Whack-a-mole

I do enjoy playing Whac-a-Mole when I bring my kids to the arcade. For those of you who don’t get out that much to participate in this sort of amusement, the Whac-A-Mole machine consists of a large, waist-level cabinet with five holes in its top and a large, soft, black mallet. Each hole contains a single plastic mole. Once the game starts, the moles will begin to pop up from their holes at random. The object of the game is to force the individual moles back into their holes by hitting them directly on the head with the mallet, thereby adding to the player’s score. The more quickly this is done the higher the final score will be. As the game goes, on the pace gets faster, sometimes with 2 moles at a time rearing up out of the holes. You’ve got to be fast and hit hard to beat the moles and win the game. Its good exercise and builds hand eye coordination.

As  a parent who is trying to feed their kids the right stuff, I feel we are playing Whac-A-Mole every day with the food industry.  Let me explain my metaphor and see if you agree.

Way back when I was growing up, it was somehow determined that fat made you fat. The food industry responded with loads of “low fat”  and even “fat free” food products. Everyone rushed out to get them. And everyone continued to get fatter, and sicker. Next came the no carb craze and just about over night, everything, even bread, became “low carb” And everyone continued to gain weight and lose their health.

These days, the moles that pop up in the food industry’s Whac-A-Mole game are things like trans fats. We pounded that one down with our mallets, but the food industry responded with palm oil and cottonseed oil: two ingredients that are hurt our health and the health of the planet (as I’ve written about in previous posts) . HFCS was the next bad boy ingredient that popped up in the Whack-A-Mole game, the food industry is responding by renaming high fructose corn syrup into corn sugar and replacing HFCS in some drinks with real sugar. Will that sneaky mole get by us, or will we pound it back into its hole with our mallets?

There is way to win this game. You see, the food industry wins every game as long as we keep putting our money into their system. Bang all the moles you want, but the machine gets your quarter no matter how high the score. What we all need to do is walk away from the Whac-A-Mole game that the food industry has set up.

Invest your money elsewhere in real food that you can believe in. Food that is grown closer to home, food that doesn’t have ingredients you can’t pronounce, food that doesn’t have a fancy marketing budget.  Don’t play their game anymore.

Watch this Whac-A-Mole action and see if you feel the same way when buying standard American food in the supermarket. There really is a better way to eat and to live besides being forced to play continual game of Whac-A-Mole…..