Guest Author
“I never drink water because of the disgusting things that fish do in it.”- W. C. Fields
First Lady Michelle Obama once again is trying to get Americans to eat, and now drink, healthier.
She announced last week a new initiative called “Drink Up” that will try to get more Americans to drink water rather than other beverages that can make you fat.
“I’ve come to realize that if we were going to take just one step to make ourselves and our families healthier, probably the single best thing we could do is to simply drink more water,” Obama said in a statement.
Michelle Obama has focused her efforts as First Lady on trying to get Americans to slim down and eat better with a “Let’s Move” initiative. So far, she experienced what could be termed at best limited success while enduring heavy criticized by opponents on the right for her health-oriented campaign.
Like Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City found out with his efforts to limit the size and sale of soda drinks, the First Lady has discovered that many Americans don’t like it when their government tells them what to eat or drink.
She led her husband’s administration effort in her “Let’s Move” campaign to try to get school children to eat better school lunches with the passage of Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, but faced stiff resistance from the onset because she was perceived as pushing government to subrogate the roles of parents in deciding what their child should eat. (Read my 2011 article on the issue).
Then last year, the school children themselves rebelled against the change from hot dogs and hamburgers to salads and yogurt. Suddenly, school districts were reporting double digit drops in the percentage of children buying lunch as well as massive waste from kids either not eating at all or throwing out the healthier food they were given on the lunch line.
So in her latest “Let’s Move” initiative, the First Lady has taken what would seem to be a rather innocuous and common sense approach toward good health by suggesting that Americans drink more water.
But still, she does not seem to get it. If you can’t tell Americans what to eat, you certainly can’t tell them what to drink, even if it makes a lot of sense.
Her announcement of the initiative in Watertown, Wisconsin (groan) once again raised the expected ire of conservatives and libertarians. But this time, she also got flak from environmentalists concerned with her alliance with companies that serve their aqua in those nasty plastic bottles that clutter our landfills and roadsides. Even some public health professionals criticized the initiative as overselling the benefits of water.
The job of First Lady is not easy. When their husbands get elected, they find themselves not only tasked with running the White House and being America’s “Official Hostess,” but dealing with high expectations that they use their position to make a great impact on our society.
We’ve seen a variety of first ladies come and go, and depending on their personalities, their intellect, and their actual interest in the job, some have played important roles in promoting causes and producing major change in American society.
Take Eleanor Roosevelt, for example. She really set the bar for future first ladies. Known as the 20th century’s great social worker, Roosevelt became a powerful force of persuasion for the New Deal and the budding civil rights movement shortly after her husband’s election in 1932.
While the “drinking more water” effort is by far Michelle Obama’s best effort to educate rather than dictate what Americans should and should not eat, she may want to spend the last three years of her time in the White House taking a different approach.
If she actually shopped in a grocery store, she would find that the healthier foods on the outer aisle of American supermarkets are much more expensive, especially the organic fruits, vegetable and dairy items, than those caloric foodstuffs found in the middle rows — and that really determines more than anything else how we eat in the U.S.
If for the next three years Michelle Obama would push legislation and agricultural policy so that the price of organic chicken would be the same as two or three boxes of pasta, that would cause Americans to raiser their water bottles high and toast her as the next Eleanor Roosevelt.
