Oprah, WalMart & USDA Want ‘Healthier’ Processed Anusburgers

The U.S. Department of Agriculture promotes the sale of as much U.S. agricultural products as possible, which means soaked in poison and processed out of recognition, but the USDA is also supposedly the national arbiter of nutritional information. This is why the average public school lunch is made of trans fat, e. coli and the cheapest available industrial sweetener/rat bait, and why the once-a-week “green day” means a couple of months-old frozen carrot sticks are dumped on the tray next to the globule-dripping mystery tumor and the 89%-grease Tater Totz. School lunches are prepared both to make your children obese and to meet strict USDA nutritional guidelines, while simultaneously providing a way for American slop processors and slaughterhouses to sell warehouses full of decrepit disease clumps and chunks of undocumented farm laborers (“Chikkin’ Fingers”) that would otherwise have to be incinerated so feral dogs wouldn’t get sick.

So the new dietary suggestions were put out last week, by this same USDA that brokers the sale of federally subsidized inedible Roundup Corn Slop to make plastic shoes and soda pop. And, buried in the bureaucratic press-release language that must be cleared by the meat factories before it’s released to the public, Americans were very gently encouraged to eat maybe a little bit less, due to the fact that two-thirds of them are grossly overweight and the children in this country are bigger and rounder than the “bouncy houses” employed for their birthday parties.

But at least Oprah will save America by telling her employees to “go vegan” for a week, right? Uhh ….

The NYT’s Mark Bittman reports today:

Ms. Winfrey, who has been on more diets than the rest of us combined, challenged her staff to “go vegan” for a week. Intriguing, except her idea of surviving without meat and dairy — no explanation given for why we should go from too much to none — is to fill your shopping cart with fake versions of both, like meatless chicken breasts and dairy-less cheese.

But the goal is not universal veganism, which is pie-in-the-sky; it’s health and sustainability. And we get there by preparing real food, vegan or not. (Remember: Coke, Tostitos and Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs — yum! — are all vegan.) The answer is not fake animal products, whose advocates argue that they’re transitional to a kinder-to-animal diet. Indeed, that’s good, but a real food diet is better.

But what about WalMart? Didn’t Michelle Obama broker some deal with the world’s largest store with the world’s largest customers so that maybe there would be some produce available now and then, and also maybe some produce that hadn’t been genetically modified to remove all flavor and nutrition so it could withstand a six-month bath of petroleum/chemical fertilizers before being picked by a robot tank monster and stored in a warehouse for a season or two?

The real problem, again, is Wal-Mart’s other promise: “healthier” packaged foods. And whether baked, low-salt chips are “better” than fried ones, is not only arguable — the baked ones are more likely to be chemical-laden — but misses the point which, again, is that real foods are superior in every way.

The truly healthy alternative to that chip is not a fake chip; it’s a carrot. Likewise, the alternative to sausage is not vegan sausage; it’s less sausage.

“Less sausage.” Is that in the Constitution? We didn’t think so. [New York Times]