From the category archives:

Bureaucratic

Agribusiness, politics and policy

Daily (Show) dose of funny. With fries.

January 13, 2011

This bit on banning Happy Meal toys aired last week, but I couldn’t pass on a chance to cite The Daily Show and tweak McDonald’s at the same time. Because, really, while Comedy Central is poking fun at those of us who think food companies ought to lay off our kids (while we parents also parent), McDonald’s doesn’t exactly [...]

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More McDonald’s madness
(Also: critical food legislation)

November 17, 2010

Because my recent post about McDonald’s “nutrition workshops” drew a lot of ire and eyeballs, I figured there’d be interest in the latest jaw-dropping news from the Land of Ronald: For starters, London’s Guardian newspaper reported last week that the British Department of Health is creating food-policy advisory groups that include reps from McDonald’s, PepsiCo, and other fast-food and [...]

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Forget Happy Meal toys. Let’s ban McEducation.

November 5, 2010

I’ve been thinking all week that I need to write about San Francisco’s crackdown on Happy Meal toys. But what to say? News of the decision spread fast, generating the predictable “McDonald’s-is-evil” vs. “parents-get-a-backbone” debate. And, really, my opinion on fast-food marketing hasn’t changed since I wrote about the Retire Ronald campaign in April. I still think the [...]

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Bees, kids and the power of tiny beings

October 7, 2010

Because I’m a writer, I tend to look for opportunities that can only be described as “experiences I can share with my daughter, but also write about.” Part education, part entertainment, part social and journalistic experiment. That sort of thing.  Searching for the queen So it was with the “Vanishing of the Bees” movie trailer during [...]

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An 11-year-old dissects the food system in 5 minutes

September 28, 2010

You know those people who think children are too young to understand the consequences of food choices? Or, worse, those businesses, lobbyists and marketers that treat kids like they’re too dumb to appreciate or deserve real food?   This is for them. And for the rest of us? Well, 11-year-old Birke Baehr is our kind of kid. His [...]

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Food (and propaganda) at the state fair

September 17, 2010

I realize that state-fair food is a category unto itself, a passionately defended paean to Americana and summertime. And to criticize it could cause a distracting uproar. Some might even offer me their fried-fave-on-a-stick with instructions to make it disappear right up my behind.      So I’ll just say that we did not partake of the many fried delicacies [...]

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School food: Beyond swapping white for wheat

August 26, 2010

We all know Jamie Olivers in the making. A parent, a teacher, a student. Someone who’s making noise. School-food reform is big news these days, the stuff of TV shows, government campaigns and blog crusades. And even before all the hoopla, plenty of parents and others were working below the radar to get better food in their kids’ schools. But what about [...]

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When parents stand in the way of better school food

June 8, 2010

I’m a journalist, which means I balk at reporting anything before I can suss it out. So I was going to post about this after I’d attended a meeting planned for tonight and talked to more of the people involved and done all those other reporter sorts of things. And I still will. But in the [...]

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Pesticide, organic and other dirty words

May 20, 2010

“Organic” was an early word in my now 6-year-old’s vocabulary. (She pronounced it “ga-nan-ic.” Tell me that’s not adorable.) It’s also one of the first words she learned to spell, which is why we have progressively more readable versions written on random bits of paper and newsprint. So when we go grocery shopping, Tess takes pride in pointing [...]

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“Two Angry Moms”: Still too true (redux)

May 7, 2010

As I posted earlier this week, I was planning to watch the school-food movie “Two Angry Moms” for the second time. Saw it last night, and I was struck again by the similarities between these moms’ battle and the drama that played out on Jamie Oliver’s show in Huntington, W.Va. It was disheartening, honestly, given that [...]

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