I have always had a fair deal of respect for nutritionist Rosemary Stanton but realised yesterday that this is only because I haven’t been paying attention.
Not sure if the rest of you caught it, but Mrs Stanton has launched a pretty out-there tirade against Bindy Irwin’s new commercial deal as the public face of a particularly sinister company.
Not Union Carbide or Exxon or British Aerospace but the baking products conglomerate Greens General Foods, one of the shadiest players in the evil cake trade.
We’re not speaking here of the mythical drug also known as “cake”, made famous in the British news parody Brass Eye, but package cake mix, made from flour, sugar, baking powder, and flavourings such as cocoa, vanilla and orange.
Greens has been peddling the stuff for years.
Pushing it onto time-poor mums, getting kids hooked on it from an early age, using its addictive sweetness and energy-giving qualities to lure them into eating it by the slice after school - even hiding it in their lunch boxes so they can take it onto school grounds and get a fix at little lunch.
Well, Mrs Stanton has now blown the whistle on this practice - and taken aim at those irresponsible Irwins as part of the deal.
The first troubling thing about Mrs Stanton’s spray is the small matter of Steve Irwin’s death. That tragedy should make the Irwin family pretty much immune on the grounds of decency from any kind of frivolous sledging. It should also be factored into the thinking of any would-be critic as perhaps being the very reason why Terri Irwin needs to form a business partnership with a reputable family company such as Greens.
Mrs Stanton managed to negotiate her way past the taste question as she had a bigger target in mind.
Cake.
Mrs Stanton took issue with the images of Bindi and little Bob helping their Mum bake a cake in the kitchen, and even licking the spoon.
“The message that comes across to kids is “it’s OK to eat cake because Bindi Irwin does” - I think it’s very sad,” Stanton said.
“Children are very trusting, so they actually think Bindi wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t right.”
“I think it’s a bit of exploitation of her as well because she wouldn’t possibly be old enough to understand the impact that this could have.”
“It’s wrong to target kids in trying to sell stuff to other kids. It makes it very difficult for parents to then resist the pleas of their children.”
It’s a good thing Mrs Stanton doesn’t know our address, or the addresses of our many mates with young kids, as we’ve all adopted a totally reckless attitude to child-rearing where we regard baking the odd cake with the kids as enjoyable family time, a great way to introduce them to cooking, especially with a good packet mix because they can do it all by themselves, with the added bonus that you can eat something tasty afterwards or take it down to the park for a picnic. We’re lucky DOCS haven’t come around.
It’s cloud cuckoo land stuff which wouldn’t matter if not for the fact that Rosemary Stanton, author of 25 books on diet and nutrition, is on the Federal Government speed-dial for advice on health and wellbeing issues, one of those superficially innocuous right-thinking people who only has all our interests at heart.
(Googling her last night I found an interesting link to a lecture of hers on “Ethical Eating” on the ABC’s Fora website, where she suggested food prices could be artificially inflated so that our farmers no longer had to export produce, which would not only make food production more sustainable, but solve the “starving pensioner” problem once and for all.)
The other thing about the cake issue - Terri Irwin has only agreed to the deal because Greens has made a sizeable contribution to Steve’s ongoing wildlife and conservation protection programs, and are using their products to increase childrens’ awareness of endangered species through school bag tags.
Which if you’re Rosemary Stanton probably just proves that, like any other pusher, cake dealers will do anything to get people hooked.
Anyway here’s a link to Greens Traditional Chocolate Cake. Buy some and feed it to your kids.
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