The cover story of this week’s issue of Time Magazine, “What to Eat Now; The Anti-Food-Snob Diet” by Dr. Mehmet Oz, piqued our interest (link:). As food and health lovers who continually study (and write about) what to eat, information from such a well recognized, well respected doctor and television personality is important to us. We were not, however, prepared for the rubbish that Dr. Oz was spouting in this mis-informed, or dare we even say biased article. And we don’t want you to take what we have to say as gospel, so here is a link to the article online. Below please find our open letter to Dr. Oz and Time Magazine. Whole food lovers unite; fresh spinach actually is better for you. Come and cook with us!
Dear Dr. Oz,
You are Vice Chairman and professor of surgery at Columbia University, a bestselling author and the Emmy Award-winning host of The Dr. Oz Show; therefore, you have a personal and professional responsibility to be measured in your judgments and thoughtful in your advice. You are a well respected authority on diet; your 2011 article in Time Magazine entitled “The Oz Diet” is one of the best we’ve read about what to eat and why. But with your most recent Time Magazine article, “What to Eat Now; The Anti-Food-Snob Diet” you have fallen from grace in our healthy-food-loving minds.
While we believe in making good food available to all people by any means necessary, we simply cannot agree with you that eating fresh, whole, locally grown, organically produced food makes one a food snob. More to the point, we believe that supporting an agribusiness industry that removes the beaks and wings off of laying hens, sprays our fruits and vegetables with known pesticidal contaminants and allows companies such as Monsanto to genetically alter foods so that seeds cannot be saved and farming cannot be sustained, makes you an accomplice to the misleading propaganda spread by the industry.
Dr. Oz, shame on you. If we are to regain and maintain health in today’s world, we have to inform consumers about the real consequences conventional farming and processing has on the environment and our health. Fresh fruits and vegetables already struggle to make it to the table of the American consumer; please don’t make it any more difficult than it already is.
Right now, the agribusiness industry is dominated by ever fewer and larger food conglomerates such as Nestle, Kraft, General Mills, Pepsico and their partners, including Monsanto, DuPont, Dow Chemical, Cargill, etc. These food and agriculture conglomerates show little interest in what is best for the individual consumer; every single one was a member of the organization that worked to defeat California’s Prop 37, successfully keeping GMOs unlabeled in this country. Maybe your point was simply that it is better to eat any kind of supermarket produce than to eat processed food, but you can’t truly believe that your body and the world wouldn’t be better off if our food production was more environmentally friendly and less profit margin and market share driven.
As a consumer, Dr. Oz, you can spend your money as you feel is right for you and your family. But as a heart surgeon, and a medical “celebrity”, your responsibility as a spokesperson for what is right reaches far beyond your personal opinions. You are a steward of the Earth and have a responsibility to your readers to help them understand the direct and indirect consequences of the choices they make – for example, that factory farmed beef is bad for the environment and a bad environment is worse for our health and, more importantly, for the health of our children.
Your article isn’t a “buzz kill” for food snobs, but rather a huge disappointment for your readers, fans and followers, as you avoid taking a stand against factory farming and industrialized food production. You should use your public power to help make agribusiness conglomerates take responsibility for more sustainable and equitable food production.
If nothing else, do it for your future grandchildren!
Here are just a few of the issues we see with specific statements in your article.
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