Michelle Obama

Subway Surpasses McDonald’s

by Kathryn Ciano on March 10, 2011

in Economy

It’s a new era in fast food. Last decade everyone was asking which food was the healthiest. Now growth is global, and it all comes down to dominance. The bigger they are, the bigger they’ll get.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Subway has trumped McDonald’s in the US and abroad, though McDo continues to rule in sales dollars:

At the end of last year, Subway had 33,749 restaurants worldwide, compared to McDonald’s 32,737. The burger giant disclosed its year-end store count in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing late last month.

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Subway has achieved its rapid growth, in part, by opening outlets in non-traditional locations such as an automobile showroom in California, an appliance store in Brazil, a ferry terminal in Seattle, a riverboat in Germany, a zoo in Taiwan, a Goodwill store in South Carolina, a high school in Detroit and a church in Buffalo, New York.

“We’re continually looking at just about any opportunity for someone to buy a sandwich, wherever that might be. The closer we can get to the customer, the better,” Mr. Fertman says, explaining that it now has almost 8,000 Subways in unusual locations. “The non-traditional is becoming traditional.”

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Potato Diet Improves Man’s Health; Obama Administration Bans Potatoes from WIC Program

by Hans Bader on December 27, 2010 · 1 comment

in Health and Illness, Nanny State, Personal Liberty

Chris Voigt lost 21 pounds and improved his health by living on a potato-only diet for 60 days.  Potatoes are more nutritious than other starchy foods like rice and bread, and “are a good source of vitamins.”  They have a lot of vitamin C (much more than a banana or an apple), and potassium levels slightly higher than potassium-rich bananas).

But the Obama administration, which does not understand nutrition, has banned white potatoes from the WIC program (for school lunches and poor mothers), based on the false belief that potatoes are unhealthy.  (Yet critics of the Obama administration’s food nannyism get lectures from liberal journalists.)

Potatoes are critically important in providing the poor with cheap, nutritious food.  As Voigt notes,”In 2008, the United Nations declared it to be the ‘Year of the Potato’. This was done to bring attention to the fact that the potato is one of the most efficient crops for developing nations to grow, as a way of delivering a high level of nutrition to growing populations, with fewer needed resources than other traditional crops. In the summer of 2010, China approved new government policies that positioned the potato as the key crop to feed its growing population.”

After they were brought from America to Europe, potatoes “rescued the Western World” from recurrent famines, and made the Industrial Revolution possible.  They did this by radically increasing the amount of food that hungry peasants could grow per acre, and by enabling farmers to provide the agricultural surplus that would feed burgeoning industrial populations.

In addition to trying to take away poor people’s potatoes, the Obama administration has pushed ethanol subsidies that turn food into fuel and contribute to a “global food crisis” by spawning famines overseas.  The Obama administration is also using federal funds to subsidize the opening of an International House of Pancakes in Washington, D.C., and the development of high-calorie foods that benefit politically connected agribusinesses.

Afternoon Links: October 8, 2010

by Nicole Ciandella on October 8, 2010

in Zeitgeist

1. A young Arab-American in California found a tracking device on his car and removed it. A couple days later, the FBI showed up at his door. They asked for their tracker back and told him, “You don’t need to call your lawyer. Don’t worry. You’re boring.”

2. Mark Zuckerberg talks to Slate about Facebook’s solution to the “audience problem.”

3. The Social Security Administration is reporting that 72,000 dead people received a total of $18 million in stimulus payments.

4. Daily Beast correspondent (and self-proclaimed libertarian) Tunku Varadarajan slams Forbes for naming Michelle Obama “the most powerful woman in the world.” (Varadarajan is a former Forbes Opinion editor.)

5. Reason TV presents “3 Reasons Obama’s Education Vision Deserves an F.”

LibertyWeek 96: Donut Day Disobedience

by Richard Morrison on June 8, 2010

in CEI Projects, Features, Podcast, Zeitgeist

Richard Morrison and Marc Scribner welcome Chris Horner, Sam Kazman, and Ryan Radia to Episode 96 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We cover Chicago’s dishonorable gun restrictions, a special interview with bestselling author Christopher C. Horner, civil disobedience on National Donut Day, a shout out to CEI’s annual dinner gala and the FTC’s proposed “Drudge Report Tax”.

Post-Modern Food Fetish

by Greg Conko on March 25, 2009 · 1 comment

in Agriculture, Culture, Environment, Nanny State, Natural Resources, Regulation, Zeitgeist

I got a good laugh reading this Slate article last night about the First Family’s new vegetable garden on the White House lawn. What struck me most was the article’s sub-title: “Of all the reasons to plant a garden, free food may be the worst.” The author, Jennifer Reese, quotes California cuisine guru Alice Waters praising the stunt. “To have this sort of ‘victory’ garden, this message goes out that everyone can grow a garden and have free food,” said Waters.

Reese doesn’t countenance that kind of, shall we say, natural fertilizer:

Gardens and the food they produce are anything but free, and to suggest otherwise is romantic pastoral nonsense. … It takes many, many hours of toil before you harvest enough “free” eggplant and bell peppers to make a bowl of ratatouille. Though I doubt the Obamas will experience much of this, gardening is incredibly messy, ruins your hands, wears holes in the knees of your jeans, ends up costing 40 times more than you think it will, sucks up whole weekends in a single gulp, takes over your dreams, and frequently breaks your heart.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania — spitting distance from the West Virginia border — amidst mile after mile of dairy and truck farms. My own parents were not farmers. But, as children of the Depression, they tried to save money any way they could, and they kept several vegetable gardens that in any given year dwarfed the land surface area of my first three homes combined. That, in turn, meant dozens upon dozens of hours in the spring, summer, and fall for Dad, Mom, my siblings and me preparing seed beds and planting, pulling and hoeing weeds, and picking beans, peas, tomatoes, squash, sweet corn, lettuce, parsley, onions, carrots, parsnips, beets, peppers, and various fruits and berries. Worst was the back-breaking work of digging and harvesting row after row after row of potatoes.

To a pre-teen and then teenage kid, that sort of work seemed to be the worst possible way to spend a spring weekend or summer afternoon. But, my family were pikers compared to those of many of the kids I went to school with. People who actually farm for a living have it far far worse — up before dawn to milk the cows, then off to school, and immediately back home to help with another milking. Indeed, there’s very little that’s romantic about keeping a big backyard garden, and less still about the actual practice of producing meaningful amounts of food. But, of course, last Thursday’s photo op may be the last time any member of the First Family has to actually do it. Reese writes, “By Mrs. Obama’s own admission, the White House vegetable patch will be tended mostly by the White House staff.” It would, in fact, be good for this country’s kids to know more about where their food comes from. But, the First Lady’s Potemkin Garden certainly won’t teach them.