(PNS reporting from LA FLORIDA) Joining First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative, Goya Foods, the largest Hispanic-owned U.S. food company, will help promote MiPlato, the USDA program designed to encourage children to make healthier eating choices.
“Today’s announcement is about eliminating diabetes in the Mexican-American community by helping them make better choices, and, with the help of Goya, forcing them to eat like Cubans and Puerto Ricans,” Obama said Friday.
“Everything that Goya is doing,” she said, “centers around a simple idea: this country’s Mexican children need to be told what to eat by a corporate conglomerate that mass-produces Caribbean food.”
Obama joined Goya president Bob Unanue and leading Latino organizations at a Tampa supermarket to promote healthy eating nationwide with a special focus on the incorrectly-nourished Mexican-American community.
“For Goya, this campaign is a chance to reach out to emerging markets, Mexican-Americans, on the government’s dime and pretend like were doing everyone a favor. Acho meng! It’s a lot of great free advertising, mira loco!” said Unanue in an attempt to Mexicanize the company’s message.
Community organizations that received grants from the federal government under the Obama Administration also support the campaign.
Often headed by Spaniards or random South Americans, such as Ecuadorian María González of the education nonprofit Niños Unidos in Los Angeles, the groups have thrown their support behind the Obama initiative for its innovative approach to health, noting that the free canned food from Goya ain’t too bad either.
“Goya’s plan must be good — it’s endorsed by the White House — and we all know that the government knows what’s best for minorities,” González said.
Goya Foods will collaborate with Let’s Move! and USDA in the following ways:
- The MiPlato icon will be printed on different Goya products including black beans, pinto beans, white beans, chick peas, red kidney beans — in case Latino kids didn’t know they were eating Latino foods. The handy bean emblem will help children understand that beans are for beaners!
- A Goya-produced brochure featuring a series of recipes illustrating how to switch from pinto beans to gandules.
- An instructional video teaching children how to properly pronounce the new foods they will be eating, especially when it comes to chopping off the second half of their words.
- A list of “Spice Counselors” for those children who struggle to give up chile in order to accommodate their new diets.
The next phase of the First Lady’s plan is Goya’s version of the Let’s Move! campaign, to be called Muevete, Chico! which will be implemented throughout the Southwest and the Midwest, or wherever Mexican-American children are not behaving sufficiently Caribbeanish.