Well, I did take notice of the Karl Rove article in Newsweek, but I didn’t, until today, see the fucking cover of the magazine.
Yes, the cover is about how much Obama is an “elitist” because there’s a vegetable called arugula and a beverage called beer, and while there’s not a whole lot of evidence that either substance is consumed to the exclusion of the other by Obama or that either imparts magical elitist or non-elitist properties, you’re supposed to believe this makes Obama unelectable. No word yet on the elitist properties of mustard, turnip, or collard greens. And if you’re holding your breath waiting to hear if John McCain has ever fouled his lips with the fancier foods, you can keep waiting. I’m sure his family’s private chef only makes them food that Bubba would eat. I find these food wars to be amusing as hell, since I’m like half redneck, because I guarantee you that some of the food I ate growing up would make the “journalists” who trumpet these kinds of non-controversies spin with confusion. Chicken and dumplings? I’m so electable. Quail, venison and elk? Elitist! What if I told you that my stepdad shot it all himself, though? Er, people do that? I’d also venture to mention that Mexican food has been 50% of my diet since I was able to chew, but that kind of information could cause a short-circuit. How do you read the tea leaves? Are you an elitist if you drink Miller but not Bud? I suppose it’s a gracious favor to the press corps that I’m never going to run for President with this sort of confusing background. Are all candidates supposed to submit a typical week’s diet for examination, or are only the Democrats?
I meant to blog about this, but got caught up in “ohmigodabortionart”, but I suspect better late than never. Matt is wondering why it might have been hard to pry a few favorite recipes out of Cindy McCain.
Looks like someone on John McCain’s staff decided to rip off some Food Network recipes and assert on the campaign website that they were Cindy McCain’s family favorites. This is a bit of an odd thing to have happen. Most people, I take it, do in fact have some favorite recipes. Surely Mrs. McCain would have been willing to divulge hers. And if she doesn’t have any favorite recipes, it’s not as if failing to include a “Cindy’s recipes” section on the website was likely to prove a devastating liability in the election.
First thought: Hey, what if Food Network recipes really are her favorite? Just kidding. I had to blog this because I’m sort of surprised that Matt didn’t bring up the obvious answer to the question of why Cindy McCain probably doesn’t have recipes to put up on the site: I doubt she does much cooking, if any at all.
I mean, think about it. McCain is the daughter of an extremely wealthy man who made his money through a beer distribution company. In fact, if you read Glenn Greenwald’s book, you’ll see there’s good reason to believe that part of the reason that John McCain aggressively courted her while still married to his first wife was that her wealth and connections would help get him into politics. And by “aggressively court”, I mean “most likely had an adulterous affair”, because he did, after all, marry Cindy within a month of divorcing his first wife. But this is a long way of saying that Cindy McCain is probably someone whose wealth means that she doesn’t really have to do much cooking for herself, and thus wouldn’t have favorite recipes. Not, I must stress, that I would hold that against her. There is no reason a woman should have to cook if she doesn’t want to.
So why have the recipe section on there? It wouldn’t really be that easy to avoid it. While the strict recipe issue wouldn’t be a devastating liability, it’s part of a larger image that McCain does have to uphold if he wants to win over the base. And that image is that he’s the same old grandpa you know and love enough to laugh at when he’s being gruff and rude. And what’s loveable old (if racist and sexist) grandpa, without grandma in the kitchen doing all the work while he watches sports and talks politics? This image is perceived, quite rightly, as critical to McCain’s ability to win. The reality—a man who married into wealth and connections to get his political career going—will be considered emasculating, especially, as Greenwald points out, to a crowd that just recently got a big kick out of calling John Kerry a “gigolo” because he married wealthy, though he was not dependent on his wife’s wealth and connections for his political career to near the extent that McCain has relied on his wife’s. So the recipes are the exact issue, but they hint at a larger image issue that he has to deal with.
Early reports about Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s attack on Basra last week indicated that struggle over the control of petroleum smuggling was the primary cause of the aggressive maneuver that ended in spectacular failure and the deaths of 350 souls. But later intelligence reports suggest that the major resource in question was not petroleum, but access to a variety of Nabisco© products, especially the soggy deliciousness of the various Newton® products, which taste especially wet and sweet on a hot desert day.
A spokesman for Nabisco© confirmed the reports, but expressed shock that cookies, no matter how delicious, should lead to such massive loss of life and limb. “At Nabisco©, we hope that cookies can be a source of peace and goodwill, not a precious resource that people will die for. However, we understand that when you really need a Fig Newton, you really need a Fig Newton. Substitutes, even those made by that demon Paul Newman, will never quite reach the levels of figgy heights of yum.”
Violence over Nabisco© products is not an unknown phenomenon. The Nabisco© representative, who declined to be named, admitted that battles over access to Nilla Wafers® had driven the violence in Northern Ireland more than a decade past. “Nabisco© admits that we were engaged in a marketing strategy aimed at Catholics, with the intent of replacing the host with Nilla Wafers® with the understanding that current communion wafers are dry and tasteless.”
The tagline to the campaign was, “Shouldn’t you savor your Savior?”
Unfortunately, lack of access to Nilla Wafers® resulted in major IRA bombing campaigns. The British government denies any attempt to keep Nilla Wafers® out of the grocery stores of Northern Ireland.
Why Nabisco? See Offsprung.
Via Our Bodies, I found this interesting Salon article that I can’t believe I missed when it first came out. It’s about that “Skinny Bitch” book you see everywhere and how the veganism preached within allows the writers and their audience to have the excuse to finally make explicit what’s implicit in our culture, which is the notion that body fat is a moral flaw. Convinced of the righteousness of veganism, the authors apparently feel entitled to berate their readers in the same voice women the country over use to berate themselves for fat-based imperfections like cellulite and weight gain, voice that holds fat not to be just unhealthy or unattractive, but to be sinful.
The relentless bullying peppered throughout the authors’ advice accounts for much of the book’s humor, including quips like “you need to exercise, you lazy shit,” “coffee is for pussies” and “don’t be a fat pig anymore.” It was a formerly anorexic friend of mine who nailed it when she read excerpts from the book. “When you have an eating disorder,” she told me, “that’s the voice you hear in your head all the time.”
Thanks to “Skinny Bitch,” women who hate their bodies no longer need rely on their own self-loathing to stoke the flames of what seems like motivation but is actually self-flagellation — penance for the sin of being too fat. Now dieters can have the convenience of a former model (Barnouin) and a former modeling agent (Freedman) putting their transgressions in the black-and-white terms of right and wrong. “If you eat crap,” they chirp, “you are crap.”
How does the farmer’s market factor into Boehner’s either/or equation?
The presidential race is not the only place where change is an issue.
Members of Congress returning to the Capitol this week are being confronted by transformational happenings that have shaken the building to its foundations: Democrats have hired a new company to run cafeteria services. Naturally, this has caused an outbreak of partisan skirmishing.“I like real food,” proclaimed Republican leader John Boehner when asked about the new menu by a producer for another cable news outfit. “Food that I can pronounce the name of.”
Boehner is now forced to wrap his lips around such phrases as “broccoli rabe and shaved persimmon,” “balsamic glazed butternut squash,” and “calico pinto beans”…all on this afternoon’s menu, along with the downright patriotic “American Regional Yankee Pot Roast,” which, even Boehner would have to admit, kind of rolls right off the tongue. On Fridays, there is a real sushi bar tended by a bona fide Japanese sushi chef. Gone are such grade-school cafeteria specialties as Salisbury steak and fried chicken, slathered in gravy and served with a side of chips.
Chris Bowers wrote an inspired rant about how this is further evidence that there’s something deeply fucked up about the conservative revolution, that even the pluralism that allows for balsamic vinegar is held up as some evil scourge on good, old-fashioned American conformity. Halfway through his post, I knew one thing was inevitable. As sure as the sun comes up in the morning, there are people on the internet who want to give the appearance of having intelligent opinions without having to do the work of it, and those people would go for the easy kill: “But not all conservatives abhor the sushi! You’re stereotyping!” Apparently, there were a lot of people who wanted to sound smart without being smart, because Chris had to update to clarify that he wasn’t saying that eating only grilled cheese with American “cheese” slices only wasn’t a baseline requirement to vote Republican or anything.
The implications of this article by Michael Pollan are chilling. In sum, superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics are increasingly common, and since at least 70% of American antibiotics are actually used on farm animals to prevent them from getting sick in the inhumane, crowded conditions of factory farms, the chances are pretty high that factory farming is largely responsible for the evolution of these superbugs. And these superbugs are scary—in 2005, more Americans died of staph infections than of AIDS. There’s no condom you can use against staph infections, and even though you run the most risk of catching one by being hospitalized, there’s a new version that you can get elsewhere.
The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent strain — called “community-acquired MRSA” — is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.
The logic of capitalism has this amazing power to run over any other kind of logic, which is definitely the case with factory pig farming, which is the likely culprit in the case of the antibiotic-resistant staph cases. Normal human logic resists the factory pig farm. It’s cruel, for one thing, and disgusting. The sheer amounts of pig shit produced are clearly an unmanageable environmental hazard. But the eventual consumers are shielded from the horror of factory pig farms, and the owners and workers rely on the money from the farms, and as such are ill-motivated to make the necessary changes. And since lagoons of pig shit weren’t enough to convince corporate pig farmers to reconsider their methods, I doubt the increasing toll in human life from their efforts will move them, especially since it’s two steps removed from their direct control.
Pollan argues that the word “sustainability” is losing its meaning, and it’s clear why—it’s incompatible with capitalism, and openly arguing for economic systems to replace capitalism is simply verboten in our society. Taboo, unacceptable, off the table. And it will be until it’s too late to reverse the damage done by the need for unchecked growth for profit.
Google has entered the online recipe market. (Via the new blog that promises to be enticing, Cogitamus.) It even has a calorie search feature, so you can alert it to the fact that you’re not interested in dishes with 1,500 calories a sitting or whatever. If our Google overlords ever decide to tyrannize us, I suspect most of us will go quietly.
Ezra’s right; there’s something farcical about the knee jerk use of the word “nanny state” when you’re talking about children. The rhetorical device “nanny state” was developed to exploit a very specific set of non-subtly gendered anxieties—to make men especially picture a finger-wagging Mary Poppins that they could rebel against. “Don’t you tell ME what to do! I’m a grown man! I’ll eat all the toxic chemicals that I’m unaware are in my food that I want!”
But whining about the “nanny state” when you’re talking about the bona fide child care duties of the state—i.e. the right of the state to restrict the foods brought into the school to be sold or served the children—is puzzling. It really shows that “nanny state” is a code word that means, “In a conflict between public health and corporate profits, the latter should always prevail.” I’m guessing if it somehow started to conflict with corporate profits to teach children to read, libertarians would start howling “nanny state” about that. “How dare the nannies feed the children healthy food and teach them to read?!” It’s truly bizarre.
I do think there’s a limit on in loco parentis rights of a school, and luckily the U.S. Constitution enumerates the rights that I think should be respected on school grounds—cruel and unusual punishment, freedom of speech and religion, etc., though there’s a certain reasonable amount of age-based restriction that should loosen up as they age on some of these. There’s no real reason to stock age-inappropriate books at an elementary school, for instance. But the rights that a student doesn’t relinquish on school grounds roughly correlates to those very things where citizens have strong disagreements that would necessarily mean that any school interference would be a genuine infringement on basic rights. Religious instruction in the schools, for instance, is a clear violation of the 1st Amendment right, no matter how much wingnuts try to get around it. But healthy food and the eating of it? There’s no constitutional right to junk food, nor is there any sane disagreement in our society about the fact that it’s better to eat your broccoli than a Twinkie. And as Ezra notes, if your child absolutely must eat nasty junk food at school, no one is stopping her from bringing it with her lunch.
What’s more insidious about this whining about federal school food guidelines is how the lack of these guidelines will disproportionately affect the poor. The lack of resources, both financial and geographic, for the poor to get good, healthy food has been discussed thoroughly here. Children living in that situation could really benefit from one or two nutritious meals a day at the school. So as usual with the pro-corporate “libertarian” nonsense, it’s not just about prioritizing corporate profits over public health, it’s specifically about prioritizing corporate profits over the health of people with a lower income. In other words, outright class warfare.
But I think we can all agree this is a problem that everyone, middle class or poor, shares. Everyone wants their kids to eat better, and they’re already bombarded with advertisements for junk food everywhere. When they’re out of your sight and at school, you can’t make them eat right. The school should be able to step in on behalf of parents on this one. It’s not just for kid health and parent peace of mind, either. It’s really unfair to teachers to load kids up on a bunch of sugary stuff at lunch so that they’re beginning their sugar crash phase when they return to their desks. It’s not just a nutrition issue, in other words, it’s a discipline issue.
Sara Robinson linked to this fascinating photoessay of families around the world (chosen clearly for their “averageness”) standing by a table with a week’s worth of their food purchases on it. Sara displayed these two pictures that show the disparity in need between middle class Americans and refugees living in Chad.
I recommend Sara’s thoughts on the issue of worldwide hunger, and I have nothing to add to that. This post is about something else I noticed, in the difference between the average American diet shown here and the average middle class diet in other countries. See if you can spot the difference.
Mine has more green bits floating around and I suspect my bowl is less expensive.
Having written some downer stuff today, I figured I’d put up a little food-blogging, inspired by this post by Sara at F-Words. Sara’s writing about some of the backlash against female chefs who’ve become famous, and how Nigella Lawson is getting dinged for being too “chatty”.
The women are “chatty” and embellish too much, while the men are direct and more efficient in their communication. Of course, they could have said that Lawson’s more casual style is easier to approach for non-chefs or people bored by plain recipes, but since being “chatty” is associated with female, it has to be a drawback.
I get the impression that since the target audience of cookbooks and cooking shows is women, books that encourage a free-form, experimental approach to cooking make people uncomfortable. Strict instructions for the ladies, please.
I like cooking, but I almost never use recipes as much besides inspiration. Becoming a vegetarian really freed me up, since most recipes are meat-based, you have to get creative. Tonight’s dinner is squash risotto, because a lot of squash from local farms was on sale at the store and I had some risotto on hand. I put the squash, some green onions, some garlic, a couple handfuls of fresh basil (I’ve got a basil TREE growing outside my apartment right now) and a tomatillo into the food processor, chopped that up, softened it on the stove some and mixed it with dry arborio rice. Add in enough veggie stock to cook the rice properly, put it on the stove for half an hour until the rice is cooked, and it’s really good. If I’d had some dry white wine to mix in on hand, it would have been even better, I think.
Anyway, that’s how I tend to cook. The upside is that it’s fun, but the downside is if you completely screw something up, you have to eat toast for dinner. The other downside is that you have to come up with important sounding names for your food, because, “I just threw all this shit together on the fly,” tends to scare people.
What’s your style? How much do you use recipes? Do you use your oven at all? Do people even bake much out in the internet lands?
Feminism Friday entry.
Other feminist bloggers have written about this extremely silly article in the NY Times about a supposed trend of women eating red meat on dates to impress men. There’s no real way to measure these things, and since there’s nothing new about the various pressures that make even choosing dinner a gendered, sexualized act, I’m skeptical that there’s any such trend. But I do get why you’d want to write an article like this—first dates are situations where you’re trying to make pretty big judgments on people with very little information, so it’s not completely silly to suggest that people order dinner with an eye towards saying something about themselves to their date. (What my dinner choices always, always say: I am a vegetarian, a fact that gets over-analyzed to death.) That said, this article is a train wreck of stereotypes and plain weirdness, and it’s more evidence for the pile that Carol Adams wasn’t off-base to write about the sexual politics of meat.
Eating meat, particularly red meat, is gendered as masculine and being a vegetarian is gendered as feminine, I think it’s safe to say. With that in mind, this article reveals the sort of casual disdain for feminine things that puts women in such a bind, particularly when trying to fulfill our social role of being pleasing to men. You’re supposed to be feminine, of course, but you’re also supposed to embrace masculine things in a non-threatening way to be appealing. The movie There’s Something About Mary sent up these ridiculous expectations on women in an amusing way. Mary had the best of both worlds—rail-thin, beautiful, generous while also being big into sports and beer and man food.
Another example of the impossible expectations put on women to be “perfect”—the virgin/whore dichotomy. Or specifically the sense you get that you’re both supposed to be sexually modest and cautious (feminine) while still being able to be adventurous (masculine) to please your partner once you’re firmly placed in a committed relationship. This impossible dichotomy is on full display in the sexual “purity” movement—girls are told that they should not have sex and often not even kiss or hold hands until their wedding night, but the sex that happens within minutes/hours of having your first kiss ever is supposed to be amazing, because amateurs are just the absolute best at everything, apparently.
I’m stealing Zuzu’s picture from an Indian ad campaign for McDonalds. Because it gets right to the point.
Zuzu has a post up about a study that made me all the sadder for how much it didn’t shock me.
Preschoolers preferred the taste of burgers and fries when they came in McDonald’s wrappers over the same food in plain wrapping, U.S. researchers said, suggesting fast-food marketing reaches the very young.
“Overwhelmingly, kids chose the one that they perceived was from McDonald’s,” said obesity prevention expert Dr. Thomas Robinson of the Stanford University School of Medicine, whose work appears in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
They gave the kids the same exact food in different wrappers, mind you, and the kids liked it better if the food came with the McDonald’s brand on it. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s had a preschooler, been around preschoolers, or remembers being a preschooler. I remember when my sister and I went through the phase of wanting to eat at McDonald’s all the time. My father, who likes good food to say the least, pretty much preferred driving needles into his arms rather than eating lunch at McDonald’s, so he went on a parenting rampage to break us of picky eating and junk food yearnings. I’ve told the story before of how he blindfolded us and made us eat different kinds of pizza to show that we liked mushrooms better than we though, which was part of a larger program of breaking us of picky eating. I recall that some people were quick to liken that to child abuse, which I find a little overdramatic, though not at the Dan “Women Who Won’t Worship My Cock Must Have Dark Secrets They Don’t Want Their Master To Discover” level. I found his methods to be an enjoyable challenge—he’s told me that his main issue was that he hates it when people who make their kids clean their plate before they’re excused from the table, which encourages overeating. Anyway, I digress. I just remember being a little kid and like bouncing around begging to be taken to McDonald’s and having my dad rock my worldview by describing the coveted junk food as disgusting. At the time, I took his opinions very seriously, which is good in this case, since McDonald’s is disgusting.
Here’s an idea whose time has come—a cookbook with recipes for only two people. I read the whole article with interest, because I like cooking (a common malady for vegetarians) and because the vast majority of my cooking over my adult life has been for one or two people. So I know the frustration well; it’s easier to find decent recipes for entertaining a group of people than for one or two people. The book is called EatingWell Serves Two and they do more than just cut recipes in halves or quarters, which most of us who like cooking know doesn’t work all that well anyway. It’s got a lot of tips on how to shop for two. From my experience, the tip about the bulk food bins at the grocery store is dead on—you get really good at eyeballing small amounts with a little practice.
According to the article, the U.S. Census shows that the average household only has 2.6 people in it, which makes the glaring lack of recipes for two people all the more irritating. The word I’m casting around for is not “heteronormativity”, but it’s something close, the unrealistic idea that the norm in the U.S. is still the nuclear family of a married couple with 2.5 children. Single adults living alone, childless couples, single parents—all these very common household types don’t see themselves reflected in what I’d call the domestic media market, except maybe that show “Trading Spaces”. That show had a surprising amount of variety; you actually saw things like adult siblings living together, gay couples, childless couples, a single mom and a grown child, roommates, etc. But their diversity sprung from the format—it was intended to be a show where the standard married couples swapped households, and I suspect that after they got applications from other types of households did they realize the time had come for that.
This lack of diversity creates a rather maddening dilemma, because it’s hard to find a target to focus your irritation on, because what we’re talking about is a lack, a negative. Bringing a hole into focus is hard, so it’s easier to lash out at the pre-existing media for not being what you want it to be. Why, Martha, why must all your recipes be for four people when you yourself live alone?* Is this some kind of conspiracy?
The frustration that led people to complain that the main character in Knocked Up didn’t get an abortion, even though there would be no movie if she did so, comes from this place. We can’t focus our irritation at the lack of diversity in the media, since that’s a negative target, so instead we focus our anger on a single product for being what it is and not something else. Which is the first step down the road to aesthetic stalinism, because once you focus on this book or that movie for being what it is and not being the book or movie that you want, you are in essence arguing against the existence of the book or movie that’s come into your sites. But Knocked Up is not to blame for the fact that some other movie about a woman making a different choice haven’t been made. Martha Stewart Living** is not to blame for the hole in the domestic media for books and magazines aimed at people with smaller or different households.
Aesthetic stalinism is a different thing from making legitimate criticisms about a work’s effectiveness, though. There’s so much tendency from politically minded types to veer straight into aesthetic stalinism when addressing a work that some folks over-correct and declare a moratorium on any discussion of politically sensitive themes in the media. I like to write about the political themes in movies and it’s a delicate balance for sure. It might seem like splitting hairs, but it’s not—you can easily talk about how Rosemary’s Baby functions as a horror story where the monsters are symbolic of the patriarchy without getting into aesthetic stalinism, but if you start whining that Rosemary doesn’t rebel and provide you a fantasy of escape, you’re veering off into aesthetic stalinism. Not that I’m perfect, by any stretch—in fact, writing this post is my way of working out the issues in my head so I can proceed into summer blogging (where you sort of inevitably start writing about entertainment products more) while holding the right to have my genuine reactions without veering into demanding that some products be held to account for being what they are and not something else.
Roy Edroso has a lot of fun with wingnuts who complain endlessly about how movies and TV don’t reflect back to them an ideological fantasy they want to see—if you haven’t been reading his blog, you should, for those tear-downs alone.
*For example. I’m about 95% positive someone is fixing to pull out some minor issue to quibble with me on this. Maybe Martha does run recipes for two on occasion. Or maybe she isn’t that into recipes. I don’t know; I don’t read her magazine. The use of her name is a rhetorical device.
**I’m assuming, okay.
In making the case that they can’t, Kathy Freston quotes last week’s UN report by the world’s leading climate scientists:
The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.
I’ve tried a number of times to go lacto-ovo with little success. Large doses of soy make me ill. I hate eggs. And I feel weak when I don’t consume a little beef or chicken now and again.
Over the years, I’ve settled on greatly reducing the amount of animal protein I consume by using beef, chicken, fish and the like as a condiment rather than the main ingredient in dishes. I buy organic whenever I can. But, I guess I should take more responsibility for my personal environmental footprint. We all should.
Mine looks nothing like this
The people ask, the people get what they ask for.
Pad Thai
For the sauce, 1 quart sauce pan put:
3 Tbs brown sugar
4 Tbs rice wine vinegar
4 Tbs soy sauce
1 Tbs hot anything (I have used garlic chili paste, or chopped
jalapenos, or chopped dried red peppers)1 Cup vegetable broth
2 Tbs peanut butter
bring to a boil, add hot oil, set aside
The rest:
Chop an variety of vegetables: broccoli, green onions, green bells,
red bells, yellow bells, etc etcsaute so they are wilted
add your sauce
Boil rice noodles
Throw it all together.
This is good on its own, however, pseudo-Thai food and life in general is incomplete without this stuff:
Everyone should flavor their own bowl of pad thai to taste.
I make an awesome Pad Thai.
I don’t make it with peanut oil. I use….peanut butter. If you use peanut oil like you’re supposed to, for some reason it doesn’t taste as peanut-y as it should. I also skip the eggs. Most people like the way I make it, but mentioning this in a public forum brings upon me the cringe of shame because it’s not “authentic”, in that I tweaked it to suit my own tastes. Call it Pad Pandagon if it makes you feel any better.
The reason I bring this up is because I was all excited about this interview in Salon with Barry Glassner about some of the fear and morality issues that have cropped up on food politics and why they skew people’s priorities, and mostly because his book apparently takes on the hunt for “authentic” ethnic cuisine and I was hoping they’d talk about this in the interview. They don’t get around to it, because it’s probably not that important, but still, I was disappointed. I wanted to see what Glassner would say about the search of authenticity in food, because I think in a lot of ways such a search is both doomed and can be intimidating to people who are learning to cook. It instills in people a fear of experimenting or tweaking recipes because they are afraid to get it “wrong”, and naturally, that could and can lead to stifling creativity. Food, like art or music or literature, shouldn’t be categorized into strict ethnic categories that don’t bleed into each other for fear of contamination. In fact, said cuisines hardly sprung fully formed out of the mythical kitchens of the gods, handing down recipes that are unassailable—they evolved over time due to such cross-contamination and experimentation. Plus, I’m sick to death of hearing my beloved Tex-Mex get maligned for not being authentic Mexican food. Okay, it’s not “authentic” Mexican food. But taken on its own merits, Tex-Mex is a pretty awesome thing and the wild popularity of it in the regions of the world known as “Texas” is a testament to its awesomeness.
Anyway, the interview with Glassner is pretty interesting. He’s concerned about the yuppie factor in food politics, which is a common criticism and one I’m still suspicious of, because it pits the genuine concern about industrial agriculture against the genuine concerns about poverty issues against each other as if they were somehow in inherent conflict, and I don’t buy that. Glassner brings up the trans fat ban as an example of the yuppie factor, suggesting that such a ban is harmful to the struggle against hunger, but because of the unconvincing priorities argument.
I’m certainly critical of the political right for its opposition to minimum wage and various labor laws, but when I see the left focusing so heavily on symbols, rather than on actual conditions, it concerns me. I see relatively little organized attention to hunger, for example, relative to, for instance, the kind of effective and organized campaigns against particular types of foods, like trans fats. When somewhere around 35 million to 40 million Americans are facing hunger every year it seems to me that that would be the top priority of any reasonable food activist. The ban on trans fats may be a good thing, but should it be the first thing? Should it take precedence over much more pressing food issues like hunger in the city, or the availability of fresh foods to the poor in the city? No, not for one minute.
The problem with categories like “left” and “right” is in evidence here. I have no reason to believe that the ban on trans fat in New York came out of any political motivation outside a group of very self-interested frequent restaurant eaters. So if they weren’t pursuing a ban on trans fat, would they be agitating against hunger? Probably not. That this is true doesn’t make the ban on trans fat bad, just that it’s based on pure self-interest, and I don’t think that it was intended to have any relationship to poverty issues at all.
Another small quibble with this comment:
I think that there is a basic precept that serves very well, and that’s to eat well and enjoyably and moderately over the long haul. I certainly do not advocate that eating a large quantity of any of the substances that are currently considered bad or unhealthy would be a good idea. The kind of diet that Morgan Spurlock went on in “Super Size Me” is obviously going to make you sick. But so would eating three meals a day of boiled broccoli. So, I think that it’s certainly wise to be concerned with eating well and eating moderately and taking into account the sorts of advice that generations of mothers have given, and occasionally fathers. Eat your veggies, eat your fruit, and don’t overdose on sweets. So, in no way am I advocating that we should replace the gospel of naught with some kind of absurd diet that would go in the opposite direction.
I agree with the general gist of this passage, but I have to point out that Spurlock going on a 30 day diet of nothing but McDonald’s was not as an absurd a stunt as Glassner is suggesting. If you’ll recall, Spurlock was responding to the lawsuits from people who claimed to eat at McDonald’s every day, so he was showing how such a diet would indeed be very bad for you. As Glassner points out in the interview, the cheapness and convenience of fast food makes it a very attractive option for frequent dining for lower income people—so Spurlock’s stunt functioned to shock people into realizing what the cost to the poor it is to reserve this sort of diet for them while wealthier people like Spurlock get to dine non-stop on fresh veggies and whole grains.
Cheese porn by Lindsay.
This article in the BBC about the debate over whether or not organic foods are better for you is very annoying, as are a lot of stories about what “organic” farming and gardening is and what the benefits are. (Via.) First of all, you have David Miliband, who is the minister of agricultural and farming issues in England shilling for industry, which is to be expected from someone in his position nowadays.
There is no evidence organic food is better for you than conventional food, minister David Miliband has said.
The environment secretary said organic food was more of a “lifestyle choice that people can make”.
There is no “conclusive evidence either way” concerning the health effects of pesticides, he told the Sunday Times.
I wouldn’t say there’s no proof. In fact, I looked right over to my bedside table and facing up was a page in Organic Gardening that had an article about how the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences recently published findings that organic strawberries tend to inhibit cancer cell growth more than conventionally grown strawberries. This isn’t big honking news because it’s basically what you’d expect to find, because organically grown fruits and vegetables tend to have a lot more antioxidants than other fruits and vegetables, as well as vitamins. I suppose “more nutritious” doesn’t equal “better for you” in Miliband’s book, though it’s not clear what “better for you” could mean then. But the idea that there’s no proof is just silly. There’s no conclusive proof, no, but the studies done show that organic techniques probably turn out more nutritious foods. Why this is so, however, has little or nothing to do with pesticides, which is my pet peeve #2 in this BBC article, which is the focus on pesticides and ignoring other factors that may be more important.
The Soil Association, which regulates organic food, said studies show a difference between organic food and food produced using industrial methods.
It was critical of Mr Miliband’s suggestion that food grown with the use of pesticides and other chemicals should not be regarded as inferior.
The issue of pesticides is mentioned numerous times in the article, but the word “fertilizer” is nowhere to be seen. The idea that we are eating poisons designed to kill bugs with every bite is the sexy, paper-selling notion, no doubt. But the super focus on pesticides tends to distract people from some of the bigger issues with organics and why the organic foods and sustainable agriculture movement is about a lot more than some sort of yuppiefied lifestyle choice.
Fertilizers are why organic foods are more nutritious. Synthetic fertilizers grow plants a lot faster, which means that the fruits don’t store up as many vitamins per bite. It’s reallly simple, if you think about it. Which isn’t to say that synthetic fertilizers are a bad thing at all, because they’ve managed to get calories to populations that wouldn’t otherwise have enough calories to sustain themselves, but if you’ve got a choice at the grocery store, it’s better to go organic, nutrition-wise. That’s why organics often taste a lot better, too, at least if they were harvested ripe and not halfway across the world. Organic farming is better for the environment for reasons other than just pesticide use, as well. Synthetic fertilizers tend to deplete soil health over time, which could spell serious problems down the road if we can’t start weaning farmers off synthetics.
If you start reading literature on organic gardening and farming, the thing that tends to jump out is that the popular understanding of what is about is really off-base. I remember talking to my mom about it, for instance, and she made the same assumption everyone does, that it’s just a matter of not putting some poisons out to kill pests. Ironically, when I first got into organic gardening, the one area I did break the “rules” was in pest control, since I was plenty happy to spray down my yard for mosquitos on occasion. If I still had a yard, that’s probably the rule I’d still be breaking. With meat and dairy, people are likely to focus on the no-antibiotics and no-growth hormones issues. But another big part of organics there is to make sure the animals are eating organically grown feed, which goes right back to those fertilizers.
The sole focus on pesticides in the mainstream media coverage of this issue is a serious problem, because it implies that organic food is like teetotaling or being an exercise freak instead of the big picture, which is that organic food is about keeping soil healthy so that when synthetic fertilizers run out—and they will run out, because they require fossil fuels to be made—we will still be able to feed ourselves. All other considerations tend to be secondary to that big one, for obvious reasons. Touting the health benefits of organic food is often not even an end in itself, really. Studying the health of the plants that come from organic farming is a way of testing whether or not the soil they’re coming from is indeed staying healthier. Which then tends to drive home the larger point of how you can’t really disentangle environmentalism and public health issues, because environmentalism is the public health issue—we are of the planet and so its health and ours are going to be one and the same more than we care to admit. The perceived separation between the two is why people like Miliband can be so blase about claiming that there’s no proven health benefits to organics—there’s provien environmental benefits, so if we saw the two as one and the same, we’d see his statement as the horseshit it is.
Uploaded by livewombat
Mary at Pacific Views has a couple of posts about the state of the enviornment and the state of our food in 2006. I’m going to share in her prediction that we’re going to see more interest in food issues and in global warming in 2007. The latter is an area where I fear we may not be moving fast enough to stop the damage, since we have the huge roadblock of two more years of BushCo, and BushCo would pretty much rather burn the planet to the ground rather than cut into oil profits, so there you go. Still, people are beginning to get scared and I think any Democrat who wants to run for President needs to put global warming at the top of his priority list.
On the food front, I agree with Mary that 2006 was a turning point, particularly the E. coli spinach scare. Americans have a very moralistic attitude about food, and so scares about mad cow disease and E. coli in meat tend to be pushed aside precisely because Americans have it in their head that beef is a decadent sin, so naturally there are random punishments for eating it. If you are at all familiar with people’s ambivalence about abortion rights, then I think you can see how those same feelings are kicked up when it comes to beef-eating. But spinach is holy food. An E. coli scare about spinach is like finding out you can get pregnant from sitting in church pews. It reorders the situation considerably.
Mary has more information about why E. coli is a growing problem, and most of it stems from the existence of factory farming—the Rolling Stone has an article about what an ecological nightmare factory farming of pigs is. In summary: there is no reason on god’s green earth that pig shit lagoons need to exist. Pig farming, as I’ve mentioned before, depresses me more than almost any other animal cruelty issue, because pigs are so intelligent and social that their suffering in factory farms leads to an animal form of insanity. But even for you heartless bastards who can’t care about an animal’s pain, the ecological issues should give you pause. Pig shit is particularly odious and toxic—even on traditional pig farms, where pigs get to run around, managing pig shit is a hell of a task. So imagine the issues of an extreme amount of pig shit being created in one small area.
Hogs produce three times the fecal waste as humans, yet hog farms are not required to provide sewage treatment for hog waste. What normally happens is the hog waste is stored in huge ponds known as lagoons. At certain times the liquid from the lagoons is sprayed on the fields creating a toxic (bacterial laden) manure. Often the lagoons leak or overflow poisoning the groundwater and the streams. Now we have dead zones in the rivers and oceans that are downstream from factory farms.
Truly, these pig shit lagoons are like a standing symbol of the excesses of capitalism. From the Rolling Stone article:
The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker’s cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker’s older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker’s father dived in. They all died in pig shit.
The weird thing about all this is that factory hog farming would be wiped out if the government started imposing basic health restrictions on them. Which the government needs to do. If the only way to turn a profit raising pigs was in a small farm situation, everyone wins. The pigs won’t be tortured, the lagoons of shit would disappear, spinach wouldn’t have E. coli on it, small farmers would have a livelihood again, and the meat itself would taste better and be better for you. The price of pork would go up, but it’s not the worst thing in the world if people ate least artery-clogging meat. Literally, the only people that benefit from the current situation are the Big Agra pig farmers, and fuck those environment-destroying animal torturers.
Anyway, I’m digressing from my predictions. My main point is that I am pleased with the growing interest people are taking in finding out the horrible truth about the state of American agriculture. The Omnivore’s Dilemma selling so well and getting so much publicity is a good sign, as is the movie version of Fast Food Nation, and of course, the spinach scare is just bizarre and out-of-place enough that it really cut through people’s fog of ignorance and made them really think about where their food is coming from. But since lagoons of pig shit aren’t going anywhere soon, we can expect more vegetable scares like that one. In a weird way, the huge overreaction to the spinach scare that caused most of it to disappear from the market for weeks actually may end up backfiring on the very Big Agra protectionists who definitely wouldn’t do that if it was beef that showed up with E. coli in it like that. If you eat spinach at all, you couldn’t help but notice the recall, since it was so huge. People are going to start really asking some hard questions.
The other good sign I see in that area is the growing interest in being a “foodie”. Seriously, chefs from the Food Network are big fucking stars, chi-chi grocery stores like Whole Foods and Central Market (which I like a million times more than Whole Foods, by the way) are popping up everywhere, and it seems to me that there’s like 3 times as many magazines that specialize in gourmet cooking than there was a few years ago. Sure, it’s a middle class trend, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an important trend. What is pleasing about it is that sustainable and organic farming methods simply produce tastier food, so even if people didn’t have environmental or health concerns, the foodie trend would still be driving the increase in interest in eating those foods. At the grocery store this weekend, I took stock of how many organic products are on the shelves at boring old HEB that weren’t there a year ago—organic wine, organic chocolate truffles, organic cheeses—and on a lot of them, the price is coming down as the popularity and subsequently the supply goes up. The price of organic bananas came down to about half what it was a month ago, for instance, and banana prices are usually pretty stable. A couple of years ago, if I wanted everything I ate to be organic, I would have had to go to Central Market to buy it, but now I can just jog to the regular HEB. In Austin, at least, the popularity of the farmers’ markets is skyrocketing—seems to be more people out there all the time, even when it’s cold, like it was Saturday morning. The other thing I’ve noticed lately at the farmers’ market is that it is seeming more market-like all the time. People are friendlier, actual haggling is beginning to pop up, and there’s a definite uptick in the diversity of ages and races. Now, if only they would make the folk musicians go away, it would be perfect.
So this is my optimistic prediction for 2007—we’re going to see more of the same, more people asking hard questions, more people deciding to move their food dollars to more responsibly harvested crops, and hopefully the numbers will reach the tipping point where real political power starts coming into play.
And here’s a good interview with Michael Pollan explaining even more of the issues.
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
—Robert Frost
Well, it looks like the death of us all may not be anything as dignified as fire or ice. Nope, according to a new report from the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, we may be checking out on a sea of cow farts. (Via.)
But what is even more striking, and alarming, is that livestock are responsible for about 18 percent of the global warming effect, more than transportation’s contribution. The culprits are methane — the natural result of bovine digestion — and the nitrogen emitted by manure. Deforestation of grazing land adds to the effect.
There is a certain poetic justice in the idea of humanity checking out under a wave of cow shit and flatulence. I would like to wring my hands over it, but the truth is that we did this to ourselves. It’s humiliating, but if we had wanted better for ourselves, we probably would put down the burgers and get on those greens.
As I write this post, there’s a thunderstorm unloading on the city. A thunderstorm in December. Granted, this is Texas, and we eat our fair share of the beef, so we deserve it first. Still, sucks.
Bunny hug, anyone uploaded by szen volta.
Sara Dickerman has an interesting article in Slate about why it is that pork tends to capture the imaginations of those writing about some of the ethical issues behind meat-eating more than any other meat. After hashing over some various issues, including the religious taboos against eating pork, she comes around to what strikes me as the obvious reason that pigs capture our imagination. Simply put, Pigs Are Us.
Among regularly eaten beasts, pigs are probably the closest to human. They’re intelligent, social, relatively unfurry—and they resemble us on the inside. When Pollan looks at his dead pig in the woods, he is swept with revulsion. “I’d handled plenty of viscera in the chickens I’d gutted on Joel’s farm, but this was different and more disturbing, probably because the pig’s internal organs … looked exactly like human organs. Which is why, as I recalled, surgeons hone their skills by operating on pigs.” Indeed, the boundary between human and porcine seems uncomfortably blurred in folk and literary traditions across the centuries: Odysseus’ gang was turned into pigs by Circe, a baby turns into a piglet (shown here on a baby tee) in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and chef-pig statuettes are a not-insignificant category among kitsch collectibles.
Eating pork is uncomfortably close to cannibalism. From what I understand, human flesh tastes pretty pig-like. Baby pigs are unbearably cute. And of course, there’s the fact that pigs are smarter than dogs. I suspect that the religious taboos against pork were a reflection of these facts, especially since the taboos crop up in a series of dietary laws that broadcast the general idea that the people who have this diet are more civilized than other people. If you’re going to restrict people from eating a meat to show how civilized they are, then I’d imagine you’d start with the animal most like us. Dickerman hints at this in her article, but these things that make pigs more human-like make their presence in factory farms even more despicable—pigs become horribly neurotic being raised right on top of each other and will chew on each other in desperation. In other words, by cramming pigs into factory farms, we are driving them mad. Under the circumstances, continuing to eat pork that’s made in factory farms because it tastes good makes as much sense as kicking dogs to death and justifying it because it gives you pleasure.
Anyway, I bring it up because it adds an interesting wrinkle to the ever-contentious issue of vegetarianism. Ezra had an amusing post up yesterday about K-Lo getting all pissed off when she read this study showing that IQ correlates to vegetarianism, in that the higher the IQ, the likelier you are to be a vegetarian. The discussion in comments was interesting, too, because people actually managed to avoid dragging out hoary old stereotypes about vegetarians, such as the idea that we spend all our time glaring at people for ordering meat in restaurants or whatever. In fact, the opposite—it’s noted in comments that a lot of the time, the scary vegetarian judgementalism is nothing more than making people feel guilty by just eating. Sort of like how people feel guilty if your dinner companion eats a salad while you chow down on the fettucine alfredo.
K-Lo is almost surprisingly hostile to this study, which doesn’t actually establish causation, as Ezra points out. She titles her post, “PETA Propaganda!” Her hostility is pretty par for the course for adamant anti-choicers like her, though god knows PETA is such a vile organization that all people who actually care about animals and the environment need to avoid them and call them out constantly. Hostility towards animal rights is de rigeur for anti-feminists—a good example is at Hugo’s where his stance against animal testing made his anti-feminist commenters go nuts in a way that they usually reserve for when he claims women have rights. I don’t agree with Hugo’s stance, but the general principles behind it strike me as sound. Naturally, the issue of abortion came up in the comments at Hugo’s, which fit well into what a commenter at Ezra’s bemoaned.
The blogging cookbook is now out. I contributed a recipe for catfish tacos.
Uploaded by Kath B.
The big selling point of Big Agra, at least to calm fears about genetic engineering, synthetic fertilizers and pest control, and of course the corporate malfesance angle, is that industrial agriculture helps feed the world. And there’s something to this, at least since synthetic fertilizers have saved many a nation from starvation. (The other side of this is it’s allowed the world’s population to skyrocket, which means that if we lose the ability to make synthetic fertilizers—which currently require fossil fuels to be made—we appear to be looking at worldwide famine on a level that is pretty unimaginably horrifying.) In fact, one of the biggest issues with famine today is not that there’s not enough food so much as the distribution of it. Famine is caused by poverty and often by military manuevers that block distribution. The famous Irish Potato Famine, for instance, was caused just as much by England’s relative wealth to Ireland as it was by the potato blight. As it was with England and Ireland then, so it is with the U.S. and Mexico now. So industrial agriculture’s big promise is that abundance not only makes enough food for everyone, but more importantly, it makes food incredibly cheap. And it’s true that calories are so cheap that in America, it’s actually hard for poor people not to overeat on calories while trying to get nutrition, which is one reason this country has such a problem with diseases like diabetes.
Leaving aside issues of sustainability for now, one important issue when regarding the abundance of cheap food (at least in America) is that said abundance is built on a very complex system, and if one link in the chain went awry, there’s a good chance that cheapness could dissipate. Which is why I read this article by Debra Eschmeyer—originally printed in the East Texas Review and available at Alternet—about the mergers in the big corporate futures exchanges.
However, in today’s market, the lack of competition is wielding just as much force as Mother Nature as witnessed by the recent proposed acquisition of the Chicago Board of Trade by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) to become the CME Group Inc. — combining the two largest U.S. futures exchanges.
If you think this and similar mergers do not affect your freedom of choice and the quality of food you eat, think again. Food is not simply a commodity to produce at a larger and larger scale, squeezing the family farmer out along with the value of safe and healthy food.
The CME is already the world’s largest commodity broker determining futures and cash prices for products such as cheese, butter, live cattle, timber, and fertilizer as they set the benchmark prices for farm country. Within seconds the coarse yelling on the trade floor is translated around the world, affecting farm gate prices and grocery bills of billions of people.
If this merger goes through, the newly formed CME Group will enjoy unprecedented power over global food markets to the detriment of producers and consumers and the glee of large agribusiness and traders — lining their own pockets with money generated by destroying family farmers and the consumer value that exists in having diversity in the market.
Good liberals who know their Wal Mart well should have an inkling of what evil corporate game plans of the sort that Eschmeyer is concerned about often look like: First, try to slash labor costs as much as possible. You’re already seeing this with the way that farmers in America are seeing their percentage of the food dollar go down and down while the middlemen see theirs go up. Second, try smash or buy out the competition. If you can do this, you can set your prices as high as you want without any competition underselling you.
Is there a danger afoot that this is the sleazy intention behind such mergers? Maybe we can hope that there’s some moral accountability at the top.
The new CME Group could still end up with the Go to Jail card, as the U.S. Department of Justice must decide whether this merger violates federal anti-trust laws. The CME does not have a clean slate either. Last July six U.S. Senators including Clinton, Specter, and Feingold sent a letter calling on the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether cheese trading on the CME is susceptible to price manipulation. The study was requested to fully evaluate the CME in light of the upcoming farm bill. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is also currently investigating the nation’s largest dairy cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America, for alleged racketeering and insider trading on the CME.
Family farmers already know from previous paychecks that this is not a good forecast. Because the CME is a privately owned corporation, it does not have to follow normal transparency and accountability rules. The CME is subject to nominal oversight by the CFTC over the trading of futures, but there is no external oversight for cash trading.
Well, of course there’s not. And that’s not something to rely on, either. We’ve already got one massive problem of corporate domination being used to overfeed one wealthier population at the expense of another—you don’t even want to know how much of that $1 of Coke you’re drinking is pure profit for the people who made the corn syrup at a cut rate price obtained on the backs of the poor in Mexico. Nothing to stop them from squeezing people at home and pocketing the difference.
So here’s what you can do in the meantime to help: 1) Support local farmers by trying to buy directly from them as much as possible and cutting out the middleman. 2) Write your Congress critter and ask them to adamantly support America’s farmers and keep Big Agra from monopolizing the food supply. 3) Consider giving your Christmas charity money to organizations like Heifer International, which attempts to help people living in poverty do an end run around giving their food dollar mostly to corporate fat cats by providing people with farm animals they can use to make their own food. Liberal Avenger has the details.
Lids for lives instead of simply not putting cancer-causing hormones in the yogurt?
Study that’s been burning up the blogs lately: Eating a lot of red meat increases your chance of getting breast cancer. Lurking on the edges of this issue is the larger issue of whether or not the large amount of growth hormones and estrogen mimickers people are absorbing in the modern era could be contributing to the rise in cancers like breast cancer. The WaPo article hints that there’s a good chance of this.
Why red meat might increase the risk for breast cancer remains unknown, but previous research has suggested several possible reasons: Substances produced by cooking meat may be carcinogenic, naturally occurring substances in meat may mimic the action of hormones, or growth hormones that farmers feed cows could fuel breast cancer in women who consume meat from the animals.
This particular form of breast cancer is caused by hormonal fluctuations, so the possibility that it’s growth hormones in cattle is nothing to sneeze at. Which means that you can expect nothing but evasion and buck-passing on this issue from the government and from the industry. And worse, you can probably expect pink ribbons to start popping up on McDonald’s bags and commercials for steak houses.
It sounds cynical, but there’s a preponderance of evidence that a lot of companies that are contributing to the risk factor for breast cancer are responding not by actually doing something to prevent breast cancer but instead tossing a few dimes in the direction of charities that raise “awareness”. And naturally, they’re happy to be making money at the same time while they do it. The lion’s share of the pink ribbon efforts at breast cancer prevention and the cure aren’t overly interested in either of those things so much as getting middle class women to be a little more diligent about getting mammograms, so that they might be easier to save with early detection, which is much different than prevention. Our favorite patriarchy-blamer on this subject:
Under the noble auspices of charity, argues King in Pink Ribbons Inc, global corporations, politicians, and regressive white middle class American ‘family values’ are all getting a big shot in the arm from the pink ribbon juggernaut. Corporations secure, with impunity, free publicity and a means to expand their market share via enlogoed ‘awareness’ campaigns. Politicians support virtually unopposable ‘bipartisan’ breast cancer funding initiatives as directed by behemoths like the massively influential and reactionary Komen Foundation and come out smelling like a rose. The rank and file, conditioned by now to believe that there’s no problem shopping can’t solve, are invited to feel virtuous and altruistic whenever they buy a Yoplait yogurt or a pink KitchenAid mixer.
But where’s the activism? The ostensible focus of all this pseudo-philanthropic pink jockeying is a kind of nebulous breast cancer ‘awareness’, rather than any serious effort at prevention or investigation into what actually causes breast cancer in the first place. Furthermore, once all this ‘awareness’ has produced, via mammography outreach programs or self-exam propaganda (both masquerading as ‘prevention’), a positive diagnosis, there’s not any great push to secure treatment for underserved women.
The pink ribbon campaigns are a bit hard to criticize, because the majority of people racing for the cure or whatever are so damn well-meaning. That said, the unflinching truth of the matter is that the companies that sponsor pink ribbon awareness campaigns are only too happy to skim money off the top for themselves. Not only that, but the campaigns set up an activism vortex of sorts, pulling time and money away from people who might rather be interested in spending that time and money seeking real solutions to the problem of breast cancer. That’s because there’s increasing evidence that the real solution to breast cancer is going to be dramatically reducing the amount of chemicals we ingest that mess up our hormonal balance, from pesticides to growth hormones in beef and milk. And that solution is not profitable, whereas raising awareness of breast cancer through pink products is extremely profitable.
On one of Hugo’s random notes posts, he wrote this:
Just a minute or two ago, I was eating lunch in the faculty “party room”. A colleague came in, looked at me curiously, and asked what I was having. “A tofu-vegie burger on rice cakes”, I replied enthusiastically. She visibly shuddered and said in a firm voice “Out, Hugo, now. Take it and all that it means away!” I know she was joking. But it’s not the first time this sort of thing has happened. It’s interesting how publicly eating a restricted, healthy vegetarian diet tends to arouse hostility in folks — even when your mouth is full with food, and not full of sanctimonious preaching.
Should I wrap my tofu vegie-burgers in Burger King wrappers to give them the illusion of cheerful carnivorousness? Should I put my little bag of organic fruit and nuts inside an M&Ms wrapper?
No place is it more obvious that by making one choice, people automatically assume you’re passing judgement on other choices than the realm of “health” food and vegetarianism. I think it’s because a lot of vegetarians are sanctimonious asswipes about it—PETA’s entire existence is in service of being sanctimonious but ineffective—people feel a little more free to assume all vegetarians are being sanctimonious asswipes simply by not conforming to the mainstream dietary habits. In my day-to-day life, I try to affect a posture of apologetic humility about vegetarianism, and that gets me by very well in Austin, where vegetarianism is pretty common. But once I get out of this city, the weirdness erupts, and yeah, you get a lot of people laying a guilt trip on you for quietly eating the food you like. I’ve nearly had to scream at relatives before who kept pushing and pushing the lard-laden gravy on me at Thanksgiving, which is a habit that only started up in response to deciding not to eat of the four-legged mooing members of the planet. I never ate gravy before, because I don’t like it. But now my habits are taken as a de facto criticism of anyone who doesn’t share them.
The problem is that you can’t really outright say that people are entirely crazy to say this. Simply by having my reasons not to eat meat, I am, in a way, passively judging people who don’t agree with my reasons. I don’t want to, but it’s there. Same as when I am honest with people about why I don’t have kids—even if I shove a bunch of “I” statements in front of my reasons, it’s hard to get around the fact that this means I have a disagreement with people who do want to have kids on the validity of those reasons from an objective viewpoint. It’s this pressure that I think makes conformist pressure so hard to avoid caving into and/or exerting.
Thoughts?
When someone tells you not to eat these things, believe her.
Update: Coturnix is blogging the evolutionary theory explaining hot peppers here. Very cool, and an excellent example, by the way, of how evolutionary theory is in fact predictive.
A small break from blogging about all the shit in the world and time to blog about the glorious spice in it. Punkass Marc and I are fixing to head out to the annual hot sauce festival here in Austin. The point of the hot sauce festival is to see how stupid you can be when daring yourself to eat hot sauces while standing outside in 100 degree weather. For I am a pepper belly. As a small child in El Paso, they wean you on green chilis and move on from there. And who says Texans are crazy?
Above is the glorious habenero pepper. This small orange pepper is the source of much joy, sorrow and many hilarious stories amongst the pepper-loving populations of North America. I used to grow them, because they are super efficient as a spice source—two or three of these cut up into a stew pot full of beans would make the entire thing right the edge of too hot to eat. If you see a hot sauce with a skull and crossbones on it or any other indication that it’s “deadly”, odds are that it’s made with habeneros. Last time I went to the hot sauce festival with my mom, she decided that her West Texas self would show us Central Texans what it means to be a pepper belly and made the mistake of eating some habenero hot sauce, which caused her to down the entire bottle of water that I brought while hopping around and cursing. One day I will figure out if there’s another purpose to making hot sauces that are literally too hot to eat, but right now it appears that the whole point of them is to get your sadistic kicks at taking people down a couple notches who claim to be tough in the chili-eating department. (Actually, a teaspoon of habenero salsa also can add a big, nasty kick that’s still manageable to a sauce.)
In West Texas, the vast majority of food involves chili peppers of one sort or another. My favorite all-time creative use of habenero peppers was in a fruit salad that a woman I knew back home used to make. I think the dressing had one habenero pepper in it, and she would then toss a bunch of cantaloupe and other melons and blueberries and the like with the mouth-frying dressing. It was like prank food—people never saw it coming. You’d be standing around at a 4th of July party and see the big fruit salad and figure it would be nice and cool on a hot summer day, load up your plate, take a bite and then enjoy the singular pleasure of seeking a beer to wash down the pain while people laughed at you. That salad, plus the ability to unleash a shitload of fireworks every year, were possibly the only things that made summer bearable in boring ass Alpine when I was a teenager.
So have at it—hot sauce. What’s your favorite? What’s too hot? Comical hot sauce stories?
Chris Clarke has been doing intermittent posts on the subject of fatness in America and, weirdly enough, he got some comments or emails suggesting that fatness is the traditional symbol of corporate fat cat wealth in America. This is a criticism over a century out of date. The very wealthy display their cash through their bodies by having personal trainers and nutritionists and the free time to work out an insane amount. Madonna is possibly the most visibly alarming example of this trend.
None of this means that greed and food consumption and weight aren’t interrelated, as Chris addresses in a follow-up post on the escalating use of corn syrup in American food. Corn syrup is the preferred additive to make your junk food competitive in the junk food market because it’s incredibly cheap. And the reason that it’s so cheap says a lot about the escalating immorality of American trade policies.
On January 1, 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. NAFTA removed most of the legal barriers to trade among Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Almost immediately, Mexico’s agricultural infrastructure began to collapse. Before the agreement was signed, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari had amended the Mexican constitut