Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken is out and blowing minds. CrossFit has had a rash of outbreaks. Not CoronaVirus – it’s had an outbreak of pregnancies.
Good morning and welcome to the WODDITY podcast for news about CrossFit. We are a daily podcast, Monday through Friday, doing CrossFit news in five minutes or less.
My name is Ben Garves and today is Tuesday, the 4th of February, 2020.
Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! Review
Last night I sat down in front of my laptop and took the time to watch the new sequel to Super Size Me, which is called Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! And it was incredible. If you somehow missed the original, Super Size Me was about documentarian Morgan Spurlock deciding to see what the health impact would be if he ate nothing but McDonald’s for an entire year. In the process he gained 24 pounds, saw a skyrocket in his bad cholesterol, started to experience violent mood swings and sexual disfunction…all sorts of fun things.
Well, he’s back almost fifteen years later with a new premise: with all these fast food restaurants teasing us with health halos by using words like “crispy” instead of “fried” and excessive adjectives like fresh, local, organic, hormone-free, antibiotic-free, free range, has fast food gotten any healthier?
What do the phrases really mean? What does it take to be able to use them? How does the use of brown packaging, green paint, and wood trim impact the way we think of these fast food restaurants and the foods they serve?
I’m all for spoilers, so here goes: it takes next to nothing to use phrases like fresh and local. In fact, it’s local if it’s in the store, and it’s fresh if they’ve recently opened the packaging. Something being crispy DOES mean it has been fried. It’s illegal to use hormones in chicken, so hormone-free chicken is the case for ALL chicken. The chickens we eat grow so quickly there’s never a need for antibiotics, so they’re all antibiotic-free, too. “Free range” just means they have access to any semblance of the outdoors, but the chickens we eat are a notoriously lazy and overweight breed, so they wouldn’t venture into the tiny outdoor space they’d be accommodated, regardless. And, no, fast food hasn’t gotten any healthier.
Spurlock shows us this through immersing himself in the process. He starts a chicken farm, raises thousands of chickens through their full six-week lifespan, spars with an evil group he calls “Big Chicken”, which he also shows is notorious for working to keep farmers in debt and manipulating chicken feed and fertilized eggs to support some farms over others and force bankruptcy on farmers who try to raise awareness about their shady dealings. Spurlock then goes so far as to open a fast food chicken sandwich restaurant to raise awareness on all of this.
And it is incredible. I’d say the one thing I didn’t expect, and a huge reason why I recommend this movie to you, is how much the film is pro-farmer and works to tell their stories, support their causes, and tries to help them talk about how their livelihoods are being destroyed by companies like Purdue, Koch, and Tyson.
Well, lookie there – I didn’t mean to go on a rant, but it really was THAT good. I have a link to it in my show notes if you want to spend 100 minutes getting woke to Big Chicken.
Annie Thorisdottir Pregnant
Okay, let’s turn our attention to the real gigantic story of the day. Two-time consecutive CrossFit Games Champion Annie Thorisdottir and her long-time partner Frederik Aegidius have announced she is pregnant, with a due date in early August, just after the 2020 CrossFit Games. Thorisdottir had already qualified to the Games and will now take a step back from competition, meaning her qualification spot will likely fall to Madeline Sturt of Australia. She had been in the news just last year for signing a sponsorship contract with Nuun which agreed to protect her sponsorship through pregnancy.
How did they announce it? Well, with a Instagram post featuring two little tiny baby Reebok Nano concept shoes. Oh, man, I hope this becomes a thing. Baby Nanos.
This is amazing stuff, y’all. I talked just yesterday about Adee and Michael Cazayoux announcing they had a little one on the way. Now they have more competition for the Fittest Baby on Earth.
And that’s it for news about CrossFit for Tuesday, February 4th. Thanks for listening. Please be sure to rate, review, subscribe, and share. For WODDITY, I’m Ben Garves. Unless something breaks, let’s rendezvous back here on Monday.
