To celebrate the arrival of the 2012 Orange County Fair (in 11 days!), the 32nd Agricultural District (or its PR monkey) is running a television advertisement that celebrates the heartbreaking decline of the family farm and the frightening rise of obesity in America.
Wait . . . what? That's not the intended message of the spot?
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The commercial starts with an actor in overalls and homespun cadence explaining how the fair's delicious food comes from the fields he is speaking from. Actually, it began with his farmer father, who worked through a rain of powdered sugar.
Your correspondent goes on to pluck from his “crops” deep-fried cookies, honey-dipped corn dogs and his “favorite,” chocolate-dipped bacon.
This is meant to herald the 122nd OC Fair's theme “Home Sweet Home,” but it just as easily reinforces America's eating problem and the disappearance of natural food grown by thriving independent farmers.
A Monsanto orchard of Australian bloomin' onion gut bombs, anyone?
Speaking of the runs, the fair runs July 13-Aug. 12.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.