Belated randomness! Now with extra funny! 28 October 2009 5:32 pm
Posted by Tracy in : books,culture,fast food,food snobbery,fun,funny,health,health at every size,media,nutrition,random,video , trackbackI don’t know about the rest of you, but I find regular laughter to be an essential component of a balanced media consumption lifestyle, right along with serious hard-thinking stuff like class readings. (For sociology next week I had to choose between Barry Popkin’s The World is Fat and Hank Cardello and ghostwriter Doug Carr’s Stuffed: An Insider’s Look at Who’s (Really) Making America Fat. Yeah, that’s rough. But the Popkin book is shorter and not based on the premise that only the food industry can save us from ourselves, so it wins, even if it may yet force a ranty post or two out of me.) I digress. Here’s a few instances of food politics in pop culture that helped me keep things in perspective:
On parental responsibility and advertising to children, here’s Stephen Colbert on the Florida school that allowed McDonald’s to print advertising on report cards (14 February 2008):
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| People Who Are Destroying America – Happy Meal | ||||
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Cat and Girl hit two home runs in a month by following “Value Menu” (which I’ve already raved about) with a bit of buzzword poetry about soda, junk food addiction, and health care or the lack of access thereto. So awesome.
We’ve been discussing the use of litigation to force (corporate) policy change, which made me want to link to an oldie but goodie: Shannon Wheeler’s Too Much Coffee Man comic about the McDonald’s coffee case, and how it was depicted in the (mainstream, corporate-owned) media as perhaps the most frivolous lawsuit of all time. Sadly, it’s no longer online.
Finally, I highly recommend Colbert’s interview with Dickinson college professor Amy Farrell, author of the forthcoming Fat Shame — even if you don’t watch the whole segment, his lead-in rant about weightism (TM) is seriously priceless:
14 October 2009
That’s about 8 minutes with ads, or you can pick and choose from the whole ad-free episode — start around 3:45 if you’re impatient.
I think I desperately need Professor Farrell’s book to counteract all the “we’re all going to drown in our own fat!” doom-song-singing I’ve been assigned to read this week and the next.
Gastrointestinal daredevilish-ly yours,
-Tracy
