This past weekend, Peeled Skinny favorite author Mark Bittman published a nice little breakdown of the proposed Soda Tax in the New York Times.  He states the important facts, like what's proposed, who's proposed it, and some of the implications.  He also expresses how it's part of an over-all movement towards healthier options for kids.  Hmmm... and he didn't mention Peeled Snacks?

Obviously this topic resonates with Peeled Snacks.  We're trying to offer people better options that your average ju-ju bee chew, and we feel as if we're part of a generation of manufacturers who find the nutrition label to be an important part of their products.  I also adore Bittman, and consider his "How to Cook Everything" to be my right-hand-man in the kitchen.  But this article, alas, totally misses the point.

All good points within, for sure, but just why is it that Soda is so cheap?  Is it because we have some super-cheap food source (say, the "soda plant"?) that grows like a weed?  No, it's because we have corn, which is heavily, Heavily, HEAVILY subsidized by the federal government, and we can process the crap out of corn to make corn syrup, which is easily and cheaply added as a sweetener to just about anything and everything.

So what's being proposed here, to protect our kids, is to grow a non-nutritious cash crop, paid for by tax money, have private companies mash it into soda and sell it to kids, and then tax those companies on the sale.  This is the very definition of "robbing Peter to pay Paul".

Just because a beverage is carbonated doesn't mean it's part of the problem.  A lot of manufacturers out there are trying to contribute SOLUTIONS to the problem, not make it worse (example?  FIZZY LIZZY, which Peeled Skinny considers to be ambrosia, no fooling).  Yet their fantastic product, which has no sugar added, would be taxed along with the crap-in-a-bottle that some big CPG companies sell.

Granted, the powers that be certainly have the goal of making this tax as easy to manage as possible, so they'd want to lump ANY carbonated beverage (including Fizzy Lizzy) into their little scheme.  But hey, you want easy?  I've got easy for you:

Eliminate the corn subsidy.

Take away all the money that the federal government pays farmers to grow a crappy crop and use it to pay for whatever this tax was meant to pay for.  That's what we around Peeled Snacks world headquarters call a REAL solution to a REAL problem, as opposed to a BOGUS solution to a MADE UP problem.  Taxing soda would mean missing the point.  And missing the point will keep our kids fat. 

Nuff Said,

Peeled Skinny

Posted by iankusc at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So did you watch Superbowl #44?  What did you eat while watching?  Peeled Skinny used the opportunity to eat Pizza (BAD Pizza, whose brand shall remain unnamed to protect the innocent) and drink beer, and, thankfully, NOT eat eggs.  Why not?  Because were I to have eaten eggs during the Superbowl, a certain very expensive commercial would have made me seriously ralph.

In the commercial, we see a chicken whispering to another chicken spreading some news, and the listening chicken shrieking in horror.  The news gets passed around, with chicken after chicken shrieking, till it even gets up to the president (a WHITE chicken president, I might add), who too shrieks.  Then we learn the news: Denny's is giving free grand-slam breakfasts on Tuesday the 9th, and they'll be needing LOTS of eggs!

How do you say "yuck" in chicken-speak?

Living in New York, I don't have to rely on Denny's (we have diners everywhere), but I certainly bare no ill-will to them.  When traveling I often eat there, and in general see Denny's as a success- they've found their way into many people's lives in a good way, and if they clog the occasional artery, they never pretend that their food will do otherwise.

And this commercial certainly has a joke to it, backed by production values that sell the message.  How ironic, though, that the clip's "message" (about chickens' unborn chicks being eaten en-mass by free-loading restaurant-goers) debuted the same year that the people in charge of the Super Bowl ads see fit to air a pro-life commercial.  Did the Denny's people collude at all with the "Focus-on-the-Family" people?  We suspect not.

The idea of the commercial, though, perversely mirrors the horror that we should all be feeling at our food industry.  How many eggs does it take for Denny's to pull this promotion off?  Well, apparently a nearly genocidal amount, enough that the President thinks about reaching for "the button".  The chicken horror should be shared, the commercial says, because we all know what it's like to have our children gobbled up with lines out the door.  For FREE, no less.  Or, if we don't know what that's like, we CAN at least LAUGH about it....

For Denny's to have used such imagery in a SUPER BOWL commercial is beyond post-modern.  It's a commercial analyzing people's horrified reaction at industrialized food, being analyzed by the industrialized food purveyors, who then turn it into a joke accentuating the horror, and magnifying it to a campy and WAY over-the-top degree.  It's Andy Warhol meets Albert Camus meets Ridley Scott, by way of the after-after-partiers at a Tea-Party convention.  It's pure genius, and purely sick.

I only wish I'd thought of it first.  Maybe Peeled Snacks could do a commercial like it, only instead of chickens we'd have Mango trees screaming in horror.  Hmmm.... maybe not.  Hope you enjoyed the Saints' victory as much as I did,

Ian K, Peeled Skinny and with a miserable post-Super Bowl tummy

Posted by iankusc at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)