‘Lil FoodSpook Goes to Disneyland, 1957
My mother was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She had eight other siblings. She met a man from Kilgore, Texas. In those, days mothers back then warned their daughters about dating Texas men. My Mom was a very pretty girl. She was very intelligent. She was the eighth of nine children. Somehow she met a man from Texas. They dated and had a tumultuous relationship for a couple of years. My mom decided to bail. Two of my mothers older sisters had already left Louisiana and lived in Los Angeles, California. My mother left her boyfriend and caught a train to California where her sisters were. The year was 1941. World War II was raging in Europe. Hitler was rounding up Jewish people by the millions and killing them in the most barbaric ways you could imagine. He was also exterminating Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill and Blacks. The list goes on.
My mother was kind of a gypsy. Her older sisters were not kind to her when she showed up in Los Angeles. My father caught the same Southern Pacific train out of Shreveport, Louisiana and came to California to find his girlfriend, who later became my mother. My mother’s sisters disapproved of my dad. They thought he was uncouth. His father only allowed him to finish third grade. Whereas my mother’s sisters were all teachers and the brothers were brick masons. Well, you know what happened. They got married.
My parents married in 1942. They moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco to work in the shipyards building Liberty ships to transport our troops and supplies to Europe in WWII. The money was good. War is a very nasty business. Young people die. If you are born into wealth, you won’t die. You won’t be drafted. Overall, wars are very profitable for corporations and even citizens. Millions of people from jerkwater towns all over the country were transmogrified from rural “sod busters” to middle class property owners. My parents were in that first generation of Blacks from the South to become what considered “middle class”.
In 1957 ‘Lil FoodSpook was nine years old. My parents had bought their first home in 1950. Many people, White and Black were still living in WWII built apartments, (aka, war projects). The real point of this article is my experiences as a grade school child in Richmond, California in the 1950’s. When I went to school, I had a lunch box. My dad had a second job working as a butcher in the grocery store across the street from our house. We never new what meat would be served at dinner. I think it was a mystery to my mother each evening also. We got tired of steak. We were well fed. It was also a mystery as to what would be in my lunch box at school the next day. I might have a tuna sandwich and celery sticks or it might be a pork chop between two pieces of Wonder Bread. My favorite was bread pudding. I could trade that for anything that any other kid had in their lunch pail. My first lunch pail had a picture of Mighty Mouse and Pluto. I was really kool. The main thing is, your mother decided what went your lunch pail.
One day my mother asked how would I like to spend the summer with my cousin in Los Angeles. I was delighted, this was my favorite cousin. When school let out for the summer in 1957 my parents put me on a Continental Trailways bus from Richmond to Los Angeles. The bus lines then had “travel attendants”. I lived with my cousin for two months in the summers for four years. My aunt and uncle took us and my cousin’s older sister to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm in Anaheim every summer. We would eat candy apples, cotton candy, salt water taffy and snow cones. When we really got hungry, we got hotdogs or hamburgers. French fries were a real joy. Absolutely no food could be consumed without a glass of Coca-Cola.
America was past the recovery of WWII and the Korean War. They country was building at warp speed. If you were able to take your family to the new Disneyland, you were Somebody. If you could afford to go out Knott’s Berry Farm and have hot dogs and cotton candy, you had achieved Status. Thus the fast food takeover of our eating habits began. The Mickey Mouse Club, Howdy Doody, Bugs Bunny and countless other media presentations and cartoons were invented to entertain my generation. Now in 2008, Disney’s Hanna Montana is the media’s main outlet for bad nutrition. Today ALL media is designed to get people to buy crap foods. These ads especially target our children. The weapons being used today by the corporate world are the same as were being used in the 1950’s. In my childhood days it was Mickey Mouse and Snow White, Twinkies, Snowballs, and Tootsie Rolls. Today foods are much more dangerous and advertising more duplicitous. It benefits the food industry to keep you in doubt about what people like me are saying and also about your own instincts. When you eat think, ‘would I put this food in my child’s lunch’? Think, did I check the amount of sodium in that Campbell’s can of noodle soup that I fixed for my little daughter? You may not realize this fact, the food industry and especially fast food restaurants could not have succeeded without your help. They had to convince you first by using the Colonial, Ronald Macdonald, Nascar and Coke and countless other fast food icons that brainwashed you and in turn, you train your kids into uninformed automatons thinking a soda machine on their elementary schoolyard is perfectly NORMAL. Well, it is not normal. It is not normal for children between the ages of 2 to 25 to develop type II diabetes.
During the past 45 years, 99% of the media we are exposed to, is designed to make you buy something or eat somthing. No company is advertising “don’t eat our food, it will make you fat and give you grave health problems”. It is quite the contrary, “eat our food, it will make you sexy, you’ll make lot of money and will marry a incredible individual. Did I mention , live happily ever after? It is all a LIE! Go to your next Disney animated film. Count the ads for sodas, popcorn, and candy before the film begins. Go to the lobby and look at the people in line at the counters. Look at the people over 35. What do their waistlines look like? Whose standing right beside them? Their children. The adults are teaching their children how to become obese without even realizing what they are doing. I was one of those parents. I have lived long enough to see how I was fooled and how trusting I was.
I’m saying, when you go to DisneyWorld and SeaWorld and any other world, and especially theaters, please understand the price you pay for admission is maybe 3% of their profit for the year. The other 97% is made by selling you and your children tons of processed foods. Chicken nuggets may not be chicken at all. Goofy at Disneyland was not there to be your friend. He’s there to make you feel fuzzy enough to pull your wallet out and buy crap. I ama grandfather. I have two beautiful grown daughters and a grandchild. I know how good I felt to be able to take my daughters to Disneyland and Disney World and buy all the fastest foods they even thought they wanted. My aunt and uncle did the same for me when I was a child. That acquired “good feeling” about fast foods has brainwashed us over the past 40 years by the design of our food industry and has led to obesity and type II diabetes in people in this country in unrepresented numbers
I had a ton of fun with my family visiting these tourist destination over the years. My kids loved the places we took them. Little did I understand how our eating habits were being slowly changed. I unknowingly became a sales person for the fast food industry just by taking my children to these places. I now see my daughter taking my grand-daughter to fast food places. I try to be low key when I get a chance to talk about nutrition. She listens somewhat, but nothing really changes. My daughter is grown now. She is teaching her daughter what I and her mother unwittingly taught her. This blog is just my way of trying to fight this epidemic of obesity and diabetes in America. I was not aware of the dangers of fast foods when my children were young. Back then, we had never heard of transfats or hydrogenated oils. Today we have no excuse. Adults must protect our children and ourselves from the damages caused to our bodies by an uncaring food industry protected by our government. Don’t let Goofy fool you.
