DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Read it.

On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it.

Aha! Obesity isn’t related at all to, you know, actual personal choices that people make! It’s an EPIDEMIC! You catch fatness, like a DISEASE! It’s obviously a Public Health Problem that is (as with all other Public Health Problems, like trans-fats and how much salt to use or soda to put in a container) The Job Of The Government!

“We were very concerned, and rightfully so, that obesity was becoming a major issue,” Behnke recalled. “People were starting to talk about sugar taxes, and there was a lot of pressure on food companies.”

In other words, they anticipated (rightly so, based on recent history) that they were about to get butt-fucked by politicians ginning up a crisis in order to demagogue their way to retaining their taxpayer-funded jobs, and so (like prey everywhere) were trying to figure out how to escape — the swine.

A chemist by training with a doctoral degree in food science, Behnke became Pillsbury’s chief technical officer in 1979 and was instrumental in creating a long line of hit products, including microwaveable popcorn. He deeply admired Pillsbury but in recent years had grown troubled by pictures of obese children suffering from diabetes and the earliest signs of hypertension and heart disease.

Pillsbury, of course, was obviously holding the little brats down and stuffing popcorn down their maws — the swine.

Food manufacturers were now being blamed for the problem from all sides — academia, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. The secretary of agriculture, over whom the industry had long held sway, had recently called obesity a “national epidemic.”

Oh noes! Food companies actually try to make food that people will like! And BUY! The horror! The horror!

Message: You’re too stoopid to know what’s good for you — that’s why God gave you food columnists in the New York Times.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2013 at 07:34 and is filed under Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.