Michael Pollan on food marketing sheds light on baby formula discussion

An interview on Alternet with best-selling author Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food) ties in to our recent discussion on breastfeeding and formula marketing. Emphasis mine:

Michael Pollan (MP): I remember my mother dutifully giving us all margarine instead of butter. She would say, "Some day they're going to figure out that butter is actually better for you than margarine," and we thought she was nuts. In fact, it turned out that margarine was lethal and butter is fine.

Alternet's Terence McNally (TMN): She was still feeding it to you suspecting that would happen...?

MP: The authority of mothers was essentially destroyed by the food industry. The $32 billion a year in marketing muscle out there has undercut culture's role in determining what we eat, and culture is a fancy word for your mom.

TMN: Just to emphasize that number, that's not the food industry, that's the food marketing industry.

MP: That's advertising, studying us, packaging, figuring out how to get us to eat more.

TMN: Food industry folks say, "We don't think we should regulate this sort of thing because Americans believe in individualism and free choice, but we're all for public education." So maybe we'll throw $100 million of education up against that $32 billion of marketing.

MP: $100 million is one snack food's annual budget. The entire USDA/FDA effort to educate people about food equals one chip. [laughs] There's no contest. They control the information about food.

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Young and old in Ramat Gan

Haveil Havalim #181  is hosted at Tzipiyah. 

Now that my little one entered gan we are free on Fridays, the first day of the Israeli weekend. We decided to go out for breakfast, using the coupon my husband received as a birthday present from work. It's not easy to get out of the house for a morning alone; his birthday is in May, and we used the coupon from 2007.

The list of participating restaurants included two in Ramat Gan. The first one, in the lobby of a mall, featured deafening music.  I snapped a few shots as we walked to the second one. 

The sign below reads that King David Park is named after David, King of Israel, father of the House of David dynasty, 1004-964 B.C.E. You can read the English graffiti yourself; I don't sanitize this blog (much).

Ramat Gan has many elderly residents, but a complex of kindergartens neighbors the King David park. These ads were posted everywhere:

The formula companies have gotten creative, because they are not supposed to market formula to new mothers. So instead they sponsor "educational" events directed at parents of young children. This ad promotes a "babycollege" seminar at Tel Aviv University (!) about "aktiviut" (activeness? activity? exercise?) among young children, aged 0-3. If you want to learn how to raise a healthy child, don't go to a formula company. 

We ate at "Hablintzes shel Shoshana." (For those who care, it was a standard Israeli breakfast of rolls, eggs, cheese and salad.) According to the sign Uri, not Shoshana, manages the restaurant, which advertises itself as heimish (traditional Jewish). It was also quiet. We had a choice of tables on arrival but the restaurant quickly filled with secular, elderly customers. The couple nearest us spoke in Yiddish.

A sign in the restaurant informed customers that fish and dairy products are not cooked together. This is a chumrah (stringency) apparently based on an error--a mixup between the words "fat" and "milk" which are similar in Hebrew. Another sign at the kosher McDonald's, located in the same complex, notes that the ice cream served at this counter is dairy. You have to order the ice-cream from the main counter, though. 

Our usual view of Ramat Gan comes from busy Jabotinsky Street, but this section was lovely. The shaded walks are set so far back from the street, we wondered where the residents parked.

Sderot Hayeled

Continuation of Elimelech St. (?)

I'm having trouble coming up with pithy post endings. That's it.