Monday, September 20, 2004

ELITIST CLASS PREJUDICE BEHIND FOOD CORRECTNESS

"In the docu-blockbuster-cum-human-experiment "Super Size Me", released in British cinemas over the weekend, New York filmmaker Morgan Spurlock eats nothing but McDonald's meals three times a day for a month.

Sounds radical, right, taking on the Golden Arches of America and charging them with making poor folk sick and miserable by forcefeeding them junk? In fact, Super Size Me, like so many other anti-McDonald's campaigns, comes with a generous side order of snobbery. Its real target is the people who eat in McDonald's - the apparently stupid, fat, unthinking masses who scoff Big Macs without even asking to see a nutritional and calorie breakdown first. Spurlock and his ilk might hate McDonald's, but they seem to loathe the McMasses even more....

So Spurlock grosses out in order to see what it's like to be one of those gross Americans. Fellow American Cosmo Landesman of The Sunday Times praises him for taking a 'kamikaze dive into the gargantuan blubber-gut and buttock-mountain serial heart-killer and cholesterol free fall that is obese America's fast-food blowout'...

It is striking how morally loaded some of the discussions about food are. In one of the funnier scenes, Healthy Chef Alex - a holistic health counsellor who believes in 'integrating appropriate food choices and lifestyle options' - tries to coax Spurlock away from the 'corrupt' world of meat-eating and towards a Good Life of nuts and lentils. Spurlock visits a school where the pupils are calm and attentive and claims that it's a result of their eating healthy school dinners from the Natural Ovens Bakery rather than the sugary fare stuffed down kids' throats in other districts. Food, it seems, is not only about taste, enjoyment or nutrition; what we eat apparently reveals something of our moral character.

In this, Super Size Me chimes with the times. On both sides of the Atlantic there's a large portion of moralising in the panics over obesity, school dinners, junk-food-guzzling and the rest. What is presented as straightforward medical concern for our health and wellbeing is often really a judgement on lifestyle and behaviour - and especially the lifestyle and behaviour of a certain class of people. In debates about 'bad' foods (McDonald's), fast foods (microwave meals), and fat mums in clingy leggings who make their kids fat too by feeding them 'junk', there's a barely concealed contempt for the working classes, who are presumed to be lazy, feckless and not sufficiently concerned with healthy cooking and fitness. It's there in the terminology: they are seen as 'junk' people....

Instead, at a time when few are willing to say what kind of lifestyle is right and wrong, the lower orders are lambasted for their eating habits and lack of food-consciousness - all in the name of helping to transform them into better healthy happy citizens, of course. The moral divide today is ... between those who eat healthily and those who (allegedly) don't, between good foodies and bad burger-eaters.

Such cheap McMoralism is best summed up in a leaflet produced by McSpotlight, an anti-McDonald's campaign group that encourages local communities in the UK to resist the building of new McDonald's restaurants. Under the heading 'Litter, noise and smells', the leaflet says McDonald's will 'result in noise and disturbances at all hours....the smell from the kitchens, from waste storage and from litter disgarded [sic] by customers may become offensive and attract vermin'. What these campaigns really hate about MaccyD's is the kind of people it attracts; in McSpotlight's leaflet, offensive 'customers' and 'vermin' all merge into a mishmash cautionary tale about the apparent horrors of the modern McDonald's. Meanwhile, inside my local McDonald's, normal-looking families can be seen enjoying their Happy Meals....

More here

No comments: