Crushing Mr. Creosote

National Review Online, April 29, 2004

Soso Whaley

Soso Whaley is a feisty not quite fiftysomething animal trainer based in New Hampshire, a champion roller skater (a silver medal for her tango!), the hostess of Camo-Country TV's Critter Corner and an adjunct fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank. (Oh, did I mention that she's a filmmaker with plans to make a documentary about camel-racing in Nevada?) When we ate together the day before Tax Day, in a drably functional midtown Manhattan McDonald's Express filled with surprisingly skinny teens, this is what she chose: six Chicken McNuggets, sweet 'n sour sauce, and two baked apple pies (one for later).

This April that's not unusual fare for Soso. She's eating at McDonald's a lot this month. In fact, she's only eating McDonald's this month. By the 14th, she had dined (I've seen the pile of receipts, neatly collected, dated, and filed) on Crispy Chicken; Chicken McNuggets (six-pack and ten); Chicken McGrill; McChicken; for a touch of the exotic, Hot 'n Spicy McChicken; and, in a welcome break for the nation's poultry, hamburger, double cheeseburger, Quarter Pounder with Cheese, Big Mac, Big N' Tasty with Cheese (no, I have no idea what that is), and Filet-O-Fish; Egg McMuffin, a bewildering selection of McGriddles (bacon, egg and cheese; sausage, egg, and cheese; and the ascetic sausage alone), hash browns, hotcakes, the wildly multicultural sausage breakfast burrito, Fruit 'n Yogurt Parfait ("I love that," sighs Soso), hot fudge sundae, a flurry of McFlurries (Butterfinger, M&M, Oreo—the Nestle Crunch is yet to come) and much, much more.

And, she says, she's feeling "great" (her diary can be viewed on the Competitive Enterprise Institute's website), and she's lost weight (around five pounds by the time we met). Poor, sad Morgan Spurlock didn't do quite so well. Around 20 years younger than Soso, this tall, seemingly robust New Yorker also spent a month eating only at McDonald's and made Super Size Me, a film about the experience. The movie looks as if it will do well, but Spurlock did badly, very badly.

Neither Soso nor I know exactly what Spurlock ate (Super Size Me comes out on May 7), but, as he has described them in numerous interviews, the results were nastier than a four-day-old Bacon Ranch Salad: headaches, vomiting, depression, a super-sized gut and—sad, sad news for his girlfriend (a vegan chef, conspiracy theorists please note)—a shrunken libido. The numbers tell their own terrible story. Spurlock gained 25 pounds and his cholesterol soared (from a modest 165 to a more challenging 230). His body "basically fell apart over the course of thirty days." His face—oh the horror, the horror—turned "splotchy," his knees "started to hurt from the extra weight coming on so quickly," and as for his liver, well, don't ask. O.K., you can ask. Spurlock's liver had, in the less than reassuring words of his doctor, "turned into paté."

Soso, by contrast, is made of sterner, more stoic stuff, a daughter of Eisenhower's Kansas, a creation of a sterner, more stoic time, a woman, I can report, whose face is splotch-free. Our lunch together was marred neither by vomiting, nor depression, nor headaches, and the "gas" that had been a rather distressing feature ("all that extra fiber") of the early days of her McDonald's diet had, mercifully, disappeared. Questions about her sex drive were met with a wry chuckle. This robust Heartland heroine, "a meat and potatoes gal," has even survived a few rounds with Hell's tubers, McDonald's revolting French fries, themselves. "Oh, they're OK," said Soso, smiling over her pile of McNuggets, but she didn't, I noticed, order any fries.

So what was Spurlock's problem? Could it have been something he ate? On his movie's website, Spurlock sets out the ground rules. He was to subsist only on McDonald's products, he had to eat every item on the menu at least once, but he was not allowed to choose Super-sized portions unless they were offered, in which case he had to accept them. More challenging still, his plate or, as we are talking McDonald's, his tray, had to be scraped clean. Completely clean.

And when it comes to his movie, many critics have, appropriately enough, lapped it up. Ebert & Roeper gave Super Size Me "two thumbs up", while Variety found it an "entertaining, gross-out cautionary tale" that "leaves little doubt that eating this stuff on a regular (or even occasional) basis is bad, bad, bad for ya." To the New York Times it was one of a clutch of "entertaining, moving and historically significant" movies at this year's Sundance Film Festival, a festival where Spurlock won the award for best director for what The Hollywood Reporter has dubbed his "brilliantly subversive" work.

Subversive? Hardly. Fashionable? Certainly. Blaming "Big Food" for America's big people is merely the Left's latest big lie. For real rebellion, try Soso. She's an autodidact, an individualist, a contrarian, an ornery soul, someone who likes to find stuff out for herself. "I understood I was being misinformed by the media and that made me mad." It began with animal rights. Soso's work with our furry friends led her to question the frequently uncritical acceptance of the stories being peddled by the likes of PETA, and from there it was a short jump to doubting the gimcrack orthodoxies of "global warming" and after that, provoked by the hype surrounding Super Size Me, a date with destiny under the golden arches.

Spurlock shot a movie about his time at McDonald's, and now Soso is shooting a movie about hers. "Spurlock made his film to make his point and I'm making my film to make mine." The Competitive Enterprise Institute is helping with the publicity, but other than that, Soso has kept her independence. McDonald's has no involvement in her project (and, I was told, is not a CEI donor). When Soso buys a bacon, egg & cheese McGriddle she does so on her own dime.

Soso's ground rules were similar to Spurlock's, but without the compulsory super-sizing, the obligation to finish everything up or, most importantly, the intention of eating, as Soso has put it, "like a troglodyte." She's got a point. Condemning McDonald's on the basis of the kamikaze consumption of Super Size Me makes about as much sense as using Monty Python's Mr. Creosote as an example of typical restaurant dining. Spurlock's bizarre breakfasts, lunatic lunches, and demented dinners added up to some 5,000 calories a day, freak-show feasting that proves nothing about McDonald's. It wasn't what the greedy slob ate, but how much.

Soso feeds where Spurlock fed, but her more modest meals are amounting to a little less than 2,000 calories a day, a still far-from-frugal discipline that leaves room for cheeseburgers, choice, and Fruit 'n Yogurt Parfait. In some ways, it can be argued that her new diet has been an improvement over the old, not much of a feat given its emphasis (the Portsmouth, N.H., Herald reported, a touch disapprovingly) on "lots of meat and too many on-the-go meals like candy bars and doughnuts," something that may have contributed to the rather disappointing cholesterol count with which Soso began the month.

Above all, Soso's long march through Mickey D's menu is an effective demonstration that maligning McDonald's as one uniquely lethal food group is ridiculous in an age when its restaurants offer far more variety than in the past. There's green in those golden arches. Vegetables have been spotted! And by vegetables I don't mean either the wrecks of a Russet that the burger chain calls "fries" or, for that matter, the people prepared to eat them. McDonald's sells salads, lots of them. Two weeks into her big adventure, Soso had already chowed down on side salad, and, scourge of the henhouse that she is, Bacon Ranch Salad with Grilled Chicken, Caesar Salad with Crispy Chicken, and the California Cobb Salad.

But there's no need to feel guilty about sucking down a few burgers as well. They too can be part of a balanced diet, "it's food," adds Soso. "Food is food. Don't eat too much." People, she argues, need to think about what they eat, and then take responsibility for the consequences. Some exercise would also help. "It's just too easy to blame McDonald's."

Not any more.

++++++

Soso went on to make a splendid film,  "Mickey D and Me", about her experience. I appear briefly in the course of this segment. 

Ronald’s Bad Choice

National Review Online, February 5, 2004

Chicago, September 1989 © Andrew Stuttaford

Whoever thought up the weird blend of menu, sermon, and keep-fit manual that McDonald's has now dubbed "Real Life Choices," he has at least proved one thing. Creepy Ronald is not the only clown working under those famous golden arches. Thanks to this initiative, diners waddling into any branch of the burger chain located in the New York tri-state area can participate in a program designed "to help [them] stay on track with [their] diet regimen and incorporate McDonald's food without feeling guilty." However, before going any further in describing this latest insult to the nation's intelligence, I have one small request. Please get up from your chair and remain standing while incorporating the rest of this article. Thank you. I'll explain later. When a junk-food joint offers a "program" as well as a menu, it should stir suspicion even among its most gullible customers. (You remember them. They were the trusting fools that actually ate a McLean Deluxe.) And when that program is given a name so drenched in corporate saccharine as "Real Life Choices" only two things are certain: It will be a complete fantasy and there will be no additional "choice." An exaggeration? Well, let's look at that "choice." Speaking to MSNBC, a marketing director for McDonalds brightly conceded that, no, the program was not exactly a new menu option, but rather "a new way of ordering." Ah, I see.

This is how it works. Fearful of fat? Cautious about calories? Chary of carbohydrates? Well, the program will allow you to request standard menu items modified to take account of your specific dietary concerns. It really isn't that difficult. Feel free to tuck into six (white meat) Chicken McNuggets(r) and a side salad, but only use half a package of Newman's Own Low Fat Balsamic Vinaigrette Dressing. I feel slimmer already.

The company has said that it is trying to "[teach] consumers how to eat the McDonald's food they love." Just in case any consumers are offended by the notion that they need teaching how to eat, McDonald's has added celebrity glitz to Real Life by recruiting Pamela Smith, "a leader in the wellness movement... best-selling author" and "wellness coach" to Shaq O'Neal, to help design the program.

Full details are set out in a handy leaflet. The advice is straightforward and insulting only to those with an IQ above that of a French fry. So, for example, fatphobic Chicken McGrill Sandwich ® fanciers are told to forget the mayo, but pick Picante, BBQ, or Buffalo sauce instead. The carbohydrate-averse are also allowed a Chicken McGrill Sandwich ® — so long as they drop the lettuce and tomato. But be careful! Dieters who prefer watching fat and calories to casting an eye over carbohydrates should add lettuce and tomato to their sandwiches. And what, you may ask, about desperate diners worried about fat, calories, and carbohydrates? What are they meant to do when confronted with the troubling dilemma posed by lettuce leaf and tomato slice? You may ask, but McDonald's has no answer. Those losers, clearly, are on their own.

But there's more to Real Life Choices than slim pickings. The program also boasts "tips for healthful living." Take advantage of "hum-drum tasks...by doing them with vigor!" Vigorously stand up to take a phone call (vigorously rising to your feet to read this article would, I reckon be just as effective), vigorously park at the far end of the lot, and vigorously wash your car by hand. "Any extra movement boosts the metabolism and burns calories better." There's no word on how many calories would be burned tearing up patronizing propaganda, but, as a service to readers, I'll pass on a few more of the ways in which McDonald's suggests that the hum-drum can be made more vigorous. Make sure you comply.

"Walk to a co-worker's desk, as opposed to calling them."

So, what's behind this nonsense? If we rule out theories that the tri-state McDonald's hierarchy has either descended into a form of collective insanity or been possessed by mischievous demons, the only possible explanation is that the company is trying to formulate a response to chatter about a supposed obesity "epidemic." The lawsuit filed against McDonald's earlier last year by two chunky children may have been dismissed for a second time (the judge barred the plaintiffs from re-filing, saying, rather tactlessly under the circumstances, that they did not deserve "a third bite at the apple"), but no one seriously doubts that there will be others in its wake.

"Use a carry-basket at the supermarket, as opposed to pushing a cart."

Equally ominous is the fact that legislators and bureaucrats are showing mounting interest in this issue. For example, last October Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson took time out from his doubtless demanding schedule to "commend" McDonald's and Burger King for introducing some lower-fat items on their menus. "It was," he condescended, "a step in the right direction of providing consumers with less fat." Meanwhile, there's draft legislation both in Congress and, locally, the New York state assembly that would oblige fast-food chains to post calorie counts on their menu boards. Over on the left coast, Oakland's mayor Jerry Brown, an always-reliable bellwether of the modishly bizarre, has come out in favor of a tax based on "the unhealthy quality of foods." Even poor old Joe Lieberman has tried to get in on the act. He wants the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the way that fast food and other snacks are marketed.

"Walk to pick up the morning paper instead of having it delivered."

The notion that the increasing rate of obesity is the fault of the capitalists who sell fast food, rather than the consumers who eat it is, has proved popular among many overweight Americans willing to blame anyone other than themselves for the aesthetic tragedies that are their stretch pants. Everyone loves an alibi. The cranks, busybodies, and lovers of self-denial now peering through our restaurant windows are only too happy to oblige. As Mary Wootan, the director of nutrition policy for the deranged, but influential, Center for Science in the Public Interest explained at the American Public Health Association's annual meeting last November, "we have got to move beyond personal responsibility."

"Make several trips up and down the stairs instead of using the elevator."

Happily, judging by the estimated $40 billion a year they spend in the pursuit of one diet or another, there are still plenty of Americans who disagree. Seen in this light, McDonald's Real Life Choices are nothing more than shrewd marketing, a canny attempt to make sure that the chain doesn't lose customers frightened by the flap over flab, and perhaps even to attract a few more. Premium salads introduced by the company last April have reportedly been something of a success. And, to be fair, it is possible to eat perfectly healthily at McDonald's. Contrary to the killjoys' shrill claims, there really is no such thing as "bad" food. What matters is a balanced — and moderate — diet. There's no reason that a cheeseburger (or two) cannot be a part of it.

"Use a push-mower instead of a riding mower to mow the lawn."

Likewise there's probably nothing, other than absurdity (and remember, laughter uses up a few calories), actually wrong with all those hints for a healthier humdrum. Yes, they are irritating, but following them wouldn't hurt. It might even help — a little. However, the irony for McDonald's is that in launching a program surely designed, at least in part, to head off lawsuits it may have actually increased its legal risk.

The company's most effective response to potential plaintiffs is the (entirely reasonable) argument that its meals are safe. If some folk choose to overindulge, the consequences are their responsibility, and theirs alone: It is not up to Mickey D's to police how much people choose to pile onto their trays. To use a legal term, McDonald's does not owe a "duty of care" to its clients' waistlines, arteries, or bathroom scales. Unfortunately, measures such as the Real Life Choices program, or, to take another example, the somewhat surreal decision to hire Oprah's personal trainer as a consultant) muddy the message. They seem, if only implicitly, to acknowledge that the company's critics may have a point. Any trial lawyer worth his salt (forgive the nutritionally incorrect phrase) will portray such steps as an admission by McDonald's that it bears some legal responsibility for the obesity "epidemic."

And even the details of such programs can, in the hands of a skilful attorney, be turned into a courtroom nightmare. If McDonald's believed that the program was necessary, why did it wait until 2004 before introducing it — and then only in three states? Worse still, were some of "the tips for healthful living," to use a dread word, "misleading"? After all, they included the counterintuitive, and undeniably self-serving, suggestion that diners should "plan ahead to have "power snacks" or meals every 3-4 hours, energizing choices such as fruit and yogurt or cheese, tortilla roll with meat or cheese, or sandwich [that] can do the body good!" Now, I'm no expert on the human metabolism, but recommendations that we should all graze our way to good health may raise an eyebrow or two.

There's not much more reason to think that the company's efforts will do anything to lessen the political pressures it is going to face. Indeed, by increasing the perception that the food giant is somehow to blame for our plague of pudginess, it may well worsen them. That the company is apparently so spineless in the face of these threats should be no surprise. All too often, the boardroom answer to ideologically driven criticism (and if you think the attack on fast-food restaurants is really to do with waistlines, I have a bridge to sell you) is appeasement. McDonald's, it seems, is no exception and, as that company is about to discover, appeasement never works.

O.K., you can sit down now.

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I talked to MSNBC about this topic here. 

The Fat Police

Kelly Brownell and Katherine Battle Horgen:  Food Fight - The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do about It                

National Review, January 26, 2004

Santa Fe, New Mexico, January 1999   ©  Andrew Stuttaford

It is difficult to single out what is most objectionable about this hectoring, lecturing, and altogether dejecting piece of work, but perhaps it's the moment when its authors credit the rest of us with the IQs of greedy rodents. Quoting a study that shows that, presented with a cornucopia of carbohydrates and wicked fatty treats, laboratory rats will abandon a balanced, healthy diet in favor of dangerous excess, they draw a rather insulting conclusion: Civilization's success in creating so much abundance has come at a terrible price, a "toxic environment" so overflowing with temptation that, like those Rabelaisian rats, humanity will be unable to resist. We will eat ourselves if not to death, then to diabetes, decrepitude, and stretch pants.

The "obesity epidemic" is becoming a tiresome refrain and Yale professor Kelly Brownell is one of its most tireless advocates. Nevertheless, for those with the stomach for more on the fat threat, Food Fight is worth a look for what it reveals about the motives and objectives of the busybodies pining to police your plate.

But let's start with the "epidemic" itself. With a relish they are unlikely to show at the dinner table, the authors pepper their readers with data purporting to show that roughly two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, products of a feeding frenzy that is dangerous medically and drives up health-care costs by tens of billions of dollars. Some of the numbers may need to be taken with a pinch of low sodium salt, but the trends they represent are a matter of concern. In this at least Food Fight is right.

Over the past couple of decades. Americans have indeed put on some pounds. All too often, heavy isn't healthy. The mere fact of being too fat (calculating what is "too" fat takes more, however, than a wistful glance at the pages of Vogue) can cause problems such as arthritis and a range of other, sometimes serious, diseases. Despite this, corpulence should be seen as symptom of ill health as much as a cause: Being fat won't necessarily kill you, but the sloth and the gluttony that got you there just might.

To their credit, the authors do cite research showing that fit fatties are at lower risk that unfit string beans. Still, they tend to concentrate on obesity as a problem in its own right - and, ironically, that's something that may be counterproductive. Befuddled by standardized notions of an ideal weight, Americans spend an estimated $40 billion a year in the generally unsuccessful pursuit of one miracle diet or another. The result is yo-yoing weight - something often less healthful that having a few too many pounds - and unjustified self-congratulation for a population that likes to tell itself that it is "doing something" about its health, when, in fact, it is doing anything but.

Highlighting fatness, that soft, billowing symbol of self-indulgence, reflects an agenda that has expanded beyond legitimate health concerns to embrace asceticism for its own sake. There's a hint of this in the way the authors respond to the idea that all foods can find a place in a properly balanced diet. While conceding that such an approach has "some utility" in individual cases, they see the argument that flows from it (that no food is intrinsically "bad") as a distraction. They are wrong. An emphasis on balance is the best chance of persuading this country to eat more healthily - and, importantly, to stick with this decision. To Brownell and Horgen, more comfortable with proscription and self-denial than compromise and cheeseburgers, this is, doubtless, dismayingly lax.

Their language too is a giveaway. There is tut-tut-ting over the "glorification of candy" and anguish over restaurants "notorious" for their large portions. Under the circumstances, it's no shock that the reliably alarmist "Center for Science in the Public Interest," an organization famous for its efforts to drain away our pleasures, rates frequent and favorable mention.

Asceticism often brings with it a sense of moral superiority and the urge to spread the joys of deprivation amongst the less enlightened masses - by persuasion if possible, by compulsion if necessary, and sometimes by something that falls in between. So Brownell and Horgen lament the lack of "incentive" for recipients of food stamps to purchase "healthy foods." Common sense, apparently, is not enough. Worse, these wretches might even be tempted into "overbuying." Who knew the food-stamp program was so generous?

With tobacco a useful precedent, it's not difficult to see where all this is going. Brimming with tales of carnage, soaring health-care costs, and the threat to "the children," Food Fight follows a familiar script. That's not to say its writers don't make some telling points. The ways, for instance, in which junk food is marketed to America's no-longer-so-tiny tots are troubling, but at its core this book rests on the unpalatable belief that even adults cannot be trusted with a menu. The authors' solutions include regulation, censorship. subsidies, propaganda, public-spending boondoggles, and a faintly totalitarian-sounding "national strategic plan to increase physical activity." Oh, did I mention the "small" taxes on the sale of "unhealthy" food?

Food Fight is a preview of the techniques that will be used to persuade a chubby country to agree to all this. There are scare tactics (death! disease!), a convenient capitalist demon ) "big food"), and, best of all, an alibi. It's not our fault that we are fat. Yes, the importance of getting up off that sofa is fully acknowledged in Food Fight, but the book's soothing subtext is that we are all so helpless in the face of advertising and abundance that we can no longer be held fully responsible for what we are eating. Even the ultimate alibi (food might be addictive!) makes a tentative appearance, but whether this theory is true is, readers are informed, not "yet" clear.

The notion that eating too much is somehow involuntary is ludicrous, but it fits in with the view repeated in this book that "overconsumption has replaced malnutrition as the world's top food problem," a repugnant claim that makes sense only if feast is indeed no more of a choice that famine. Anyone who believes that will have no problem in arguing that, as people cannot reasonably be expected to fend off Colonel Sanders by themselves, government should step in. And "if the political process is ineffective" (voters can be inconveniently ornery), Brownell and Horgen would back litigation. Such cases might be tricky, but even the treat of mass lawsuits "regardless of legal merit" could, they note, help "encourage" the food industry to change its ways.

And that thuggish suggestion is more nauseating that anything Ronald McDonald could ever cook up.

Iced Vice

National Review Online, August 28, 2003

First they came for the beef and cheese nachos. Now they have come for Cold Stone Creamery's Mud Pie Mojo. In a development that was as predictable as it is absurd, the killjoy cranks over at CSPI, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, have issued a report denouncing ice-cream shops for hawking "coronaries in cones." Well, no surprise there. Writing in the July issue of Reason magazine, Jacob Sullum describes how the center (despite its name, it has nothing do with either science or the public interest) has a menu of menaces that must not be allowed anywhere near a dining room. These include fried mozzarella sticks ("just say no"), double cheeseburgers ("a coronary by-pass special"), and even fettuccine Alfredo ("a heart attack on a plate"). Hold the salt on those fries (Hypertension!), in fact, hold the fries too (Acrylamide! Cancer!), fly from buffalo wings, peel away from crispy orange beef and put down that "culinary equivalent of a loaded pistol," a baked potato with butter, sour cream, bacon bits and cheese.

Danger doesn't end with the main course. Desserts, such as the Cheesecake Factory's notorious carrot cake, have also come in for stern criticism: It was, clearly, only a matter of time before Ben & Jerry's, Haagen-Dazs, and even poor, bland, TCBY heard the knock on the door.

But does it matter? CSPI immodestly describes its researchers (even that seems too generous a word) as "food sleuths," but for now, these self-appointed calorie cops have no warrant. This does not mean that their critics can relax. The center may peddle hysteria, half-truths, and the guilty pleasures of self-denial, but they have a way with the media and in the lunatic world of the gathering "war against obesity" theirs is likely to be an influential voice. For that reason, if no other, their crusade against cones is worth a closer look.

Let's start with the hype. No campaign of this type is complete without a crisis. The Greens make Chicken-Licken look like an optimist, the gun-control crowd never cease to amaze with their tales of carnage and then, of course, there's "passive smoking." The junk-food jihadists are no less melodramatic. Sound the alarm! There's an "obesity epidemic"! Why call it an epidemic? Well, epidemics demand a tough response. If Americans can be convinced that they are in peril from a plague of pudginess, there's no saying what they won't agree to.

CSPI's ice-cream screed is a reminder that the center is a master of hyperbole, if not of science. Those "coronaries in cones" are capped by the warning that a Baskin-Robbins large Vanilla shake is "worse for your heart" than "drinking three Quarter Pounders," a disgusting image that should not be allowed to obscure the fact that no food as such is bad for your heart. What matters is the overall composition of your diet, the amount of exercise you do, and so on. This report won't tell you that. Instead CSPI's propagandists prefer to pursue their morbid rhetoric of heart disease ("you'll need… cholesterol-lowering …drugs" to cope with a Friendly's Caramel Fudge Brownie Sundae) and death (a "super" version of one of Friendly's Candy Shop Sundaes is for the "self-destructive"). Oh, please.

Hand in hand with the hype (indeed it's a corollary of it) is the assumption that Americans are not responsible for what they eat. This gives the fat police an excuse (if people can't control their eating then someone — usually government — must step in to do it for them) and the overweight an alibi — thus its appeal. At its most extreme this line of thinking manifests itself in the ludicrous claim that fast food is somehow addictive, but generally the girth Gestapo confine themselves to behaving as if the man at the lunch counter is not much more intelligent than the cow that went into his sandwich. He is, it seems, a dull, helpless dolt, unable to take a rational decision for himself, a clueless creature, powerless before the might of a well-crafted commercial.

This is the idea that underpins remarks by Jayne Hurley, a "senior nutritionist" for CSPI, that it is "as if these ice cream shops were competing with each other to see who could inflict the greatest toll on…arteries and waistlines." That's a good sound bite, but like a CSPI-approved diet, there's not a lot to it. In reality, the only people "competing" to put on the pounds are the vanilla-chasing ruminants who choose (and that's the word) to dine there. They may not know the exact number of calories involved (a key CSPI complaint), but, believe me, Jayne, the customers who opt for a Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey in a chocolate-dipped waffle cone understand that it ain't no health food.

The third, all too familiar, element in this drama is the feeble response of the food industry. In particular, management at Kraft Foods appears to have learnt nothing from the tobacco fiasco — despite sharing a parent company with Philip Morris. An essential part of any successful litigation against Kraft will be to show that the company owed a "duty" to protect its customers from their own greed. That's an argument that is laughable, but it's also lethal. The moment that the food companies concede that there's something to it, they are in deep, deep trouble. Needless to say, this is exactly what Kraft has done. The company's stock has fallen sharply, and deservedly so, since it made the announcement (about reducing portion sizes and calorie content) that will be a key building block in any case against it. Lemmings, of course, plunge in packs. PepsiCo and McDonald's are amongst the other food giants busily making the same mistake.

There are early signs that the ice-cream chains may turn out to be just as misguided. The correct response to CSPI-style criticism is to say that consumers — and consumers alone — are responsible for the results of their overindulgence. Period. No more discussion. Pass the creamy peanut-butter sauce. Instead, there was, so to speak, a touch of waffle in the response from the Cold Stone Creamery. This included the observation that "lower calorie options for our customers…are also made available in all our stores." So what? Even if the only treat on offer was regular sweet-cream ice cream with a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, roasted almonds, and hot fudge in a chocolate-dipped waffle cone (1,400 calories!), that shouldn't matter. No one is forced to buy it, and if you do, the consequences are yours and yours alone.

But if we have a leaner future ahead of us, the same is not true of trial lawyers. They may well have a very rich feast to look forward to. There is one obstacle they will have to watch out for, however. Tobacco litigation was in one sense relatively straightforward. If some wheezing patient could be shown to have puffed away at a certain brand of cigarettes for years, the first steps of a case against the manufacturer of those smokes could then be taken. Imagine, though, the difficulty faced by a lawyer confronted by the potential junk-food plaintiff who has just waddled in through his door. The fees could be as large as the litigant, but who to sue? To be sure, there are trenchermen who confine their eating to just one spot, but most do not. Apportioning the blame for super-sized portions won't be easy. Did the pizzas cause the damage or was it the pies, the pralines, the penne or, heaven forbid, the plaintiffs themselves? CSPI's executive director has acknowledged as much. The ice-cream extravaganza, he says, has "something to do with the size of Americans' pants," but "no one disputes that the obesity epidemic has many causes." True enough, and that simple fact could greatly complicate any litigation.

The best way for trial lawyers to avoid such difficulties will be to follow the precedent of that piece of extortion better known as the tobacco "settlement." Rather than have to prove the cases of individual plaintiffs, with those tricky facts and awkward questions of causation, it will be far easier to claim that obesity has "cost" state and federal governments countless billions of dollars. Rapacious and unprincipled governments (that's all of them, in case you wondered) will play along. It will be argued that the bill for obesity should be paid by the industry that allegedly created the problem. There will be dark talk of "misleading" advertising, "irresponsible" marketing and "dangerous" ingredients. As their legal expenses mount, companies will slim down menus, various tasty ingredients will disappear, and countless "advisory councils" on nutrition will be hired. It will do no good. Confronted by the power of big government and the greed of big law, big food will, so to speak, chicken out and negotiate a pay-off.

Get your Toffee Coffee Cappuccino Chiller while there's still time.

Mac Attacked

National Review Online, July 7, 2003

Chicago, October 1989  © Andrew Stuttaford

The realization came as I chowed down on a good breakfast of egg, sliced Canadian style bacon (water added!), sweeteners (one or more of sugar, dextrose or corn syrup solids), the salts of the earth and laboratory (specifically sodiums phosphate, pyrophosphate, aluminum phosphate, erythorbate, nitrite, citrate, stearoyl-2-lactylate and good old salt), enriched (a cocktail of thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, iron and folic acid), bleached wheat flour (confusingly, wheat flour may contain malted barley flour), vital wheat gluten, trivial wheat gluten, yeast, (and, self-sufficiently, yeast nutrients — ammonium sulfate, calcium sulfate, calcium carbonate, ammonium chloride, non-calcium phosphate), partially hydrogenated (more water!) soybean oil (except when it's cottonseed), vinegar, high fructose corn syrup, corn meal, soy flour, soy lecithin, lecithin without soy, dough conditioners (an intriguing blend of calcium peroxide, mono-and diglycerides), numerous acids (fumaric, acetic, citric, sorbic and ascorbic), calcium propionate, potassium sorbate, corn starch, beta carotene, eye of newt (all right, I made that one up), cultured milk, cheese culture, unsophisticated cream, enzymes, sinister-sounding "fungal" enzymes and, a touch weirdly under the circumstances, colors and flavors just known as "artificial," all washed down with carbonated water, caramel color, more acid (phosphoric and citric this time), more sodium (saccharin — "cause[s] cancer in laboratory animals!"), "natural" flavors (and, helping nature out, potassium benzoate "to protect taste"), caffeine, potassium citrate, aspartame, and, finally, that proofreader's nightmare, dimethylpolysiloxane. McDonald's really, really wanted me to know the contents of an Egg McMuffin and a Diet Coke and, yes, there is, indeed, such a thing as too much information.

I was in a Mickey D's on a main street somewhere in northern Massachusetts. It was a bleak, blue collar, pink slip of a town, the sort of town that is more Dunkin' Donuts than Starbucks, the sort of town where someone ought to be able to find a scrap of fat and a bad for you bun without running the risk of a lecture. No such luck.

There, amid the dispirited detritus of a tarnished Golden Arches, amongst the straws, the stains, the rumpled napkins and those sad, sad sachets of tomato ketchup were some new, perky strangers, politically correct pamphlets (printed, naturally, on "acid-free recycled paper, 30% post-consumer waste") in NPR beige and Sierra Club green. McDonald's is, I learned, a "socially responsible" neighbor, busily promoting "environmentally sustainable practices" and the work of Dr. Temple Grandin, "one of the world's foremost authorities on animal behavior" (until that ugly moment at the abattoir, future happy meals need to be kept, well, happy).

And, yes, there's more. "Nutrition," the reader is told, "is a long-standing priority at McDonald's." So I should hope. The place is a restaurant after all.

Unfortunately, that is not what Mickey D's means. Nutrition is not food. Food is super-sized, fatty, and fun. It's burgers (add cheese!), fries (add salt!), hot dogs (add mustard!), and it's a barbecue in July (add beer!). Nutrition, by contrast is glum, not fun. It's subtract, not add. It's greens, not fries. Food is a chocolate shake. Nutrition is no-fat milk. Food is an all-you-can-eat buffet. Nutrition is a doctor checking your cholesterol, a bureaucrat vetting your dinner plate and a fast-food chain beginning to sweat. Most of the leaflets on display were designed to demonstrate McDonald's commitment to "balanced eating" and to help its clients with their "nutrition goals": The truly obsessed could find out more on the company's website or by dialing a special number.

Well, my nutrition goal that day was an Egg McMuffin, a choice that a disturbing number of people would find upsetting, reprehensible, and, quite probably, suicidal. For, "obesity," it is increasingly obvious, is set to be the new tobacco. The Savonarolas of self-denial have found another pleasure to wreck, and a scold of "advocates," cranks, and worrywarts has, so to speak, weighed in with relish. To take just two examples, the American Obesity Association (yes, really) is referring to obesity as an "epidemic" that is shaping up to become "the leading public health issue of the 21st Century" — and, no, they are not bragging. Meanwhile, the never knowingly under-alarmist Center for Science in the Public Interest is gleefully quoting HHS statistics showing that gluttony and sloth "contribute to" (whatever that might mean) between 310,000 to 580,000 deaths in America each year, a hungry man holocaust that's "13 times" greater than the death toll from that more familiar liberal bogeyman — the firearm.

Needless to say, attorneys too are preparing to feed at this tempting new trough. The first lawsuits have been filed, each for a Quarter Pounder (or more) of flesh. These have faced difficulties, but all the ingredients for a successful rerun of the great tobacco shakedown are clearly falling into place — the defendants (the fast-food chains) have enticingly deep pockets and their wares can be linked to health problems that come, supposedly, with a high cost to this country (around $117 billion annually according to the junk statisticians at the Centers for Disease Control) and which are, ominously, coming under scrutiny from within the (ever expanding) beltway as well as the trial bar. Naturally, none of this is blamed on the tubby "victims" themselves. Much like those unfortunate geese conscripted into the cause of  pâté de foie gras, they are said to have had little choice in what was slid down their gullets.

So, as we saw in the cigarette wars, notions of personal responsibility are either watered down — "dealing with overweight and obesity…is also a community responsibility," explained (now former) Surgeon General Satcher — or denied altogether. It's now claimed that Big Mac mavens may, like smokers, have been tricked into their unhealthy habit — all those munching and, we can be sure, litigious morons had absolutely no idea that mountains of burgers, fries, nuggets and shakes might lead them to put on a pound or two. Better still, fast food may even be, wait for it, "addictive." John Banzhaf, the "public interest" law professor who pioneered tobacco litigation, has argued that "fast foods can produce addictive effects — like nicotine — in many users; and that the chains deliberately manipulate the foods to make them far more dangerous and habit-forming than they would otherwise be."

When this sort of nonsense appears on the agenda, "the children" are never far behind. Sure enough, fast food's foes are busy pointing to the fact that the nation's tots are not so tiny any more. Across the fruited plain, tubby tykes (most of them, presumably, orphans: in this discussion we never seem to hear very much about parental responsibility for their kids' diet) are waddling their way through an "obesity epidemic" all their own. The need to save them from this peril will inevitably be used to justify both litigation and, almost certainly, intrusive and patronizing legislation — the not so thin end of a very bulky wedge. It's only a matter of time before Ronald McDonald is Joe Cameled by the calorie cops.

With pockets that aren't just deep, but super-sized, McDonald's is right to be worried. Ironically, its very success will count against it. Those golden arches are ubiquitous (millions and millions of potential litigants) and, worse, they have become a symbol of all that infuriates the anti-corporate crowd about big-business America. Anticipating the struggles to come, McDonald's France has already started to wave the white napkin, suggesting (in a paid magazine "advertorial") that customers should not visit its restaurants more than once a week. No word yet on whether Vichy water will be added to the menu.

Sterner souls on this side of the Atlantic have since disavowed this attempt at surrender, but, even in the U.S., the company's tactics look dangerously like appeasement. As the cigarette companies discovered, appeasement is unlikely to work. The leaflets displayed in that Massachusetts McDonald's are a pointless gesture — little more than drivel sprinkled on grease — and they will not do any good. The information they contain may be technically complete, if mildly insulting (most customers are quite capable of working out for themselves the purpose of different serving sizes without additional explanation), but it falls far short of the health warnings (basically, "you're doomed if you eat any of this") and other "disclosures" sought by the restaurant chain's critics, critics who will be aided by lawyers as insatiable as the pudgy plaintiffs they purport to represent.

What's more, by this and other moves (it has, for instance, recently announced the creation of an "advisory council on healthy lifestyles") the company may well be conceding, if only by implication, the core of its assailants' case — that fast-food joints have some sort of duty to guide their clients towards (to borrow McDonald's tortured language) more "healthful eating." That's a mistake, legally, politically, and intellectually. It takes the debate into territory where a burger behemoth will find it difficult to prevail: far better, instead, to render leaflets and advisory council into post-consumer waste. If diners choose to eat none too wisely, but all too well, the consequences should be their responsibility and theirs alone — and Mickey D's should say so.

McDonald's has no need to apologize for what it does best — delivering cheap, sinful, and surprisingly succulent slop to those who don't have the time, inclination, or talent to make other arrangements. And, if, despite what the sad saga of the McLean Deluxe might suggest, there really is a demand for "healthier" food under the golden arches, the logic of the marketplace will lead McDonald's to salad bar, tofu and side orders of carrots. For now, the company is stressing the healthiness of its salads, Fruit 'n Yogurt parfaits (280 calories without granola!) and Chicken McGrill (300 calories without the mayo!), but, don't worry, it has not abandoned those who prefer a fattier feast. The new bacon, egg, and cheese McGriddles (450 calories! 80 percent of your daily cholesterol, ahem, "value"!) show obvious promise and, in another exciting development, McDonald's is looking at adding more sugar to its buns (to make them toast more easily).

Now that's what I call heartening.