209: The Case Against Local, Safe, Organic Food: A Parody

This is a parody of The Case Against Homeschooling by Jesse Scaccia

The Case Against Local, Safe, Organic Food

Local, Safe, Organic Food: great for self-aggrandizing, chemical-phobic mother…… but not quite so good for the kid.

Here are my top ten reasons why whole food parents are feeding their children the wrong things:

10. “You were totally brought up by granola-crunching, Birkenstock wearing, tree-hugging hippies” is an insult college kids use when mocking the slender, healthy kid in the dorm (whether or not the offender was from a hippie family or not). And… say what you will… but it doesn’t feel nice to be considered an outsider, a natural outcropping of eating whole foods.

9. Call me old-fashioned, but a child’s diet should include such food-like substances such as Fruit Loops and canned meat loaf (not at the same time I hope).  In modern society, we call these engineered commercial products “food,” even though they’ve been stripped of all their nutrients.

8. Buying local, safe, organic food is selfish. According to this article in USA Today, children who eat whole foods are increasingly from wealthy and well-educated families. To take these (I’m assuming) healthy children out of our fast food establishments is a disservice to our less fortunate kids. Poorer children with less literate parents are more reliant on fast food chains, and they  greatly benefit from the additional sales from their richer and higher achieving neighbors.

7. God hates whole foods. This study, done by the food conglomerates, notes that the most common reason parents gave for buying local, safe, organic foods  was a desire to provide nutrient rich, healthy foods to their children. To the whole food believers out there, didn’t God say to subdue the world?  From my side, to take your children off manufactured food products is to miss an opportunity to spread power of dominion given by the Lord to the common people. (Personally I’m agnostic, but I’m just saying…)

6. Whole food eaters are arrogant to the point of lunacy. For real! What makes them think they can just “cook from scratch” with ingredients from their local farmer’s markets.  Well, maybe they can make a few dishes as well as I can, but there’s no way they can make pizza as well as Papa Johns, or chicken as well as the Colonel, or burgers as well as the King, or fries as well as Ronald, and, and, and . . . .

5. As a consumer of packaged foods, cooking whole foods kind of pisses me off. (That’s good enough for #5.)

4. Cooking whole foods could breed intolerance, and maybe even racism. Unless the children are  being fed at the MTV Real World house, there’s probably only one kind of cuisine in the room. How can a young person learn to appreciate other factory-produced food-like substances if he or she doesn’t eat them?

3. And don’t give me this “they still eat junk food occasionally” garbage. Convincing children’s palates to accept the oiliness of Sunny Delight, or the sodium of chicken nuggets is a process that takes more than an little junk food here and there. Whole foods, undoubtedly, leave the child’s digestive system unprepared.

2. Whole food parents are arrogant, Part 2. Many highly educated, high-income parents are “probably people who are a little bit more comfortable in taking risks” in choosing a recipe or a new vegetable. “The attributes that facilitate that might also facilitate them being more comfortable with trying kumquats, or Brussels sprouts.”

More comfortable taking risks with their child’s palate? Gamble on, I don’t know, the Superbowl, not your child’s future as a consumer of Hamburger Helper and Cheetos.

1.  And finally… have you met someone who eats mostly vegetables? Not to hate, but they do tend to be pretty healthy***.

*** Thoughts on the word ‘healthy.’ In general, to be healthy connotes a certain inability to integrate and digest refined carbs, sugars, and high-fat foods.  Which, I would argue, is a likely result of eating in an environment without processed foods.