Victor kinda suggests that I review Super Size Me. I wasn't going to because I thought he was going to, but it turns out he was so thrilled about finding a parking spot right in front of the theater that he doesn't even care about the movie.
Anyway. Yeah, we saw Super Size Me last night. I loved it, but of course, for me it was preaching to the choir. I'm already of the opinion that fast food is not healthy for children and other living things, but I thought Morgan Spurlock's 30-day McDonald's-only experiment was a fairly clever way to hammer the point home. (I mean, halfway through the month his doctor is telling him his liver is turning into pate! And his girlfriend mentions that his, well, performance is suffering. It is wonderfully telling.)
For the record: I still eat fast food. It's cheap, it's convenient, it's tasty...although as I eat more real food, good food, I'm realizing that there's tasty and then there's actual taste.
One of the criticisms I heard about the movie is that "no one would eat fast food every day." Well...when I was in high school, we had a Wendy's across the street, and I ate lunch there pretty much daily. In college, I usually had my breakfast from a fast-food outlet in the student union after my commute to campus. Lunch I usually had from a convenience store on the way to work. A lot of my classes were at night, so it wasn't unusual for dinner to be from the student union or vending machines. For four years, my diet wasn't too far off Spurlock's experimental one. I'm sure more people eat like this than would care to admit it.
Not long after Super Size Me won at Sundance, McDonald's announced that it was taking the super size items off the menu. I will give credit to the restaurant industry...fast food and fast casual...they respond. McDonald's has salads now. Ruby Tuesday's puts nutritional information on the menu. Movies like Super Size Me, books like Fast Food Nation, and lobbies like the Center for Science in the Public Interest, despite being sneered at as "food cops" and enemies of freedom, are getting through to some consumers. Those consumers put their money where their health is, and next thing you know, you can get apples and milk in a Happy Meal.
I don't have kids. I think God every day that I don't have kids. But my sister has three, and I see them often, and I get a glimpse of what it's like...it's easy for single yuppie liberal me to go to the organic market and the farm and the bakery to get my unprocessed healthy food. My sister is shopping with three kids under 6. They are doing it all at the mega corporate grocery store, and on each endcap of each aisle the kids are pointing to the junk food they saw advertised on tv. And it's easy for single yuppie liberal me to say "Don't let the kids watch television so they won't see the commercials," but most parents live in the real world. (Today's Baby Blues comic strip is a perfect illustration of this, but the link isn't working right now.)
And when I am in the grocery store, and it's 6:30 p.m. and I am stuck in a slow line behind a parent with an overtired and hungry child whining for Shrek Pop Tarts, single yuppie liberal me wants the @#$%^&* parent to buy the @#$%^&* kid the @#$%^&* crap to shut the kid the @#$% up. I can't condem the parents who give in to the pressure.
I actually have a lot more to say about points from the movie and from some of my own nutritional research of late, but I still have bills to pay before I go to bed and another long week ahead. So I'll wrap up quickly with this...
Victor and I were planning on catching the movie then going to dinner last night. We hadn't decided on a restaurant, but after leaving the theater Victor drove straight to the local, independent, vegetarian place.