The Politics of Food, 1.2

Lest we forget food is fundamentally about you and me, I share with everyone a paraphrased conversation at the supermarket.

Generic college-aged white guy: Dude, you ever have Sauce n’ Cake? It’s a cake you make in the microwave.

Generic college-aged East-Indian guy: In the microwave? Does it taste good?

Generic college-aged white guy: Oh yeah, it will blow your mind. I was eating like a box of it a day when I was trying to get bigger. [laughs]

So there you have it: if you’re trying to build mass, spurn the protein, go for an artificially flavoured pudding mix you can make in the microwave. The conversation was even funnier to overhear because I used to love Sauce n’ cake myself as a kid.

What to Eat Part 1.1

I found a good review of Pollan’s book over on Briarpatch magazine’s website.  It’s a good mag, one that I’ve read on and off, and I’ve recently become a subscriber.  It also reviews Paul Roberts’s The End of Food (which I’ve also read) and the No Nonsense Guide to World Food (which I haven’t but may pick up). 

There’s also an interesting article on whey protein and how it came into being.  It’s not very pretty for a lot of reasons.  I won’t give away all the surprises, but suffice to say that we weren’t eating the stuff 25 years ago…

What to Eat: Part 1

I have been reading a lot of books on food lately.  Most of this stems from my dissertation topic: I’ve chosen to examine the narrative and moral structure of what I’ve termed ‘weight loss reality TV.’ There are quite a few shows in this genre, including perhaps the best well-known (and most widely distributed and cross marketed), The Biggest Loser.  I’ve entitled this part one because there are other books I’ll likely discuss in my blog in the upcoming days or weeks. 

A while ago I picked up a copy of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Readers of his earlier food book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, will see a little of his old book given a different spin, including his critical take on industrial agriculture.  But he also considers the science and ideology behind nutritional science, and he emerges very skeptical of the advice given by the experts. 

He explodes many sacred cows in his book.  Fat in our diets is not really the enemy.  Breaking down foods into their constituent nutrients (or antioxidants, or whatever) is not a good way to conduct science or to ensure health.  And perhaps what is going to be the most maddening to most people is that we eat too many animals.  Far, far too many.  And too many animal products.  This last part might not seem that explosive in terms of what nutritionists have been telling us about saturated fats and cholesterol, but Pollan’s point is a double swipe at what he calls “nutritionism,” which is that food can be reduced to constituent parts (fibre, vitamins/minerals, macronutrients, etc).  First, this ignores the problem that farming animals causes in the first place.  Too much meat not only means more health problems; it also means higher chances of environmental degradation, for instance.  Second, this ignores that many cultures without boneless, skinless chicken breasts have done fine without too many animal products.  Many people do just fine incorporating them into their diets as once or twice a week luxury items, and a variety of other cultures across the globe have lower rates of chronic illnesses than do our own. [1]

So what does Pollan recommend?  In some ways you could be saved the trouble of reading the book, as the cover picture summarizes his approach:  Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants.  By this, he means simply that we should eat things that are not overly processed or intended for convenience, that we should eat less, and that our diet should lean towards vegetables, fruits, and grains, rather than animal products.  It might even seem to be a “diet,” summarized this way, but it’s not really intended to be. It’s intended to be a slogan that connects the various strands of his book.  Not only is that diet likely to be good for our health, but it is also likely good for our environment, it is more sound than most of the nutrition science, and it defeats efforts from those who hawk foods and fad diets.   But Pollan’s showing why this slogan is a good one to follow is engaging.  Although written to the non-expert, I would also be tempted to assign it in a sociology of food course because it would provoke a great deal of discussion. 

[1] Although Pollan’s book comes across as somewhat Amerocentric, his arguments apply to all to the degree that they adhere to a “Western” diet: those in North America, Europe, Australia, and those who are eating like people in those areas.  Even here, though, there are clearly wide variations. 

The Cigarette Century

Discussed in this posting:  

Brandt, Allan M.  2007.  The Cigarette Century:  The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America.  New York: Basic Books.  600pp.

Brandt's book is an illuminating look at the many facets of the cigarette, a story he starts in the later part of the 19th century.  The book is divided into five broad sections, dealing with the culture, science, politics, law, and globalization of this consumer good.  In the process, Brandt reveals much more than the cigarette itself; rather, tracking them is in large measure a tracking of many modern developments that we now take for granted.

Among the topics that are touched on by the cigarette are the evolution of manufacturing processes, the sometimes arcane realm of tort and civil law, the rise and refinement of public relations and advertising, and the insuation of corporate and moneyed interests into politics.  Thus, this book is both a comprehensive history of the cigarette, and in many ways a case study through which these various social processes can be seen to have changed throughout the 20th century up to the current day.  

In large measure, the book tells of an industry which wanted to make itself immune to all sorts of regulations in many ways.  First, by cloaking itself in controversy by maintaining, long after the science had lead to a preponderance of evidence suggesting smoking cased cancer, they had evaded successfully medical and governmental regulation.  Second, by cloaking themselves in the language of "rights" and "emancipation" and "feminism", they helped lead the charge to spread smoking to women, to protect it under the guise of allowing smokers a "right to choose," and to force other countries to open their borders to these products despite any health consequences.  

While the book is interesting and comprehensive throughout, the writing and story becomes most compelling in the section entitled "Law," where the access to the corporations' archives displays in full brutality the cynical manipulation and arguments that these business players wished to propagate on the American public.  Here I read the book aghast and shocked, wondering with each legal argument that a member of the prosecuting team put forward the justification executives would retort with in court.  

The book, while comprehensive, does not tell every story that would be of interest.  Because it is a story of cigarettes and not tobacco, other aspects of "cigarette history" (or "prehistory"), such as tobacco and slavery, do not receive much attention in the book.  It is also short on comparative history of tobacco in other nations, containing scattered references to the British companies throughout, but not coalescing into a full-blown review of differences in similarities across societies.  Some of this is also encountered in the last section of globalization, but mostly from an Americentric point of view.  This isn't necessarily a fault, however, as Brandt's book makes it clear that these companies have been among the most powerful in lobbying to have trade barriers knocked down for their product. 

This book will likely not be the last written on American cigarettes, as the archives made available by litigation and brave whistleblowers is dauntingly huge.  Nonetheless, Brandt succeeds in reviewing a history that is both quite specific, and at the same time, quite broad.  It is history and sociology at its most powerful, making something mundane and ordinary into something strange, a mystery to be unravelled, explained, and above all, demystified.  

"Immune to Reason"

The title is taken from a Mother Jones article discussing parents who choose not to have themselves and their children vaccinated (Allen 2008). The article points out that studies that have attempted to find links between vaccines and different conditions - most notably, autism - have failed to show that there is any population based link between vaccination and the conditions it has been putatively linked to. This means that, as a population, we aren't seeing increased rates of autism or other diseases because of vaccination.

Yet this hasn't stopped some people from opting out of the process altogether. A key point to make about the vaccination-autism link is that evidence has stacked up against it only at a population level. This means that in individual cases this might have been a cause of the problem. At the same time, as Collins and Pinch (2006) discuss as they review this facet of medicine through the lens of the sociology of science, we don't know what the potential "masked markers" that determine if vaccination will cause autism are yet (or even that such markers even exist). Another problem is that when enough people fail to get vaccinated, there is a loss of what is called "herd immunity" - if enough people get vaccinated, it will protect everyone, even those who aren't vaccinated. Vaccination can never be at 100% because of various issues (for instance, some people will be too young; some will be allergic to vaccinations; some will mistakenly believe they are vaccinated when they are not for some reason; people may immigrate from other places where vaccination wasn't undertaken; and so on), but the problem is that every single person who chooses not to be vaccinated makes it more likely that others who aren't vaccinated for whatever reason will also fall prey to the disease.

Both discussions of "herd mentality" interestingly miss a key point of what might motivate vaccination skeptics to not become vaccinated. Ironically, it is located in the very successes of medicine and nutrition. Because these two factors have eliminated the incidence of previous diseases which were deadly or debilitating (e.g., polio, whooping cough, etc.) people are now in a historically significant position where the risk of these diseases appears lower than highly visible and publicized conditions such as autism. The success of medicine has created the ironic possibility of more doubt of medicine. But as Collins and Pinch (2006) point out, despite the low profile of these diseases in most western nations, the risk of developing them is probably much higher than autism - particularly if one chooses not to vaccinate.

I am not suggesting that we ignore any potential vaccine-autism (or vaccine-other condition) link; indeed, testing new vaccines in the future will demand that they are tested to monitor for such conditions, to establish that the new medicines are doing much more good than harm. Hypothesized "markers" may even be found so that doctors will be able to recommend to parents that their particular child has a good reason to not be vaccinated. But under current conditions, we are all "blind" to what those markers might be. As terrible as autism might be, we should not forget that other terrible conditions can more easily infect the non-vaccinated. In such conditions, we would all be advised to take a scientific leap of faith and roll up our arm cuffs.

References:

Allen, Arthur. 2008. "Immune to Reason." Mother Jones, October, pp. 91-2.

Collins, Harry and Trevor Pinch. 2006. Dr. Golem: How to Think about Medicine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Miro

I've just found a new program online that I've been enjoying for the past couple of days called Miro. It's a totally free media program that can handle everything from RSS feeds to music and movie files (of many varieties), as well as acting as a Bittorrent client for those of you wanting to download files this way. All of these features would be great alone, but the program also includes an integrated "channel search" that allows you to find media from a wide variety of providers, much in the way of a video blog, but with a prettier interface. For example, one of my favourite online news programs Democracy Now! is available this way. I've also found channels that link to Bill Moyers' Journal (PBS program by the populist journalist), The Onion News (incredibly funny satire), as well as some stuff from Discovery Channel (I have an inner science geek that I haven't adequately nurtured since I left middle school).

The footprint of the program seems to be relatively small, using about 112-130K of RAM on my computer when I've checked, which is another bonus as many of the other media programs as hogs in this way. (It's also a bonus if you consider how much memory separate programs would use collectively if you were running them at the same time.) There is a version for all of the major platforms (Mac, Linux, Windows), although the Windows version apparently includes some issues with the firewall. I haven't run into them yet, but the page includes a helpful workaround if this happens to you.

So far I'm in love.

Non-violence and Jesus

I'm reading The Impossible Will Take a While, a collection of political writings designed to inspire hope in activists. One of the essays caught my attention because it offered a radical interpretation of several of Jesus's parables, and what it means to be a good Christian. The essay, entitled "Jesus and Alinksky" by Walter Wink, suggests that while Jesus never recommended violence, he was also not committed to passivity either.

The three stories that Wink analyzes - to turn the other cheek, to go two miles with someone who asks you to go for one, and to give someone your cloak if you are sued for it in court and that is all you have - suggest that Christians should accept their fate of the world around them in light of great evil. But what Wink suggests is that Jesus was suggesting that 1) one should not allow violent actions to rob one of dignity (turn the other cheek); 2) to stand firm with strong opponents (go two miles); and 3) allow ridicule to expose others who stand against you (give away your cloak even if it leaves you naked). Wink's essay, in essence, suggests that Jesus counseled non-violent resistance. This kind of reading is of course in the minority; with many people waiting for the rapture as followers of Christianity, the passivity route seems to be very popular with many.

Although Wink doesn't discuss it, the issue of Christ's divinity also plays into this creation of passivity. If we accept that Jesus "died for our sins," and that his actions stemmed from the fact that he was the "son of God," there is little we can or need to do in light of the great evil in the world. Religion, in this way, only becomes opium (to gloss Marx) because a great many of us accept that someone else is ultimately responsible for our salvation. Although the analogy is crude, Christ's divinity allows us to pass the buck to Jesus.