Criticizing Trump's Diet Doesn't Make You a Food Snob

This weekend, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni mounted a defense of Trump's choice to eat his steak well-done and dip it in ketchup. He also defended Trump's appetite for fast food—something the President has been quite vocal about, once saying, "At least you know what they put in it." Ann Coulter really enjoyed the piece.

Aside from the fact that we have no idea what's in fast-food (witness the recent discovery that Subway's chicken sandwiches may only contain 50 percent chicken DNA), Trump's love for fast and processed foods speaks to much more than just his limited American palate.

Which brings us to Bruni's main argument: that those on the left and by implication, those concerned with the quality of their food, are guilty of "food snobbery" for judging Trump's eating habits. Bruni says this attitude feeds into claims of elitism by his supporters and further undermines our very real criticisms of Trump.

"The red scare before us isn't ketchup. It's Mike Flynn, Jeff Sessions and the curious flow of courtesies between Moscow and Mar-a-Loco," he writes.

Forgiving the bad puns, it is certainly true that the troubling connections between the Trump administration and Russia are far more concerning than Trump's predilection for over-cooked meat and a sugar-laced condiment. But we should never underestimate food—and specifically our current industrial food system—and its role in our culture and the health of our country.

One of the key messages coming from the food industry is that its products represent "real" American food for "real" Americans. Its advertisements often ridicule liberal elites concerned about the ingredients in their foods and who or what were harmed in making it.

But it's curious how this happened—how did caring about your body, your health, or the health of your children become something only reserved for liberal elites? Presumably, all parents care about the health of their children, and no one wants to suffer from debilitating diet-related diseases like diabetes, heart disease, or certain cancers. But if you buy what the food industry is selling, both literally and figuratively, you are pretty much guaranteed ill health eventually.

Yet the industry casts pesky liberals, with their concerns for their health, as nanny-state enthusiasts hell-bent on telling everyone what to eat. Industry shouts, "free choice!" when confronted with legitimate concerns about the safety of its products and "personal responsibility!" when public health advocates point to surges in obesity and disease. But who are the ones cramming the airwaves, and every other commodifiable space with their ads telling us to eat this and drink that? It's certainly not the government or the liberals.

In his column, Bruni has done Big Food and Big Ag a service by legitimizing industry's main messages: "Trump is just exerting his rightful culinary autonomy," he writes.

No. He's exerting a very particular American privilege masked by a faux salt-of-the-earth veneer over a corporate, profit-based agenda. It's not snobbery to care about the quality of the products you put in your body or your children's bodies, and it's certainly not snobbery to care about the rights of food workers, animal welfare, or the impact of the fast and cheap food industries on the environment. In fact it's the opposite—it's the height of privilege to ignore these issues in the service of convenience and affordability—especially when you can afford the pricier foods that avoid some of these pitfalls. The industry, meanwhile, is happy to take advantage of the fact that so many people cannot afford a healthier and more sustainable option.

And what about how we feed our kids? Bruni writes, "As merciless as we can be about how people feed themselves, we're even more merciless about how they feed their kids. A mother giving her 5-year-old a sugary Sprite might as well be handing him a loaded gun. The looks she gets from the parents around her are that aghast and alarmed."

Okay, you're not handing your child a loaded gun. But you might be handing your child a diabetes diagnosis, and certainly no parent wants to do that. With what we now know about sugar's clear connection to diabetes, among many other devastating diet-related diseases, there truly is reason for alarm. These are decisions with life-long consequences.

And what about the complete disregard for animal welfare and the environment when we promote our "freedom" to eat industrial food? By most estimates, the food and agricultural industries, which are entirely dependent on cheap fossil fuel, represent fully one-third of all global greenhouse emissions. The concentrated animal feedlot operations, or CAFOs, that supply all the meat for the industry are rampant with horrific animal abuse. They are also responsible for obscene amounts of pollution. Animal waste and chemical fertilizer runoff make industrial agriculture one of the biggest sources of pollution in American waterways; there's a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey due to runoff; and in 2008 scientists identified 405 oceanic dead zones due to soluble synthetic fertilizers. Sadly, this is a global problem and more than half of the Great Barrier Reef has disappeared in the past 27 years in large part due to fertilizer farm runoff. There are also billions of pounds of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides used on all industrial foods which now pollute the globe and our bodies. On top of that, the industry is notorious for its abuse of workers all along the food chain, from farm workers to slaughterhouse workers to fast food workers.

To downplay the seriousness of the impact of our diets on our health and our environment as Bruni has done only benefits the industries and their solitary mission of generating profits at the expense of all else. The industry doesn't need his help—and Trump certainly doesn't need his defense.