Morgan Spurlock? Don't get him started.
"Did you see this?" he crows. "McDonald's has a sign outside that reads, 'Resistance Is Futile.' I love this sign! It's amazing! I'm putting in on the Web site!"
Spurlock is the energetic filmmaker behind Supersize Me, a terrific documentary about the health dangers of fast food and the corporate influence in the way we eat. To make Supersize Me, Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald's for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a whole month, and in the process he gained 25 pounds, almost ruined his health and learned everything he could about nutrition, additives, marketing manipulation, why Americans are the fattest people in the world and what that means in health terms. Supersize Me is what you might call a terrifying comedy. Spurlock has summed up a huge national problem in one deft doc.
(The filmmaker, who is 6-foot-2, was able to lose most of the weight he gained making the movie. The last five pounds, he claims, took 14 months to shift.)
During a promotional visit to Toronto, Spurlock talked about all he learned in making Supersize Me. The filmmaker, who is a fast talker, says, "The scariest thing I learned making the film, by far -- and don't forget I got really sick and everything -- is about the school lunch programs and what kids eat at schools, and that parents have no idea and that this is what we're pawning off as a good and healthy lunch in America. In some schools it's as if you're eating in a 7-Eleven -- all chips, burgers, fries, hotdogs, candy and sugar drinks. One school had a slushie machine in the cafeteria! This is the one place where we really need to focus our efforts. This is where we send our kids from ages five to 18, to educate them, to bring them up to speed in the world. If they're going to have a fully educated life, shouldn't that include eating? What they put in their bodies? Nutrition education?"
He pauses to take a breath. Then he goes on, happily, about how little doctors know about nutrition ("It's all about a pill with them!") how much we have lost as a society by not sitting down together for meals at home, why one out of every three American children will develop diabetes, how we became a consuming culture, how kids are diagnosed as ADD and medicated but still consume sugar and food colour and caffeine all day and why he picked on McDonald's in Supersize Me -- "Because to me they are iconic of the problem. Iconic of fast food culture. It's follow the leader. And I wanted to pick the company that could most easily institute change."
Spurlock says the chain has already ended super-sizing and will launch healthier adult meals this week. "The day before the movie comes out," he says, grinning. "Another amazing coincidence."
Spurlock doesn't talk much about himself, but he was born and raised in West Virginia, "Where, if it wasn't fried," he jokes, "it wasn't food." His mother was his first important source of nutrition information. He and his two brothers had to tend the family vegetable garden. Also crucial was family dinner. "If you missed that, you incurred the wrath of mom."
More than anything, Spurlock hopes that Supersize Me will inspire parents to change their ways and, as a result, their children's way of eating, too. "We've become complacent as a culture," he worries. "It's always somebody else's problem. Well, it's not somebody else's problem now, not any more, now that 60% of Americans are overweight."
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