Nightlight News

The heat is on Coca-Cola. Watch your ass Nestle. Grovel and weep Mars Inkorporated. Your favorite target market is going to die off from congestive heart failure or the complications associated with adult-onset diabetes. No more jail-bait sweet tooth cigarette style marketing campaigns. And get the hell out of the school cafeteria (more below). Square and rectangular slices of pizza can stay, but school districts are gonna, they're gonna, get you CEOs.

All those cartoons with their cute little party creatures - Candies the color of neon death - Taste the rainbow of your huge ass while you sit around getting a tummy ache from all that fructose, you helpless youngsters. GREEN KETCHUP??? Who will come to your aid and protect you from the vile intentions of these candy and junk food purveyors?

CONGRESS!!! They have asked the Institute of Medicine to devise new standards for school lunches, and this is indeed a moment too late (not a moment too late, but many, many moments too late). Kids are already way, way overweight. The figures out there tell the tale - the obesity rate for children 2-5 and adolescents 12-19 has more than doubled in the past 30 years, and for the unfortunate 6-11 year olds it has tripled. Of course, green ketchup is not only to blame. Blame a complex set of factors, which may in fact require an interdisciplinary advanced education such as a Master's Degree in COMMON SENSE. Kids - they like to:
Perhaps in that order. None of these factors really act as a mitigating alternative for an epidemic outbreak of childhood obesity, and you don't have to have a surgeon general-style beard to understand what is going on. What you may not realize is that the school lunches are being controlled by moustache-twisting corporate board room Illuminati types who are making big bucks off of things full of soy protein, gluten, and dextrose, fructose, sucrose, corn starch, stabilizers, saturated fat, trans fat, packaging, all produced through processes that practically bleed greenhouse gases and subjugate developing countries to our militaristic trade policies for the benefit of crazy ass fictional characters like this guy -
Now I love bunnies, don't get me wrong! However, our friends at the Institute of Medicine revealed that over $10 Billion Dollars a year is spent marketing foods and beverages to children, most of which is not nutritious. But I would hate to have to be the person to break it to our wild-eyed friend above us - "Mr. Silly Rabbit - you are a pawn in the game that controls the health and safety of our nation's most precious asset - children!!" The rabbit probably gets paid nothing for his effort, most likely because he is purely fictional. Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa - from a top-ten corn growing state (corn being an important ingredient of everything any kid really wants to eat) - has suggested including rules in the next farm bill that would basically ban junk food from schools. It would be up to the USDA to enforce the rules. It would be a new-anti-fat butt food pyramid. I like this Mediterranean Food Pyramid that some enterprising food nerd came up with.
Well, we'll (me and some other folks with lots of time on our hands for such purposes and RSS power) be keeping a close eye on the Farm Bill proceedings, it's been five years since the last one - this is like the World Cup for food and agriculture policy dorks. I have recently discovered the small joy in actually reading the proceedings online. Check out this beauty - testimony by John Queen of Waynesville, NC, President of the National Cattleman’s Beef Association, testifying on the market structure of the livestock industry. Fascinating!