Actually, my headline is wrong. Fast food is absolutely a battlefront in the culture war. But that's part of the misdirection I wrote in my previous post.

Those who would make the questions of health and fast food into a culture war — "Get away from my French fries, Mrs.Obama," Glenn Beck said a while back — do so because there's no way to win, or lose, a culture war, and stalemate benefits their side.

Beck's not the only one, by far. There are the shameless yahoos at "Center for Consumer Freedom," which is an intentionally misnomered front for the food and restaurant industries, and there's this guy, quoted in the LA Times story:

"We were sitting here at a board meeting trying to figure out how we wound up on the front lines of the culture wars," Conway said. "We're trying to feed people, and here we are in the cross hairs every single day." [Conway is Daniel Conway, spokesman and lobbyist for the California Restaurant Association.]

Oh, those poor, put-upon, picked-on do-gooders! But I digress — I am prone to digression anyway, and these people count on drawing attention away from the point. But not this time.

The important issues here are health and nutrition, not your cultural leanings. Our health and nutrition are substandard. What are we going to do about it? Reducing it to a culture issue will not solve this, or solve anything.