White House lies about fries (and Coke)

Miami Herald

3 days ago

I'm planning a trip to Las Vegas next month and the first and last thing I always try to do whenever I go there is hit the In-N-Out Burger next to the airport.
As regular readers might remember, I developed a taste for In-N-Out's simple, but delicious, burgers and fries in the 20 years I lived in southern California. But for my last 27 years in Wichita, the nearest has been Dallas/Fort Worth and Denver.
So imagine my chagrin, bordering on horror, when I got a press release from the White House early this week titled 'President Trump Delivers on MAHA Push,' saying that In-N-Out has 'transitioned to 100% beef tallow' for frying fries.
If Trump's doing deliveries, I'll take a double-double, extra pickles. And I thought he'd banned the use of the word 'transitioned' in one of his executive orders or another.
'Tallow' is a fancy-sounding euphemism for 'rendered beef fat.'
In colonial times, it was used to make smoky, smelly candles.
But it's all the rage in the food chain these days in MAHA land, because Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation's foremost amateur nutritionist and bear-cub-carcass abuser, thinks it's somehow better for you than plant-based oils.
MAHA is a subset of Trump's MAGA movement, and it stands for 'Make America Healthy Again' (if they really cared, we'd have universal health coverage).
So let's start from the premise that deep-fried anything isn't going to be particularly good for you. But when I was a kid, the nation switched to plant oils because all that tallow was turning America's arteries into glue sticks.
So when I read from the White House that my favorite burger joint had switched to tallow, I thought, 'Say it ain't so.'
I sent the company an email and they sent back a quote from Denny Warnick, chief operating officer, saying it ain't so: 'Information was recently published in error stating that In-N-Out Burger has transitioned to beef tallow for cooking French fries. We continue to work on an upgrade to our current sunflower oil, however we have not yet made a change.'
Being from the Sunflower State and all, that smarts.
But thanks Denny. See you in Vegas in August.
The White House source for the In-N-Out tallow fiction was a link to post on X, which originated as an April Fools Day joke on a fan page.
This is how pathetic we've become as a nation. We're now being run by a government that can't tell fact from falsehood as it turns your choice of cooking oil into a political litmus test.
And let's not forget these are the exact same people who were calling Michelle Obama a communist, and worse, when she tried to get a few more fruits and vegetables into school lunches.
Remember 'New Coke?'
Not content with lobbying for big beef fat, Trump has now turned his attention to soda pop, via this post on social media: 'I have been speaking to Coca-Cola about using REAL Cane Sugar in Coke in the United States, and they have agreed to do so. I'd like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola. This will be a very good move by them – You'll see. It's just better!'
Coke has since responded with two extremely carefully worded statements, neither of which commits to switching to cane sugar, while studiously avoiding saying the president is talking out of his southern orifice.
This has the potential to go as well for Coca-Cola as the 'New Coke' scare of 1985.
For those too young to remember (and I wish I was), Coke was reformulated to try to make it younger and hipper, to recapture business lost to 'The Pepsi Generation.'
New Coke was so lame that it sparked nationwide protests and boycotts. Even the Coca-Cola Co. now acknowledges on its own website that it may be 'The Most Memorable Marketing Blunder Ever.'
It's highly questionable whether Coke could keep Trump's cane-sugar promise, even if it wanted to, without bankrupting itself.
In Mexico, Coke is made with cane sugar because the stuff is about as cheap as dirt there.
North of the border, soda makers primarily use corn sweetener, due to decades of price supports and import tariffs that keep cane sugar prices high, mostly to protect America's sugar beet growers and corn farmers.
That's why only a few producers of pretentious premium sodas use cane sugar — and a 12 ounce bottle of Mexican Coke costs nearly as much as a two-liter bottle of the domestic product.
So if Coke does switch to cane sugar to placate MAHA, it's going to make their product way more expensive than rival brands that stick with corn sweetener.
Not that one is any healthier than the other, a point Coke went out of its way to stress in a statement Thursday.
If I were a Pepsi executive today, I'd be rubbing my hands with glee, watching my biggest competitor caught between Donald Trump's big mouth and economic reality.