Lot of lectures by the creator of Supersize Me, Morgan Spurlock. I was expecting it to be all about the documentary but that was only a small portion, maybe a third. Those parts were really interesting--how he threw up on the first (or was it second?) day; how sluggish he felt, almost from the beginning; how he got to where he hated the food even while he craved the sugar-fat rush he got from it; how his metabolic indicators plummeted so badly that his doctors were alarmed and wanted to take him off the "diet".
But mainly it was lectures on topics only too familiar these days--what fast food is made of, where it comes from, why it's so cheap. More shocking is his description of how junk food is marketed to children from a freakishly early age. Fast food has the money to fund video game development, school activities, and even sports games. I wonder how fast you'd be ejected if you'd tried to hawk Burger King products at the 2012 Olympics?
He spoke of, but didn't attempt to quantify the ultimate cost to society of the stuff. It's a hard number to quantify, but I think we'd find that the our dollar menu chicken nuggets ends up costing us five times that. Too bad we can't make junk food manufacturers subsidize health care.
If you don't already know all this, read this book. You'll start to wonder when Big Macs will start coming with warning labels--and you'll know why they never will.
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