Big Food troubles.

Big Food is getting bad publicity from all sides. Fast Food Nation's fall from the best seller list was immediately followed by the publication of Candyfreak, A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America. The movie "Super Size Me" is doing well for a documentary, and even the Wall Street Journal is putting Big Food troubles on its front page with headlines like "Big Food Has Big Problems."

More consumers are saying "no" to Big Food, and Big Food is feeling the pinch. Food marketers who haven't taken the time to see "Super Size Me" should spend the two hours and $15 (including popcorn and Coke) to see it because it makes some surprising and powerful points (even if you are used to hearing about the horrors and maybe-or-maybe-not frivolous lawsuits.) The points that it makes rather convincingly are that:

1. Fast food is actually addictive. Once you get used to it, you crave it even if eating it makes you depressed and achy.

2. The effects of a high fast-food diet are far more damaging than a small sample of internists, gastroenterologists, and cardiologists anticipated.

3. It takes lots longer to take fast-food weight off than to put it on.

4. People don't know what a calorie is.

5. A high fast-food diet works a lot like heavy drinking.

(I suspect that more of our readers read the front page Wall Street Journal story entitled: "Eating Up: As Shoppers Grow Finicky, Big Food Has Big Problems." The writer, Sarah Ellison, really did her homework on this story, finding a mainstream consumer who had grown up on Kraft macaroni and cheese but "won't feed it to her 18-moth old son." We reported on this in April in an article entitled "Shoppers Talk About Kraft's Problems." The WSJ story acknowledges the increasingly broad scope of consumers' skepticism.)