Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman: We should criminalize fatty food
Last year, Whole Foods’ CEO John Mackey had a lot of sh-t to say about Americans and how we’re all fat and fat people are getting Covid and that people shouldn’t even need health care, and we should demand that everyone just take better care of themselves. It was all pretty problematic, especially since his company charges $15 for melon slices, and he doesn’t seem to understand that A) low-income people exist and B) food deserts exist and C) the pandemic was and is raging. I bring up Mackey’s 2020 comments because Jonathan Neman is this year’s version. Neman is the CEO of Sweetgreen, a restaurant chain which charges $9-15 for salads. Neman has some thoughts on fat Americans and Covid too.
On Tuesday, the CEO of Sweetgreen, a restaurant chain that sells salads for around $15 a serving, said that the underlying problem with the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 600,000 Americans so far is that most of them were fat.
“78% of hospitalizations due to COVID are Obese and Overweight people,” Jonathan Neman said in a Linkedin post. “Is there an underlying problem that perhaps we have not given enough attention to? Is there another way to think about how we tackle ‘healthcare’ by addressing the root cause?”
Neman is somewhat correct in that most people who were hospitalized or died because of COVID-19 also had comorbidities that made the virus more deadly, such as being overweight. A CDC report from March indicated that obesity was an independent risk factor for severe COVID-19 symptoms and death. But while Neman is on to something, it’s impossible to separate his comments from the fact that he profits directly from a particular (and costly) idea of “health.”
“COVID is here to stay for the foreseeable future. We cannot run away from it and no vaccine nor mask will save us (in full disclosure I am vaccinated and support others to get vaccinated). Our best bet is to learn how to best live with it and focus on overall health vs preventing infection. What if we focused on the ROOT CAUSE and used this pandemic as a catalyst for creating a healthier future?? We clearly have no problem with government overreach on how we live our lives all in the name of ‘health,’ however we are creating more problems than we are solving.”
“What if we made the food that is making us sick illegal? What if we taxed processed food and refined sugar to pay for the impact of the pandemic? What if we incentivized health?” he added.
SCOTUS literally just shrugged when Texas made a law creating a sinister civilian-enforcement law which will upend reproductive freedom in the state, but sure, let’s make it illegal to buy or sell fatty foods. Let’s criminalize sugar, I’m sure no one will have a problem with that. Let’s arrest people for eating carbs. Let’s prosecute everyone over a size 10. Do these men not understand how f–king stupid they sound? How maniacal? How controlling and fascist they sound? I’m all for people eating more salads and I don’t even think the prices at Sweetgreen are that bad, but this guy sounds like a f–king nutjob.
The part about “no vaccine will save us” is pretty stupid too because while people with comorbidities are dying at a higher rate from Covid, it’s also true that those same people who are dying are the unvaccinated ones.
Photos courtesy of Getty.
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