Ignorance and Corruption

Yesterday, I read a wonderful column by Michelle Malkin where she decries Michelle Obama's campaign against foods including "cheese dust" because it seems that the Obamas earned hundreds of thousands of dollars on the board of "Tree House Foods", a manufacturer of things like store brand macaroni and cheese.

Now on one level, Mrs. Obama's rant is hilarious because cheese dust is, indeed, food.  Specifically, if you look at the label of foods containing it, it's powdered whey, the same kind of thing used on protein drinks and those "muscle milk" canisters that GNC and others make a mint selling.  It's also the same stuff used to make baby formula that is pushed so hard by WIC.   Not only is it food, but it's also a dairy product, high in protein, but without high levels of butterfat.  Admitting quibbles over whether low fat diets actually are healthy, it's right up the power alley of a lot of dieticians.  They'd tell us that it's not only food, but also good food.

A byproduct of cheese making, it's historically fed to pigs, and hence one might also infer that it may also be more environmentally responsible--adding a pound of muscle to a pig to get pork protein takes more than a pound of whey, after all, and hog production is known to have some deleterious (and hilarious) side effects.

But instead of doing the hard work of "reading the label" and spending ten minutes learning that "cheese dust" is indeed a healthy part of many foods we eat, Mrs. Obama and her daughter, oblivious to the fact that curds are not whey, decided to try to pulverize an innocent piece of cheddar.

And that brings me to the "corruption" issue.  Mrs. Obama, despite apparently not having enough expertise in food preparation to read the first few words of the ingredients list, just happened to be elected to Tree House's board just after her husband was elected to the Senate.

One wonders what Tree House did between 2005 and now to earn Mrs. Obama's ire.  Maybe they didn't contribute enough to Barack's reelection fund, and hence she's leveraging her complete lack of expertise in food to wedge them out of a business that keeps a lot of people fed.  And don't forget for a minute; the drive to "improve" school lunches and childhood nutrition is being led by a woman who apparently cannot read a list of ingredients.