Eat Right When Money's Tight

Each morning as I'm riding my bicycle to work through Oak Park ( the most destitute neighborhood I ride through), I pass this billboard:



I cannot resolve my extreme cognitive dissonance regarding this new advertising campaign by the State of California -- one thought is, yes, eating right is a good thing...while all my other thoughts are wondering how this can possibly be held up by the poorest of our citizens when broccoli is $1.79 a pound and a three-pound 2-liter bottle of Pepsi is $0.79?

I didn't realize, not until I searched for the electronic version of this poster, was that it is all sponsored and paid for by SNAP, or our California Dept. of Public Health, as indicated in the smallest possible print at the bottom. The argument apparently being that if you are on SNAP (food stamps elsewhere in the world) -- money must be tight.

Yet I try to follow the money, and while I'm not automatically an anti-corporate, anti-globalist, environmentalist zealot...I do read the weekly newsletter from my CSA. The corn they grew for me last week -- no monies, except my own, subsidized its production, while $56,000,000,000 in tax dollars were spent over the past eleven years to prop-up industrial corn farming. Milled to produce corn starch, then further processed to produce corn syrup, a few billion $0.79 2-liter bottles of Pepsi are created, then advertised less than a half-mile away from this billboard at the Food Source at Broadway & Stockton, and sold to overweight Sacramentans on food stamps providing over 800 calories for next to nothing.

So. I've got federal tax dollars subsidizing industrial corn syrup production while I've got state tax dollars telling me not to eat it...

Tell me, what are the odds, the odds!, that I'd go into that Food Source and find more broccoli than HFCS in the basket of any SNAP recipient? I'd bet my next paycheck that I'd not find one, no matter if rule #6 was plastered on each plastic seat on each shopping cart, plastered on every bus stop bench, plastered across every HDTV and radio advertisement. It can't be done because corn syrup is too fucking cheap, and Americans? Well, all they ever care about, and all they ever will care about is that their products are cheap. We spend less money on food today than during anytime in history. To say that we can't do it, with a cell phone tied around every South Sacramentan ear, would be facetious.

Gotta wonder...what do you suppose rules #1 through #5 are? And think about the slogan if this were 2006, when hallucinated wealth money wasn't tight: Eat like shit when you're rolling in it?

Not only is obesity exploding due to HFCS I mean, ahem, due to other lifestyle factors according to the Corn Refiners Association, we've not even begun to see the health care consequences of such fat Americans; we've not even begun to scratch the surface of all the cost increases associated with providing universal health care to each of these fat Americans.