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February 28th, 2014 2:37 pm
Michelle Obama: New Food Labels Will Help Counteract the Fact That America’s Moms are Morons
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As a veteran of a speechwriting shop or two, I’m amazed that no one in First Lady Michelle Obama’s office thought to reel in the remarks that she made yesterday about the new FDA nutritional labeling guidelines that I blogged about yesterday. Here’s how the First Lady described the hellish odyssey of a mother in the supermarket under the current regime:

So there you stood, alone in some aisle in a store, the clock ticking away at the precious little time remaining to complete your weekly grocery shopping, and all you could do was scratch your head, confused and bewildered, and wonder, is there too much sugar in this product? Is 50 percent of the daily allowance of riboflavin a good thing or a bad thing? And how on Earth could this teeny little package contain five whole servings?

This stream of questions and worries running through your head when all you really wanted to know was, should I be eating this or not? Is this good for my kids or not? And if it is healthy, how much of it should I be eating? But unless you had a thesaurus, a calculator, a microscope, or a degree in nutrition, you were out of luck. So you felt defeated, and you just gave up and went back to buying the same stuff you always buy.

I’m not sure who these mothers are who find themselves overmatched by the grocery store, but it seems to me they probably need more help than just better labels on food. For the rest of us — all of whom seem capable of acquiring foodstuffs without an epistemic shutdown — this remains a $2 billion exercise in irrelevancy.

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