"Diabetes for All:" Coca Cola Super Bowl Commercial 2014: A Call to Resist!

"Diabetes for All:" Coca Cola  Super Bowl Commercial 2014: A Call to Resist!

 

The US media is reporting that some of us Americans are up in arms about the Coca Cola Super Bowl Commercial 2014 which appears to embrace our nation's newest  immigrants as well as its older immigrants, Native and Black Americans,  by sharing the singing of "America the Beautiful"  in different languages and by sharing cultural representations of these many different groups, especially our youth.

However, KC Food Justice (the Food, Health, and Environmental Justice Coalition, a local project of Local2Global Advocates for Justice) ) believes that Coca Cola, consistent with its core goal of maximizing profit and its past practices,  is astutely creating  its  newest US customers, slated  to be the majority of us by 2043. (allinnation.org). Our nation's new births are already a majority of Indigenous, Black, Latino and Asian descendants. (Id.)

Furthermore, we recognize this strategy of building an apparent "controversial" media strategy to get new customers from its and other big corporate food organizations' previous marketing strategies and targeting of youth, especially Black youth.  (Food Empowerment at Web.) Coca Cola is continuing to identify itself with controversial, hip youth culture in order to sell more of its product to youth who will become addicted customers for life. (Salt, Sugar and Fat).

Our concern, which the media is overlooking, is that Coca Cola remains an unhealthy product which contributes in great part to the epidemic of diabetes in this country (1 in 3 youth will have prediabetes) and around the world. (Food, Inc.) as well as to other diseases such as heart disease, dental issues, kidney failure, hypertension  and certain cancers,  that threaten the collapse of our health, the health  of our children and our health care systems. (Center for Disease Control).

Coca Cola targets our youth and Black and Latino youth in particular and not surprisingly our youth are suffering more from the health impacts of Coca Cola. (Food Empowerment)

Consequently, we would rather focus on the health impacts of Coca Cola's "inclusive" marketing strategies.

Finally, at least in part,  the impact of Coca Cola and other big food corporations' "inclusive" marketing strategy is the increased disparate impact of these products on  Black communities. (Food Empowerment, Center for Disease Control)   Furthermore, this impact is not only felt at home here in the US, but globally. (Sat, Sugar and Fat: How the Big Food Giants Hooked Us, Michael Moss). 

We believe as Food First ED Eric Golt Giminez says,  "In order to save the food system, (and our health and the health of our children) we have to transform the economic system; it is not enough to simply plant more organic gardens...We need trans formative reform." And in order to do that, Food First ED Eric Holt Giminez says progressives and radicals must unite for truly trans formative food and social movements. Food Movements Unite. Eric Holt-Giménez: Food movements, agroecology, and the future of food and farming.
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If we are to allow our societies to be dominated by organizations who are governed primarily by the "for profit" motive, our health will collapse.  Consequently, just as Coca Cola is marketing to "all," we are calling on "all," new and old American immigrants, Native and Black Americans and beyond,   to resist, by organizing  ourselves from the local to the national and the global levels, to build our collective strength, to transform our power realtionships with the big food and agriculture corporations and the governments and multilateral institutions that support them,  in order to build food, agriculture and socioeconomic systems that make our children's health, wealth and sustainability the center of our food, health and wealth policies.