Let Obama Eat Burgers

Here's the nub of Maureen Dowd's latest column: Because President Obama advocates healthy eating, and because there's an organic garden at the White House, his occasional trips to local burger joints are the height of hypocrisy.

She opens: "Even as he grows arugula in the White House vegetable garden, Barack Obama never again wants to be seen as the hoity-toity guy fretting over the price of arugula at Whole Foods. That is why the president ends up sending mixed signals on food."

(Ugh. Arugula again. Can't the people who insist on using food as a symbol of America's cultural divide come up with a different vegetable, if only to avoid cliché? How about radicchio? That sounds even more fey and European.)

Anyway, calling Obama a hypocrite because he enjoys an occasional greasy burger and greasier fries is beside the point. In the main, from what we know, he eats a healthy diet. I mean, look at the guy. Burgers and fries, like all junk foods, are bad only if you eat them all the time. And his trips to burger joints (designed, as Dowd correctly notes, "to prove his meaty regular guydom") don't negate his message. He still gets to tell black audiences to stop serving their kids cold Popeye's chicken for breakfast.

Ms. Dowd reminds me of the Berkeley cretin who once hassled Michael Pollan at a grocery store because Pollan was buying his kid a box of Fruity Pebbles. Of course, those Pebbles aren't everyday fare at the Pollan house, merely an occasional treat.

Ideological purity isn't good for politics in general, and it isn't good for the politics of food. The idea is to eat a healthy diet in general and to treat yourself once in a while. Insisting on 100 percent fealty is a sure way to turn off the very people you're trying to reach. Are you listening, MeMe Roth?