from SFGate earlier this week

[Guest guest]

Dear Friends,

 

I think we should thank our friends from VegNews for engaging brilliant SFGate

columnist, Mark Morford, in thinking more deeply about issues of food politics.

Morford has an engaging writing style, full of bitter insights and barbed wit.

If you like Morford's comments, you can encourage him to write

more on issues of food choices and the corporate control of our food supply.

 

Cheers,

Alka

 

**Should America Sue McDonald's?**

A valiant but doomed attempt to hold the toxic fast food giants

responsible for all the illness and obesity

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2002/07/31/notes073102.DTL & nl=fix

 

 

 

And the only thing you really wonder is why it hasn't happened sooner.

 

Why some wide-eyed balls-out superlawyer hasn't seen the enormous

potential and rallied the cancerous and the diabetic and the morbidly

obese and fired off a multibillion-dollar industry-crippling

class-action lawsuit against the lumbering fast food behemoths, a la Big

Tobacco but with more cartoon characters and obnoxious movie tie-ins and

a billion little packets of ketchup.

 

Because here is wildly corpulent Caesar Barber, 56, of the Bronx, five

foot ten and nearly 300 pounds, double heart attack and diabetic and

high blood pressure and circulatorily impaired and a walking medical

condition, the grown-up poster child of casual all-American junk-food

addiction, now suing the Big Four (McD's, KFC, Burger King, and Wendy's)

over his obesity and ill health and ruined life, finally and at last.

 

This, after nearly five decades of Caesar happily and rather ignorantly

scarfing down their fat-saturated meat-like substances and bovine growth

hormones and reconstituted liquid chicken-like compounds, pounding on

the pounds and poisoning his blood and groaning as he climbs stairs.

 

And, like far too many other Americans, never realizing there might be a

connection between the noxious faux-food that goes in the mouth, and

those strange heart palpitations and the impotence and the increasing

inability to see his toes and the early painful death.

 

And of course one part of you is screaming Hell yeah right on go Caesar,

it's about time someone spoke up and tried to hold the fast-food demons

at least moderately accountable for pumping such massive volumes of

mass-produced comestible offal into the cultural bloodstream.

 

About time someone pointed out just how aggressively they poison the

nation and sicken (and yes, kill) children and call it convenient

inexpensive all-natural all-American 100-percent pro-family dietary

goodness, never you mind all the E.coli and the toxic foodborne microbes

and the parasites and the millions of rancid dead animals made into

animal feed and all those the unreported tainted-meat recalls.

 

And yet, the other part of you is probably rather embarrassed, I mean

really, years and years of eating such garbage and when, really, does

common sense kick in? And how dumb to you have to be? And whatever

happened to personal responsibility? And what, these people are living

in a cave without TV or newspapers? And has it really come to this?

 

The fast food titans, to be sure, are guilty as sin, depraved as Jenna

Bush at a Sigma Pi party, the GOP-inbred cattle factories and industrial

dairy and poultry farms and even the potato/French Fry industries all

culpable and complicit and snickering at all the heart disease and

epidemic obesity and rapidly declining quality of life of its duped

customers. Hey, that's why they market so aggressively to children.

 

As meanwhile they cripple the USDA and kill every new attempt to

regulate their business practices and oversee their nauseating farming

and slaughterhouse conditions, working incredibly hard to positively

spin all that negative PR that says their food is dangerous and can be

seriously debilitating.

 

In other words, the elitist route is to argue that the Caesar Barbers of

the world are just litigious idiots because no one's exactly holding a

gun to his head to make him eat all those Whoppers, and he should know

better because everyone knows fast food is pure fatty crap, when in fact

the chains spend billions to dupe the working-class masses into

believing it isn't.

 

They hire grinning superstar athletes to hawk their bacon double

cheeseburgers and they sponsor sports teams and air commercial after

commercial featuring healthy smiling skinny perky non-diseased loving

families and syrupy sentimental grandparents buying the Little Ones a

Super-Size fries, because this is what all the good grandparents do. Oh

yes, they are evil.

 

They are evil and you know it and they know it and now even Caesar

Barber knows it. Caesar doesn't know many thing about the food he eats

and apparently doesn't take care of himself in the slightest, and he

says it wasn't until a doctor told him that fast food was bad that he

had any clue. Caesar is apparently not too bright in general about diet.

 

And yet, this is exactly the way the fast food giants want it. This is

how they have trained the public. They want nothing more than to keep

the increasingly flabby and ill throngs as far away from the true

sources of their quasi-food as possible, burying the true ingredient

lists and the staggering fat content and the animal feces and

pesticides.

 

The E.coli and BGH and filler and binding agents and artificial scents

and trace metals and pathogens and bone fragments and cockroach parts

and more feces and refined sugar and salt salt salt and yes, let's say

it again because it's that prevalent and odious, animal feces in the

meat. Lots of it.

 

Does Barber's lawsuit have a chance? Are the junk-food leviathans

nervous in the slightest? Very doubtful. The fast food industry --

really about a dozen enormous industries working as one umbrella

meta-industry -- is far too massive and powerful and far-reaching and

ingrained in the global culture.

 

It is a truly frightening multi-faceted multibillion-dollar Scylla of a

problem that won't be dented until some sort of semi-apocalyptic viral

Taco Bell outbreak wipes out half of Texas. If then.

 

But you'd like to think this lawsuit is a start. Maybe the first tiny

salvo, one organic free-range grass-fed seed that might grow into a full

flower of major litigation and heightened awareness and targeted

legislation. Oh yes. That's going to happen. With a pro-corporate

cattle-rancher CEO as president? You betcha. Any day now.