The new food documentary Fed Up, which rails against foods and drinks sweetened with added sugar and pegs these foods and beverages as the single source of childhood obesity, has garnered much attention from the national press (if not from actual moviegoers). The movie's producers, including veteran news personality Katie Couric—who also narrates—bill Fed Up as "the film the food industry doesn’t want you to see."
Keep Food Legal executive director Baylen Linnekin saw the film last week, and wrote about it in his weekly Reason column. Linnekin is critical of the film. He notes that Fed Up is quick (and wrong) to blame food companies for causing an increase in childhood obesity, but is virtually silent on the issue of farm subsidies and other government policies that promote and protect the farmers who grow the corn, beets, and sugarcane that are turned into the sweeteners used by those very same corporations. In fact, as Linnekin notes, the first mention of farm subsidies and sugar tariffs doesn't occur until nearly an hour into the 90-minute film.
Meanwhile, the film shines a heroic light on former President Bill Clinton, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), and USDA secretary Tom Vilsack—who each has had a role in pushing those same subsidies and tariffs. Sen. Harkin, for example, speaks of his own tireless efforts to reduce childhood obesity in the context of reducing sugar consumption. Yet in 2006, Sen. Harkin bragged that "Iowa lead[s] the nation in corn and high fructose corn syrup production."
Journalist and author Michael Pollan speaks what little sense on the issue appears in the documentary. “The government is subsidizing the obesity epidemic,” says Pollan partway into the movie. But there's little outside of his remarks to like about the film.
Fed Up veers off the rails particularly in its use of several shopworn, non sequitur policy solutions it claims will fight childhood obesity. It suggests restricting food marketing aimed at kids. This is both unconstitutional and irrational, as the First Amendment protects truthful advertising of legal products, and kids do not make purchasing decisions. Another suggestion—taxing food or drink that contains sugar and other caloric sweeteners—punishes taxpayers twice, first by continuing to use taxpayer money to subsidize and protect farmers who grow crops that are used as sweeteners and again as punishment for buying the very products that contain those sweeteners. Couric herself concludes that two specific policy steps to reduce obesity are 1) warning labels on cans of soda and 2) requiring celebrities who act as pitchmen for so-called junk foods to also be required to pitch a vegetable. Each of these ideas is worth pitching—into the rubbish.
The nation's grocery manufacturers were quick to criticize Fed Up as “a short-sighted, confrontational and misleading approach [that resorts to] cherry-picking facts to fit a narrative." We agree.
To read Linnekin's Reason review of Fed Up, click here.
