You may have noted my post yesterday on the lawsuit filed in California to prevent toys being used to entice young children to bay for a particular fast-food meal. I'm against marketing of unhealthy food to kids too young to distinguish between reality and advertising puffery, so I'm for the suit.

Here's how a monied special-interest group pimping for the restaurant and food-products industry framed the suit (no link provided, intentionally): 

At the Huffington Post, Kerry Trueman, co-founder of eatingliberally,org, asks Marion Nestle about why the food wars have become a red state/blue state issue.

The Bakersfield Californian publishes my op-ed on the food industry's efforts to escape responsibility for what its products are doing to Americans, while harping on the eater's responsibility for choosing what it makes.

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel also ran the piece.

One of my repeating tropes lately has been to ask those who rail against government involvement in setting nutrition standards, "what's your solution?" To me, it's not enough to wax nostalgic on parental guidance as the way to resolve the national obesity crisis, not necessarily because it wouldn't work, but because so few are using it!

Anyone who gives thought to food politics knows that it is supremely fugged up.

* We subsidize corn to the point that no bushel grown in the US would make a profit if not for Uncle Sam's contribution.

* Through the subsidies, we urge our fellow citizens to eat processed food at the expense of fresh. 

* Even nuttier, we never intended that outcome, but the chance of changing it is all but nil, because the situation is locked in by lobbyists.

Here's an approximation of a letter I sent to the San Francisco city supervisor who is the swing vote in an effort to bar toys from being used as incentives to purchase food:

One in three children born today will develop Type 2 diabetes in their lifetime. Based on current rates of overweight and obesity, more will suffer a range of debilitating chronic diseases related to diet.

I haven't recently visited the boneheads at the "Center for Consumer Freedom" (an intentionally misleading name for a bunch of restaurant and food-service industry interests) for a while, but not because they've stopped being boneheads. I just decided that it wasn't good for my soul to speak only negatively, and there is nothing (OK, very little that I'm aware of) else that can be said of these ... people.

To hear their reps talk, Corporate Accountability International is a giant killer: "Every campaign we take on, we win," is how Sarah Holzgraf put it last night at a gathering in Cambridge, one of 60 the group is organizing in Massachusetts in support of its newest foray, the Value [the] Meal campaign.

To win this one, it will have to be. Here are its goals:

I just got a query asking if I would come to Washington in a couple of weeks to lobby for a renewable energy bill. No way I can do it, but wanted to pass along the details to others who might. You'll see that the letter writer asks for others who might be interested:

A majority of Californians support a tax on soda to help fund childhood obesity reduction programs, according to a poll carried out on behalf of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy and reported at foodnavigator.com.