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Forget food activism, Hollywood
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created 4 months ago | Tagged: |
Bnoble
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Ms. Paltrow’s weekly newsletter’s are both insightful and personal, and run the gamut of healthy recipes to gift ideas. The entries feature educated, worldly concepts for leading a healthier lifestyle. What sets GOOP apart from other popular lifestyle sites is the touching, personal messages she adds to each weeks entry, which in the land of Hollywood where publicity is about who is going into rehab, this is refreshing.
From the Oscar nod for the anti-farming documentary "Food, Inc." to Gwyneth Paltrow hyping meatless recipes in her "GOOP" newsletter, Hollywood's enthusiasm for all things vegan and organic seems to be at a high. But with the overwhelming majority of Americans still choosing conventionally raised foods and eating a balanced diet, elitist foodies' moment in the gastronomical limelight could be just that -- a moment.
It's easy for celebrities to passionately condemn farming by large agricultural firms. They don't have to worry about a grocery bill.
For average Americans, bringing home the bacon gets a lot harder when you have to buy $29-per-pound artisanal cured pork belly.
But that hasn't stopped Hollywood's out-of-touch food purists from trying to guilt-trip all of us into changing the way we eat.
In the past year, glitzy celebrity propaganda campaigns have become ubiquitous. Longtime PETA activist and occasional actress Alicia Silverstone wrote a vegan cookbook. And vegan techno musician Moby is branching out into nonfiction writing with a new title that attempts to eviscerate livestock farming and traditional models of food safety.
Promoting a vegetarian lifestyle by focusing on health benefits may seem intuitive, but it shouldn't be. A 2006 Oxford University study found that vegetarians are just as likely as omnivores to die from strokes, and from colon, breast, and prostate cancer.
And research has repeatedly shown that organic fruits and vegetables are no healthier than their conventionally grown counterparts. The organic label, the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirms, is no more than a "marketing program." In other words, buy organic produce if it soothes your conscience, but don't think you're getting a health benefit to justify the cost of those $6 carrots.
In the spirit of debate, let's hear from the opposition. When Food Rules writer Michael Pollan sat in the cushy guest seat on Oprah in January, the darling of the "slow food" scene smugly exhorted viewers: "We all can vote with our forks."
If organic produce isn't necessarily better for the environment, and avoiding meat isn't going to prevent you from getting cancer, maybe Hollywood should go back to just making movies again. Preferably silent ones. I think the rest of us can handle the grocery shopping on our own.
