, healthful, and a guarantee of marital fidelity and long life.”