Justin Timberlake may be “lovin it,” and Beyonce may be praising Pepsi (for $50 million), but take those celebrity endorsements with a grain of salt: they’re nearly always bad for you (surprise, surprise), according to a new study.

The study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics, was carried out by a team of NYU researchers. They found that of 163 of the most popular music industry celebrities (a group they designated by examining Billboard’s 2013 and 2014 “Hot 100” lists) 65 had endorsed food and non-alcoholic beverages, most of which were fast foods, sugary drinks, and desserts: will.i.am and Doritos, Jessie J and Pop Tarts, Pitbull and Sheets Energy Strips, and Carrie Underwood and Hershey, are just some of many celebrity endorsements that made the list.

Of the 26 food products endorsed in the study, 81 percent were deemed “nutrient poor,” and 71 percent of the 69 beverages were high in sugar. Only one food on the list – pistachios, which were endorsed by Korean star Psy and late night talk show host Stephen Colbert – was deemed healthy.

The study’s lead researcher, Marie Bragg, compared these endorsements to old-school tobacco marketing, according to the Washington Post, highlighting the prominence that advertising has long given unhealthy habits.

While the study didn’t analyze how endorsements influence consumption, one anecdote illustrates what seems obvious to most who see this information.

“When Dr. Pepper asked Pitbull to endorse, they got 4.6 million advertising impressions, and sales went up 1.7 percent [among Latinos] — despite declining sales in the overall soft drink category,” Bragg told NPR. Other studies have shown that teens and young adults who liked hit songs that referenced alcohol brands were more likely to drink than those who didn’t; the link is there, and it is strong.

“We hope that this study will start a discussion about shifting this marketing away from unhealthy products,” Bragg said following the publication of these results.

Currently, however, the money is in unhealthy foods, and it’s making all the difference when it comes to America’s obesity epidemic.

“The popularity of music celebrities among adolescents makes them uniquely poised to serve as positive role models,” said one of the researchers, Alysa N. Miller. “Celebrities should be aware that their endorsements could exacerbate society’s struggle with obesity – and they should endorse healthy products instead.”

Some efforts have been made to this effect, especially with the trend of cleaner food and more transparency in the industry. Celebs like Cam Newton, Kristen Bell, and Jessica Alba have endorsed the Partnership for a Healthier America — at quite a pay cut as compared to their fast-food-loving colleagues –, and Venus Williams and DJ Khaled were recently seen in an endorsement for Silk plant-based milks.

Let’s hope that despite the millions that are up for grabs in celebrity endorsements for unhealthy foods, this healthy endorsement trend continues, and that celebs posing with cans of sugary soda or fatty snacks will soon be as distant a memory as doctors vouching for their favorite cigarette brands.

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Beyonce image via Shutterstock

The post Celebrity Endorsements are a Huge Part of America’s Obesity Problem appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnIf you eat at a restaurant or fast food chain, you won’t get served a pill of antibiotics with your meal, but big chain restaurants across the U.S. are full of products that are dependent on antibiotics to get them from the factory farm to your table.

We have taken a look at the issue of antibiotic use before. In the U.S., 70 to 80 percent of the antibiotics go to factory farms, and most of the antibiotic use is preventative, called “non-therapeutic” because the conditions at many factory farms are so bad that giving animals antibiotics is simply a way to ensure animals don’t get sick.

Why should we worry if there are antibiotics in our food? First and foremost, because scientists around the globe are warning us about the severe threat of antibiotic resistant bacteria, what some refer to as the issue of “superbugs.”  For World Health Day in 2011, the World Health Organization took on the issue, noting “in the absence of urgent corrective and protective actions, the world is heading towards a post-antibiotic era, in which many common infections will no longer have a cure and, once again, kill unabated.” But that was 2011 and things haven’t really improved.In November, the WHO will hold the first ever World Antibiotic Awareness Week in the hopes of raising awareness and tackling the issue.

There is also a growing group of scientists who are talking about the link between antibiotic use and obesity, the most recent a study focused on children which showed a connection between antibiotics and childhood obesity.

Knowing that so many of the antibiotics in the U.S. go to factory farms, part of solving the problem is putting pressure on not only the farms that are antibiotic dependent, but also the restaurants and food brands that use their products.

Last week Friends of the Earth published a new report that gives a grim look at restaurants and the use of antibiotics in their meat supply. Of the top 25 American restaurant chains, all but five received a failing grade.

There is some movement, but it’s slow. As you can see from the graphic, the majority of the restaurant chains are right at the bottom. Panera and Chipotle are the only two who publicly state that the majority of their meat and poultry served is raised without antibiotics. McDonald’s has established policies limiting antibiotic use in the chicken that they use, along with an implementation timeline. Other chains like many at the bottom have absolutely no policies in place at all.

Given the ramifications of the overuse of antibiotics, the lack of policies at these huge food chains is significant.

“In order to protect the health and wellbeing of humans and animals alike, the way we perceive animals and how we raise them for food has to shift dramatically,” wrote Cameron Harsh in a blog for Center for Food Safety.

The report is a call to action to consumers to challenge these companies to change their policies. While action from the FDA is crucial in applying stricter guidelines on antibiotic use, we as consumers also need to challenge more restaurants and food chains to rethink and change what products they buy. Want to take action immediately? Sign FOE’s letter calling on Subway to change its policies.

We do have power; we just have to use it.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

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The post Antibiotics are Everywhere in American Fast Food: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

Column Even if you don’t buy them, novelty food products like pizzas surrounded by pigs in a blanket are destroying our health and our food culture. 

My friend Brendan sent me a link a couple of weeks ago to the announcement that American fast food chain Carl’s Jr. would be serving hamburgers with hot dogs and chips inside (it’s called “The Most American Thickburger”). Brendan and I have a mutual disgust, yet obsession, with industrial novelty foods; it’s like watching a train wreck, what you see is so obscene and yet you just can’t turn away.

Which is probably why he knew I would fall off my chair when he sent me a link to Pizza Hut’s new pizza surrounded by pigs in a blanket. I just didn’t know what to say. A pizza with a crust made of pigs in a blanket. Yes, someone thought that was a good idea. Thanks for making me hate the world, Brendan.

Cringe in disgust all you want, but there are people out there actually buying this stuff, and a lot of it. If they weren’t, companies wouldn’t be making it. Nowadays, there is practically a new novelty food product coming out every week, making it not so novel anymore. Novelty foods have become the new normal, and they’re killing us.

As more and more novelty foods (hotdog and chips hamburgers, cronut sandwiches, waffle tacos, etc) flood the market, they become normalized. Certainly no one is ordering a pigs in a blanket pizza every single night of the week (or at least I very much hope not), but menu items like this have an affect on our overall food culture. As novelty food products become expected on a regular basis, overall calories and portions increase across the board. No one is satisfied with just a mediocre hamburger anymore, they need a hamburger with four patties. In an effort to beat out their competitors, food companies are forced to come out with crazier, and crazier combinations to pull people in at the supermarket and in the fast food restaurant, a continuous battle of one-upping each other by figuring out who can come out with the grossest, yet. Given all the health ramifications, this is the kind of the thing that should be illegal, or at the very least, highly regulated.

By being wowed by such items, we are destroying our health and our food culture one pig in a blanket at a time.

The problem lies not only in the content, but also in the quantity. We have created a culture where we’d rather eat ten awful things than one good thing. That’s our real eating problem. Instead of indulging in one item made with quality ingredients, let’s say, a homemade cinnamon roll for example, we stuff ourselves with several low quality items – sugar-free, low fat, packaged raspberry dream flavored muffins – and aren’t any happier or healthier because of it.

“Oh, she’s against having fun with food,” you say. Sure, everyone needs a guilty pleasure every once in awhile, and we all have them. Maybe you might even want to try a pizza surrounded by pigs in a blanket just once. But there’s a difference between novelty and the norm. I’m not arguing for a culture of upscale, fancy food, but could we at least have one with real food?

If we are going to solve our problem of public health – and it’s a problem that isn’t exclusive to the United States, as our fast food chains and industrial food culture spread around the world, plenty of countries are dealing with the same issues – we have to seriously think about how to curb this kind of food mania. Maybe it’s restrictions on the food market, maybe it’s taxes, maybe it’s subsidizing healthy food, because there is a correlation between food prices and health, maybe it’s simply holding these companies responsible for the true cost of their food products.

Part of why we are unhealthy is that in the U.S. we are subsidizing those commodities that keep us unhealthy. Let’s look at it this way: in 2012, the U.S. government spent $11 billion to subsidize and insure commodity crops like corn and soy. The year before, in 2011, it spent only $1.6 billion to subsidize and insure “specialty crops” – the government word that’s used to refer to the stuff we should be eating, like fruits and vegetables. That hamburger might not look like a piece of corn, but think about how much corn goes into feeding the beef industry in the U.S. every year. It’s a lot, and it’s highly inefficient; for corn-fed animals, the efficiency of converting grain to meat and dairy calories is in the 3-40 percent range depending on the product.

Industrial food culture is dependent on industrial agriculture, and if the proliferation of these novelty food products is increasing, it’s because the ingredients are cheap, but we don’t pay the real costs. Because along with that hot dog and chips burger is a laundry list of environmental, social and health costs. At the very least, we have to call these companies out for what they’re really doing. They’re not feeding us, or entertaining us, or making it easier to put food on the table.

They’re just making us sick.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

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The post What’s the Problem with Novelty Food Products? They’re the New Normal: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnYou can’t outrun a bad diet, but big food companies want you to think you can.

A healthy lifestyle is one that involves eating well and getting regular physical activity. You don’t need to be a scientist to know that. But are we sold a myth that is only a half truth?

In a world with skyrocketing obesity rates, we are constantly looking for the solution. Do people just need to be more active? Do they just need to make sure they only consume a certain amount of calories every day? An editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine points the finger at big food companies, saying that they have mislead us in the thinking that maintaining a healthy weight is all about calorie counting and exercising.

The authors write that “members of the public are drowned by an unhelpful message about maintaining a ‘healthy weight’ through calorie counting, and many still wrongly believe that obesity is entirely due to lack of exercise. This false perception is rooted in the Food Industry’s Public Relations machinery, which uses tactics chillingly similar to those of big tobacco.”

It’s true that many are more focused on how many calories they consume as opposed to where those calories come from. A 300-calorie fast food burger and a 300-calorie meal made from lentils and leafy greens is an entirely different thing. And if you eat that fast food burger, going for a workout afterwards isn’t necessarily going to help you either.

The authors of the editorial note that in an analysis of worldwide sugar availability, it was shown that for every excess 150 calories of sugar (ie what’s in a can of cola), type 2 diabetes was 11 times more prevalent, compared to when those 150 calories came from fat or protein. Where your calories come from matters.

But big food businesses have big advertising, marketing and lobbying budgets, and they can push any message that they want. “Coca Cola, who spent $3.3 billion on advertising in 2013, pushes a message that ‘all calories count’; they associate their products with sport, suggesting it is ok to consume their drinks as long as you exercise,” write the authors. “However science tells us this is misleading and wrong. It is where the calories come from that is crucial. Sugar calories promote fat storage and hunger. Fat calories induce fullness or ‘satiation’.”

Of course, it’s much easier for these companies to put the blame on the individual consumer than it is to change their business model. If you’re gaining weight it’s your fault for not counting your calories and not exercising enough. It’s certainly not the fault of the company that’s pumping sugar, salt and fat into the economy at enormous rates.

At some point, if we really want to deal with the public health issue then we are going to need to take a stand for government intervention, much like how we dealt with tobacco. But as the authors of the article note, the food industry uses the exact same tactics used by the tobacco industry; tactics that allowed the industry to keep functioning unchecked for decades. “The tobacco industry successfully stalled government intervention for 50 years starting from when the first links between smoking and lung cancer were published. This sabotage was achieved using a ‘corporate playbook’ of denial, doubt, confusing the public and even buying the loyalty of bent scientists, at the cost of millions of lives.”

Want to live a healthy lifestyle? Eat well, get regular exercise. But also, stand up against the big food companies that continue to make us sick.

We all need to take personal responsibility for our health, but these companies should take some corporate responsibility as well.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

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The post Are Big Food Companies Pushing an Exercise and Obesity Myth? Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

Column Fast food isn’t just bad, over the last two decades, it has gotten worse.

While you were partying away to celebrate the arrival of the New Year, you might have missed the latest study about fast food. Spoiler alert: it’s still bad for you. Actually, a lot of it is worse for you than it used to be.

Researchers at Tufts University took a look at nutritional information at three unnamed fast food chains (the Los Angeles Times thinks it’s McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s) all the way back to 1996. The findings? While we may think that our culture is a bit more health conscious these days, there has been little change when it comes to fast food nutrition, and it’s definitely not good for us.

“… among the three chains, calories in a large cheeseburger meal, with fries and a regular cola beverage, ranged from 1144 to 1757 over the years and among restaurants, representing 57% to 88% out of the approximately 2000 calories most people should eat per day,”  said Alice H. Lichtenstein, D.Sc., director of the Cardiovascular Nutrition Laboratory at the USDA HNRCA, in a Tufts release. “That does not leave much wiggle room for the rest of the day.”

While a lot of this poor nutrition has simply remained a constant, some of it has gotten even worse. Fries, even the small orders, have more calories than they used to and many of the items studied contain more sodium today than in years past.

Okay, so fast food is bad for you. Don’t we all know that by now? Yes, but that hasn’t changed fast food eating habits. Americans get more than one-third of their calories outside of the home, and of those calories, 40 percent of them come from fast food.

For kids, things are looking really bad. Just last month we learned that fast food might in fact be making children perform worse in school, and that about a third of children in the US are consuming fast food on a daily basis. A daily basis. We’re on a track to being not only fatter, but less intelligent as well.

If that weren’t enough to get you pissed at the fast food companies, consider this: a recent study found that fast food chains are disproportionately marketing fast food products to black communities, who are at a higher risk for obesity, as well as to low to middle income areas. To the tune of $700 million per year. Imagine if every single fast food ad you saw geared to children was replaced with an ad for fresh fruits and vegetables. Or if that $700 million went to supporting farmers to get more vegetables into schools; currently the USDA has a program to do just that, but it taps out at $5 million. Just think what those additional $695 million could do.

Feeling a bit sick yet? You should be. This is why fast food companies are despicable. Not only is their food bad, but their corporate policies are as well. They continually feed us full of stuff they know is bad for us, and they’re happy to do it, since the trifecta of sugar, salt and fat is addictive and keeps us coming back for more.

While it’s a fact that poverty is having a severe effect on nutritional quality – in a system that has allowed “bad” food to externalize their real costs and keep the price tags for consumers low – as it turns out, it’s the middle class, not the poor, are the ones eating the most fast food. In other words, people that can choose to eat better, but simply don’t.

One thing is for sure: we have to start holding fast food companies accountable. If we can, we must boycott them; this isn’t just a choice, it’s a necessity. We must start supporting community programs that provide alternative, and healthier, options for all economic levels. Otherwise, the future looks very grim.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: beaumontpete

The post Surprise! It’s 2015 and Fast Food is Still Bad For You: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnThe Fight for 15 is a reminder that the question of food is also a question of economics.

Cheap burgers and fries produced in mass quantities can only mean one thing: cheap wages. While American society continues to suffer the health consequences of our fast food nation, its workers continue to struggle with the fact that they can barely make ends meet. The average American fast food worker earns around $8.90 an hour. That’s $356 per week, and around $1400 per month.

Wages are so low, that according to one study, half of America’s fast food workers depend on some form of public assistance.

This dismal state of affairs has spurred the “Fight for 15” movement. In the last two years the campaign for fast-food workers to earn $15 an hour has grown, and continues to gain momentum as more and more people stand up for their right to a livable wage. In fact, the New York Times last year called living wages for fast food workers a “rarity” – if you were in that boat, you would fight too.

Fight for 15 is now growing beyond food, adding new sectors to its list of supporters. “The fact of the matter is, it’s not just fast food where you’re being treated a certain way,” 23-year-old RaAnah Killebrew told the Washington Post. “It’s retail, it’s security, it’s hospitals, it’s everywhere, where you’re not making the money you need to make to maintain.”

As the Post highlights, with workers from BP to Shell to Dollar Tree, “nearly every truly low-wage job in America is represented.”

It’s a good reminder that our broken food system isn’t just about access to food, it’s about poverty, and the inability for many families to make ends meet. In a developed country, shouldn’t everyone have the right to be able to make ends meet? In this country we’re good at turning a blind eye to poverty, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Fight for 15’s cause is all the more poignant when we consider recent figures from the country’s food pantries. According to Maura Daly, a spokesperson for Feeding America, because of last year’s cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, food banks are “feeding more people than ever before.” According to Daly, 60 percent of more than 60,000 food pantries have seen an increase in demand this year, and 36 percent say they don’t have enough food to serve the people that come to them for help.

When it comes to food, we often talk about the problem of access, but it’s important to remember that in a world of low wages and poverty, we also need to be talking about the systemic forces at play that make it so that people can’t afford to eat well. It’s a matter of not only ensuring people have access to good food, but that they can afford it as well.

As the International Business Times reports, “While metropolitan areas such as New York are densely populated with large numbers of people without food, the struggle is sometimes harder far from cities, where good food is more expensive and harder to access. She says more than half of the counties with the highest rates of food insecurity are rural.”

Low wages for fast food chain workers allows us to keep serving food whose costs are externalized, it also allows the system to continue to keep workers in poverty, unable to buy the sustenance that they need.

It’s not only our food system that’s broken, it’s the entire system that’s making a bigger and bigger gap between the rich and the poor. There are many programs popping up around the country that are trying to deal with this exact problem; Zenger farm in Portland is a great example. But we need more of this.

Everyone has the right to eat real food. Let’s keep fighting for it.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

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The post The Fight for 15, Poverty and Our Broken Food and Economic Systems: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnEating well isn’t about consuming the trendiest of health foods. It’s simply about cutting all the bad food out.

There are a lot of parallels that we can draw between food and fashion, and in a world where more and more people are conscious about where there food comes from, why not expand that to where their clothes come from as well?

I read an article this week knocking Vivienne Westwood down for comments she had made both about eating and dressing ethically. “Clothes should cost more – they are so subsidized,” she had said. “Food should cost more too – you know something is wrong when you can buy a cooked chicken for £2.” I agree full heartedly, but a Guardian columnist had taken issue with her statement, pointing out that many of us can’t afford to eat well or shop ethically.

She had a point. Many people live on the poverty line, where access to healthy food is but a slim, if not nonexistent, possibility. The same people probably aren’t in a position to buy the latest from the eco-friendly runway.

The columnist continued:

When people are struggling financially, there is no use getting on your high horse about ethical consumption, as I did after the Bangladeshi textiles factory collapse in 2013. Traumatised and angered by an image of a dead, dust-covered couple lying in each other’s arms, I was furious when a friend of mine continued to shop at Primark. Eventually she broke down in tears. “I can’t afford to look nice otherwise,” she told me.

And therein lies the problem. We are told that to dress ethically and look good, we must buy certain brands, shop at certain stores. And in order to eat healthy, we must buy certain brands, and eat certain foods.

But you can’t buy yourself into an ethical lifestyle. In fact, if anything, living more sustainably, with our shopping and eating habits, is about minimizing.

We live in a mass consumption culture, where quantity trumps quality.

Sure, a pair of $200 ethically produced jeans sounds expensive, but that’s because most of us are used to buying a few pairs of jeans at a time. If you’re used to buying 3 pairs of jeans at a time, then $200 is expensive. But what if you only bought one pair? And if you couldn’t survive with just one pair, what if you chose to buy used instead of new? I know plenty of fashionable, “nice” looking people who buy second hand. There is always an alternative, it’s just that marketing and advertising would have us believe otherwise.

The same goes for food. We overeat. We love that $2 chicken because we can’t just buy one, we can buy 10! What if we trimmed our diets, focused on the stuff that’s truly good for us and cut out the rest? You don’t have to be able to afford packaged, spiced kale chips to eat well. The reality is that it’s not adding exotic, imported superfoods into your breakfast that makes you a healthy, smart eater, it’s loading up on the more boring, local, whole foods. Bad foods out, good foods in.

“I can’t afford to look nice” could just as well be “I can’t afford a cold-pressed juice.” Living ethically has become a fashion in itself, something that if we spend enough money, we too can access. Puffed quinoa breakfast bars and soy single origin lattes. But real food isn’t a fashion accessory, it’s a necessity. Without good food, we perish.

And that’s where food has one thing that fashion doesn’t: we need to eat. Certainly, we need to be clothed, but let’s be honest, no one ever died of bad fashion. Bad food, however, is another story.

Pizza, hamburgers, Big Gulps and Slurpees will in fact put you on the fast track to bad health. But you don’t need to buy the latest and greatest packaged health foods in order to avoid going down it. All you need are healthy, whole foods. Cut out the processed stuff, buy more leafy greens and legumes.

As for your jeans? They too have an impact, and if you’re committed to knowing where your food comes from, start thinking about where your clothes come from too.

Most of us in the Western world could easily live with less, in our closets and our pantries, but we have to make the conscious decision to do so. Are you up for it?

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

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The post Bad Fashion Won’t Kill You But Bad Food Will: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

This is totally effed up but also pretty hilarious. Watch these foodies get fooled into thinking McDonald’s is a healthy and tasty alternative…to McDonald’s? Yep. 

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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KFC IS SELLING A CORSAGE WITH FRIED CHICKEN IN IT. YES, I KNOW I HAVE THE CAPS LOCK ON!

I just threw up a little at the news that KFC has released a drumstick corsage just in time for prom season.

Yeah, you read right: It’s a corsage with a hunk of dead, fried chicken in the middle of soft, fragrant flowers.

I’m assuming it’s a marketing ploy to get exactly this type of attention. Healthy food-loving writers like me will tell you how utterly offensive this is. So, of course, rebellious teens will find some kind of demented pleasure in strapping a dead animal to their wrists.

Maybe it’s an effort by a KFC marketing guy who was presumably stood up on his prom? And maybe now he’s trying to humiliate girls by getting grease stains all over their satiny prom dresses?

Or, maybe this is KFC’s commentary on schools nixing fast food? We may have won the battle for healthier school in the lunchroom, but they can sell kids chicken as accessories.

Whatever the reason, it exists. For $20, your date could be wearing a hunk of original recipe chicken. There’s even a slightly disturbing Wes Anderson-y inspired video promoting the corsage. And yes, in case you’re wondering, I watched the whole thing. Mostly though, I was just waiting for the “we’re just kidding! Ha ha fooled you” part. But it never came.

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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ColumnIn the world of fast food restaurants Chipotle has high aspirations, but will it really change the system?

I finally got around to watching the first episode of “Farmed and Dangerous” recently.

For those not in the know, “Farmed and Dangerous” is a comedy series about the world of industrial farming. Available on Hulu, it was all funded by Chipotle. This isn’t Chipotle’s first venture into the world of media. Last year the Mexican fast food chain released “The Scarecrow,” a short animated viral piece that’s intended to get us hating on industrial farms and loving the family ones.

The video earned Chipotle both accolades and negative critique, mostly because the video visually had a lot of pro-vegetarian messaging. Meanwhile you can still buy a meat filled burrito at the chain. As Elizabeth Weiss put it in The New Yorker, “but when Chipotle runs out of sustainable beef, a decidedly less happy cow could end up marinated and grilled and nestled beside our cilantro-lime rice.”

Now Chipotle has stepped it up a notch, producing a four episode series, and “Farmed and Dangerous” is set up as a comedic drama. The gist of it is this: big agriculture versus the little guy. In other words, Chipotle giving industrial agriculture a bit of a slap in the face.

I am all for critiquing the agricultural and food industry – that critique is much needed – and Chipotle is certainly going out on a very shaky limb by producing a series like this. And yet, there’s my cynical side which let’s out a disappointed sigh and says “but, at the end of the day, Chipotle is still a fast food business.”

Clearly there’s a difference between a Taco Bell Waffle Taco (yes, it is a waffle and sausage patty rolled in a taco shape and stuffed with eggs) and a Chipotle burrito, in fact it’s hard to imagine even putting Taco Bell and Chipotle in the same category. But at the same time I can’t help but sense a twinge of greenwashing. We’re talking about fast food after all.

How is Chipotle different from other fast food restaurants?

Chipotle restaurants don’t have freezers, which means getting fresh deliveries of ingredients. That’s many steps beyond most fast food restaurants. The chain is committed to its mantra of “Food with Integrity,” which means sourcing sustainably raised food. In a world where people live by fast food, we need chains like Chipotle.

In fact, Chipotle is positioned to make some big changes. As reported in Fast Company, “Chipotle is now the largest buyer of higher-priced pork, beef, and chicken from animals that have been naturally fed and humanely raised outside of the factory-farming system.”

But we can’t forget that Chipotle is still a big chain. Global in fact.

A friend of mine recounted a story of running into three English speaking women on a busy restaurant street in Paris. She kindly asked if they needed help and she listed off a few nearby gems. “Thanks… but we heard there was a Chipotle around here. Do you know where that is?” responded one of the women.

Chipotle. In Paris.

Granted it’s better than McDonald’s and Burger King. But still.

Let’s break this down simply:

Fast food restaurants are bad. Most of them serve overly processed food that’s sourced from God knows where. But people eat a lot of fast food. If we want to provide people with healthier food options, then part of that is providing healthier fast food options. Chipotle does that. But just because Chipotle is a smarter, more sustainable alternative to standard fast food chains, that shouldn’t keep us from calling it what it is: a fast food restaurant serving fast food. After all, in terms of nutritional numbers, a burrito at Chipotle is right up there with a Big Mac, maybe even a little worse than the burger with a bad name. Fast food is fast food, no matter what bucolic images you serve up with it.

Would the world be better with more Chipotle and less Burger King? Hell yes. Let’s hope that Chipotle really is a force of good. Our food industry could do with a bit of change. But at the same time, don’t go blindly consuming either, always remember to ask what you’re eating and where it came from. Because fast food is still fast food, and the likelihood that you are sitting down and taking the time to enjoy a full meal at Chipotle like you would a meal at home is quite small.

We live in a world of fast food restaurants and changing that world isn’t just about asking what those restaurants are serving. It also involves us thinking about our eating habits in general. And that requires less fast food overall.

Related on EcoSalon

Whole Foods Market, Trendy Vegetables and Food Gentrification: Foodie Underground

Behind the Label: Chipotle, Food With Integrity

Chipotle Labels GMOs… So Should You Still Eat There?

This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Michael Saechang

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