Not a fan of Coke? Trying to cut sugar out of your diet? Want to avoid things like diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, or obesity? You are a racist. Oh, don’t look so surprised. You knew you were a racist when you started reading this. You just didn’t know how many ways you expressed it. You never knew your aversion to Coke was a microaggression. But now that you know, get chugging.
Actually, you probably aren’t a racist, and the window to prove you are not by swallowing gallons of sugar, caramel coloring, and high fructose corn syrup has closed. But in the early part of the century, anti-Coke meant anti-woke. Although the term woke had not come to the fore yet.
Calley Means is a former consultant for Coca-Cola and helped found the group True Medicine. He recently appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” show to talk about how he was tasked with ensuring that proposed taxes on sugar or sugary products failed and that food stamps would cover soda. Opponents of that plan were labeled as racists. And Coke paid the NAACP and similar organizations to do the smearing. Here is the interview:
You can read Means’ tweet thread about the issue below:
Early in my career, I consulted for Coke to ensure sugar taxes failed and soda was included in food stamp funding.
I say Coke's policies are evil because I saw inside the room.
The first step in playbook was paying the NAACP + other civil rights groups to call opponents racist
— Calley Means (@calleymeans) January 2, 2023
Means also alleges that the FDA funneled money to universities, as well as conservative and liberal think tanks, to claim that soda did not cause obesity. He also states that soda manufacturers have been “deeply embedded” in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, of all places, which led to the concept that there was no such thing as “bad foods” only “bad diets.” It also meant that in 2007, soda was kept in the SNAP government nutrition program.
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Funny, I would have thought that opposing something that could lead to all the above problems would be non-racist. But not according to Coke.
You can say what you want, but no person in their right mind is going to believe soda is nutritious. It may taste good, and yes, you can drink it all you want, but to pass it off as “nutritious” and pay civil rights groups to help you move it into low-income communities? One wonders why the NAACP and the other organizations did not see this as a hazard for the people they claimed to champion and tell Coke to go pound sand. Or sugar. I think we know why. All the checks cleared.
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