Pass the Low Fat, Reduced Sodium, Lower Sugar Tostitos

Is Pepsi in an evangelical crusade against the added trans fats and sugars in their products? No. No they aren’t. Pepsi is scared into shaking, like a sailor clinging to the mast of a sinking ship. In Pepsi's case, their ship is sinking into a sea of government regulation. Pepsi has to sell its products to make profits, bottom line. The problem for Pepsi lies in a public which is steadily becoming more informed and conscious regarding their food choices.

Pepsi is desperately trying to avoid regulation wrought road of big tobacco. High dollar anti-smoking campaigns and government levies aim to strangle big tobacco’s profit margins and educate an increasingly hip general public about the dangers of smoking. Pepsi wants to become the government’s next whipping boy and the public’s next failing health scapegoat as bad as the Marlboro man wants to spend his afternoon accessorizing at Louis Vuitton.

Pepsi is nervous enough to espouse they will remove every high sugar vending machine from k-12 schools by 2012. Pepsi also recently claimed salt, sugar and fat content will be reduced from their brands by 25% before year 2020. The trend is towards healthy nutritional choices and Pepsi is quietly distancing itself from its rationalizing and deflecting public relations policies of the 90s, when Pepsi’s marketing campaigns referred to their snacks as "fun for you."

Pepsi’s stuck between looming government and social pressures to provide healthier options and the reality that in many cases their best customers don’t want those options. “Fatty Boom-Boom” is a term you might’ve heard thrown around a locker room or two to reference people who consume 24 cans of Pepsi a week and require a forklift to use the restroom. Pepsi has a slightly more affectionate, yet equally as creepy and much more sterile term for the boom-booms, who just happen to be their best customers: “frequent users”.

So what happens when you alienate the “frequent users” and aim into the hipper, more educated organic soy milk sipping and sustainable denim wearing hipsters? You get "Tropicana Juice". A financial disaster compared to the launch of "New Coke" which fell on deaf ears and uninterested palates during the mid eighties. Other Pepsi ventures into the health snack niche have met similar fates. Pepsi and other large conglomerates who are now throwing their hat into the health conscious ring are receiving a harsh realization. Many nutritionally hip consumers have already found the niche brands which they are loyal to.

Regardless of the outcomes of Pepsi and their government regulation affairs, I think we all deserve to know what’s what about the food we put in our bodies. Eating a Twinkie with HIGH FIBER!! plastered on the box would be akin to purchasing a 500,000 mile, 60’s era car off a used car lot for reliable transportation solely because the salesman scribbled NEW TIRES!! on the windshield. We often want to believe that we can accept the manufacturer’s claims which labels our food’s packaging. After all, the government regulates these claims don’t they? And wouldn’t it just be plain wrong for the people who serve us our food to not be anything but one hundred percent crystalline clear about the pros and cons of their products? Wake up. The company selling you your white eggs and bread is no different than the used car salesman offloading his lemons. Realize that food, like almost every other industry is driven by sales and revenues. Whatever the public wants to see and see is what food companies will show and tell them. If eggs produced using green energy are a hit this week, the companies who produce eggs will begin using ten percent of their energy to produce those eggs with windmills, now they’re green eggs and the consumer is happy again. If eggs produced with extra vitamins are a hit this week, the companies who produce eggs will locate commercial grade vitamin D at ten cents per ton and throw in a handful or two on top of the chicken feed, now they’re vitamin eggs and the consumer is happy again. This is sales and marketing 101.Smoke and mirrors will diffuse the true intention, to get you to buy eggs no matter what the latest trend, latest fad or latest Johnny come lately tells you to.

So what are us normal people, who love to eat but would also like to refrain from reducing our years of quality life to do? I mean we do have to eat, don’t we!? I can’t solve all of your problems and to teach you 5 fairly easy rules that can help immensely:

1. Avoid Trans Fat and High Fructose Corn Syrup - Both of these manmade food additives where developed as cheaper alternatives to natural fat and sugar. Your body still has little use for either. In one study it was found that 7 grams of trans fat per day, the amount found in a medium French fry, increased your chance of cardiac failure by 50%.

2. Go Organic with your animals - It’s true, organic isn’t a cure all. But what organic does mean is that the foods with the USDA Organic label, have not been raised or produced with antibiotics, hormones or carnivorous feed stocks. Changing your poultry, dairy, beef and other animal products to organic wherever possible can have great benefits to your health.

3. Unleash your inner Julia Childs - Here’s an easy way to get even the busiest people to re embrace their inner chef. Set a goal to prepare just one meal per month. “But I don’t know how to cook!” The first time I wanted to cook shrimp I googled “shrimp recipes” and I found at least half a dozen sites dedicated to shrimp recipes, so the problem is not that you can’t find a good recipe. Just follow the directions and repeat this mantra “Everything is going to be ok.”

4. Learn the Glycemic Index - Merely changing your carbohydrate intake from bad ones, donuts, to good ones, granola cereal can help you stay healthier. Some good examples of quality carbohydrates are oatmeal, beans, lentils, brown rice and other whole grains. Again if you aren’t familiar how to prepare these foods so they taste better than your shoe, refer to rule 3.

5. Cheat - Yes that’s right, you can cheat. It’s ok to go overboard every once and a while, as you start your new endeavor to eat more healthy, vow for three meals a week you won’t count calories, fats, proteins, fibers or anything else that can take the fun out of pigging out. As long as you aren’t gorging at every meal, a few meals a week where you do is ok and can actually be beneficial.

Pepsi is here to stay for the indefinite future. Governments may always be about one step behind when it comes to protecting the nutritional welfare of an educated society. So take it upon yourself to slowly begin the process or regulating your own nutritional intake. And remember that no one is ever finished learning all there is to know, it is a lifelong process.


The Economist's March 27th article entitled "Pepsi gets a Makeover,"
(1,200 words)

Portrait of a Person / "final" revision

My grandma walks kind of like my dog. After he’s spent the day scouting gopher holes beneath the brier patches that run along the fence line, he’ll come home wearing the scratches and hobbles he’s gathered from the day’s fun. He’s a smart dog. He’s learned if he telegraphs his injuries too much, I’ll be less likely to let him play, and then he’ll have to spend time in his kennel while he heals up, and he only lives to chase those gophers. Before he comes back home from gopher hunting he licks his cuts and then struts to his big wool blanket like he’s made of stone, then collapses from exhaustion.

On second thought the way my grandma walks also reminds me a lot of Joe Montana. Grandma embodies one of his more famous sayings, “You gotta play injured.” Her stride conjures up images of a popular photo of Joe, you’ve probably seen the one. Joe’s back is turned, walking off the field, his uniform is soiled and wet with sweat. Grandma doesn’t wear a uniform, just some old barn clothes, but she works just as hard as Joe. She takes the same pride in her living as Joe. I’m sure they both get the same sense of satisfaction after a long day is done.

Grandma’s walk also reminds me of an impression. When I was young, working with my friend Jack, he demonstrated what his father, who is eighty years old, would look like if he didn’t stretch in the mornings. Jack kind of stuck his arms out straight to the side when impersonating his father. He stuck his arms out really stiff, with his hands about a foot from his body. He spread his feet about a foot apart with the same stiffness in his arms. Jack made it look like he was wearing a long sleeve shirt and pants so tight he couldn’t bend at his elbows or knees. Then Jack shuffled sideways with his stiff legs and arms while keeping them perfectly straight. Jack made his father look like someone trying to make a snow angel who had terrible arthritis or like a crab that somehow learned to walk upright. After Jack’s impression he and I both had a good laugh. The comedy of it was from knowing full well we aren’t above the laws of nature and age. One day Jack’s dad will be me and Jack, I guess it’s normal to laugh about the things we’re most uneasy about. Grandma’s walk reminded me of Jack’s impersonation of his father.

Now I know it seems like I’m giving my grandmother an awfully hard time, but these are the ways I convey to you how hard a worker she is. She does her best to hide her injuries from my nosy aunts, who give her endless static, but they already know who the only person that will ever slow down my grandma is. Death himself; and at least she won’t have to hear his mouth, though I’m sure they smile at each other nearly every day. Grandma doesn’t let a little crick in the neck or lump on her knee slow her down, she takes the reins of her body and puts it through her paces without mercy. Up at dawn and down at dusk. Gauging by her health, I guess death has an affinity for simple people with good senses of humor and slow southern charm. Grandma’s driven her body to hell’s gate and back without taking so much as a sun burn.

One of the many anomalies of my Grandma is her diet. There are only three types of people on this planet that can consume the same breakfast as my grandma enjoys every morning without immediately going into an aorta seizing, lard induced catatonia. Eskimos, aboriginal whale fishers and true blooded, down south, farm and horse folks. Basically, to consume this breakfast, you need to be moving from about five in the morning until around ten at night and burn about five thousand calories per day. The smell of her cooking animal fat in the air at dawn is a much better alarm clock than any Sony I’ve ever owned because bacon has this miraculous way of turning off the switch in your brain that makes waking up such a chore. Bacon puts your mind on one track. Eat the bacon. It’s too bad, but most mornings I don’t have any bacon. I don’t burn half the calories that grandma does.

I stumble into the kitchen every morning to make my delicious breakfast of egg whites and oatmeal and I always notice her still warm frying pan containing all of the necessary elements of a well balanced cardiac arrest. Grandma enjoys the things that I could never touch with a 2 foot grill skewer. Scrapple, thick cut bacon, pork shoulder, ham hock. When she’s feeling healthy she’ll have some grits with butter, in a one to one ratio. I swear I could make a list five feet long scribed with the fattiest parts of creatures that Grandma gets away with savoring, while the rest of us suffer eating “egg substitute” and “low-carb wheat bread” to keep our waist lines in check. Grandma burns more calories than a California wildfire fighter, so I guess she’s earned the right to gobble down what she wants to.

Grandma knows the value of a good days work. If you’ve ever worked a day where by its end you’re dripping in the sweat of your labors, you already know grandma’s lifestyle. Not every minute of her work is fun, but at the end of the day she’s physically done something. Work connects Grandma to her animals, it connects her to the earth, and it humbles her. For me, those days of sweating like a sieve, baking in the sun and freezing in the cold all ended after numerous summers and falls spent helping my uncle in playing in concrete and working on a family friend’s turkey farm under the summer sun. Honest work taught me that I am not cut out for a lifetime of that style of work. I guess that’s the nice way of saying I’m not much good for manual labor. If you ask my grandma about my work ethic, she’ll flat out tell you that I’m a wimp, but I think she’s just joking, or at least for my pride’s sake I really hope so.

It is a mystery as to what keeps Grandma going. Some say she’s doing what she can to keep busy, not concern herself too much with my granddad, who passed a few years back. I have a theory, yet not many know it. Everyone is addicted to something which keeps their bellows fanning the embers of their soul. Grandma is addicted to the simple life. You know that feeling you get after finally straightening out your basement that’s been on your to do list for years? This is Grandma’s feeling every day. Grandma gets it done. Grandma’s guided by a moral compass as finely tuned as Swiss movements. Grandma’s been blessed with a genuine respect for authorities I only wish I possessed. One time I drove her to the hardware store and I came to a traffic light which showed red. I let the front wheels roll a few feet past the white line. By the appalled look on Grandma’s face you’d think she just then realized that I was Billy the Kid and we were speeding away from a bank robbery. Grandma’s never gotten a traffic ticket, there’s one way I wish I were like Grandma.

Grandma’s stride can send shivers down the spines of her family members yet she breaks horses, bales hay and rises and sets with the sun. Grandma’s breakfast could turn a gym rat into a house cow in under a month yet she runs errands, babysits grandchildren and provides for her family. Grandma’s got calloused hands yet many hearts have been healed by their tender touch. Grandma’s a blessing, even when she’s hobbling.


(1,299 words)

Article Response - Pass the low fat, reduced sodium, lower sugar Tostitos please

After reading the Economist's March 27th article entitled "Pepsi gets a Makeover," you may be tempted into thinking Pepsi is leading an evangelical crusade against added trans fats and sugars in their products. You would be wrong. In fact Pepsi has been scared to shaking like a sailor clinging to the mast of a sinking ship, only in Pepsi's case, their ship is sinking into a sea of government regulation.

Pepsi, ever fearful that they will go the way of the big tobacco companies, who are blamed for every case of lung cancer or premature respiratory related death since the inception of cigarettes, desperately desires to avoid a similar overly scrutinized path. Pepsi has become nervous enough to remove every high sugar cola vending unit from k-12 schools by 2012. Pepsi also aims to reduce the salt, sugar and fat content in their numerous brands by 25% before 2020. The last thing Pepsi needs or wants is to become the governments whipping boy example in the war against obesity. As the trend towards healthy nutritional choices gains social appeal, Pepsi is attempting to quietly distance itself from its rationalizing and deflecting public relations policies of the 90s when it referred to its products as "fun for you."

You can't help but feel a little bad for Pepsi. Stuck between looming government and social pressures to provide healthier options and the hard reality that when consumers are provided with healthier options, many of them prefer to remain fatty boom booms than adopt an entirely new lifestyles. Several years ago Pepsi launched "Tropicana Juice," a product aimed towards health conscious consumers. It was a financial disaster often compared to the unsuccessful launch of "New Coke". Other ventures into health snacks have met a similar fate. The hip consumers targeted in Pepsi's "healthy" new launches may have already found niche brands which they are loyal to and may be unaffected by the often times transparent, too little, too late conglomerate attempts at sparking their interest.

The side effects of our favorite foods and beverages may not be in our best interest, yet often we choose to consume them anyway. As a consumer would you rather have the choice as to what you put in your mouth? Inevitably you may have to investigate every product you choose for its quality and its companies ethics. Would you rather have these issues left to your government and the lobbies which persuade them?