Junk Food Junkie

Yesterday Isis had a liter of Moutain Dew and three Reeses cups for breakfast.

The food culture in this beauty school amazes me every day. These girls eat crap all day long. Potato chips and Dr. Pepper for breakfast, Doritos throughout the morning, Burger King for lunch, then more crap in the afternoon. Admittedly, it is mostly the under 22 year olds. (Maybe all "teenagers" eat like this?) The few of us who are over 30 (Ha! I'm "over thirty," WAY over), don't do the crazy breakfast or the all-day snacking, but do indulge in the fast food lunch. Every day. We eat fast food for lunch every day, six days a week. And frankly, it's delicious. In fact, it's super-delicious.

The End Of Overeating by David Kessler (http://tinyurl.com/yj2tezj) confirms what I had learned in myriad focus groups and client's test kitchens over the years -- the food we eat is specially engineered to be super-delicious. This is all fine when you're eating the super-delicious fast food once a month (or less), but when you're eating it every day it becomes even more super-delicious (the scientists make it that way). And the Marketers and Advertisers count on it.

In the preface to Adland, James Othmer asks ".....Would you work on a fast-food account? Fried Chicken? How about fried chicken with gobs of sodium and preservatives but no trans fats and they list the calories on the bucket and they do a separate "Hey kids, don't be a fatty!" campaign and put jungle gyms and salad bars at selected locations?..." I have worked on fast food accounts. Sat in meetings discussing how not-bad our bad food was. In the pitches for those accounts we'd promised we had the magic words and pictures that would make people eat more crap. And they do.

I overhead Ruby on the phone, making a doctor's appointment for her one-year old who's diagnosis is "failure to thrive." I suspect that a large part of the issue is that his diet consists largely of noodles and Burger King. She also occasionally gives him a sip of red wine because "it's good for his heart." (The C-R-A-Z-Y health misinformation and crappy, or non-existent health care, is a subject for another post -- or another blog -- and the Congress, the House of Representatives, and the The President -- and you. But I digress... again...)

I'm switching back to salads; soup or a Subway 6" with no mayo, cheese or oil. Except on Tuesdays when wings are BOGO.