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.
New fast-food restaurants are now banned in South Los Angeles. Say goodbye to many entry-level jobs in that poor urban area. The cockamamie idea behind this ban is that since minorities are disproportionately obese, and since they disproportionately patronize fast-food restaurants, such restaurants are thus guilty of “food apartheid.” (Never mind that many fast-food entrees are not particularly fatty, that baked goods are a bigger source of calories for kids than fast-food items like pizza, and that it is possible to lose weight while regularly eating at McDonald’s, as various people have, including me, Soso Whaley, and a Richmond man who lost 86 pounds.)
On the other hand, a federal judge recently refused to certify a class-action lawsuit against McDonald’s over claims it made people obese.
While liberal busybodies are attacking McDonald’s and other fast-food chains, they are simultaneously using federal tax dollars to subsidize the opening of an International House of Pancakes in Washington, D.C., and the Agriculture Department is subsidizing the development of even higher-calorie entrees at a major restaurant chain.
On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall (see CEI’s video celebrating that), it’s interesting to note that a pizza parlor in Shirlington, VA is promoting heroes of communism and Marxism. And the source of that information is none other than the Washington Post’s Reliable Source today, which records an email exchange between a customer objecting to posters of Vladimir Lenin and Che Guevara on the walls of Busboys and Poets restaurant and the owner’s response praising those two icons.
The customer, Bradley Blakeman, should have known that his pizza would be served with a side dish of leftist politics. After all, the owner of B&P, Andy Shallal, makes no bones about his commitment to leftist causes on his website. And he emailed back to his disgruntled customer (and the Washington Post) that
Guevara and Lenin “represent the struggles of working people. . . . They fought against the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few.”
To be sure, that’s a fairly narrow way of looking at both of these figures. To some prominent scholars, Che is known for his “murderous collectivism,” while Lenin is widely regarded as one of history’s mass murderers.
It doesn’t sound like Blakeman will be a repeat customer at Shallal’s restaurant, but if comments on the Post article are any indication, Shallal will have no trouble finding fellow travelers. Here’s one, for instance:
The lives of Che and Lenin are known and respected in every town of every country in the world in spite of the millions of words written and billions spent trying to rewrite history.
And that is because the struggle they dedicated themselves to is the same struggle working people all over the world today are still fighting.
If only that poster would read a bit of that history, including what the Berlin wall represented.
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