Fed Up

Let me start by saying that I am a republican and by nature our ideologies indicate that we want less government control on the food industry and in our lives. However, this film brought about an important issue that we have to address and fix in American society which is obesity caused by sugar. The documentary delves into the cultural changes and regulations put into place, evaluating them well. They use a lot of statistics and facts that help their claim that government intervention is needed to help the next generation through this on coming epidemic. Overall, very well thought out and backed with support, and I like how they gave different options to combat this crisis at the end. My personal favorite was to put percentages of recommended intake next to the sugar on food labels.

The poster itself makes the claim that "Congress says pizza is a vegetable" when that has never been the case at all. At one point, several years before the movie was released, Congress amended an agricultural appropriations bill, and allowed schools to count the tomato paste used in pizza to count towards vegetable servings, which is fairly appropriate, as the 1/8th cup of paste is nutritionally similar to the half-cup of vegetables that kids would normally throw out. Nowhere in that bill was pizza mentioned. When they choose that for their tagline, the best thing they have to say about their movie, and it's an old and completely fabricated narritive, I can't help but wonder if there's anything of genuine substance, or if it's nothing more than a doom-and-gloom blame-it-on-the-corporations fictional documentary.

People dismissing this movie tend to really believe in personal responsibility but not economics. As a matter of policy we make the worst food we can possibly eat cheap and ubiquitous. We could flip this around - make healthy food cheap and stop subsidizing the one thing we know for sure is killing us.