Don’t Believe the Salad Millionaire
Jonathan Neman really seemed to think he was onto something. Last week, in a lengthy, now-deleted post on LinkedIn, the CEO and co-founder of the upscale salad chain Sweetgreen expounded on a topic that might seem a little far afield for a restaurant executive: how to end the pandemic. “No vaccine nor mask will save us,” he wrote. (The vaccines, it should be noted, have so far proved to be near-miraculously effective at saving those who get them.) Instead, he lamented that Americans are simply too fat to survive COVID-19, a reality that he says could be addressed with “health mandates.”
Neman did not go into many specifics about how health should be mandated, or what such mandates would mean for disabled people, though efforts at national improvement that focus on those designated as physiologically undesirable have historically ended poorly for them. He did offer one proposal: The federal government could decide which types of food Americans are allowed, it would wipe out virtually everything stocked on the inner aisles of the average grocery store—not to mention much of what is sold by Sweetgreen’s competitors.
