Dissection of a healthy meal

I had read Roland Barthes's book Mythologies quite some time ago and found it an interesting, although somewhat enigmatic book. In each of his short essays, Barthes takes a piece of French culture - toys, steak and chips, wrestling, and so on - and dissects it for what it means. Although I found most of the essays interesting, the significance was mostly lost because of the specific topics he discussed (and this was circa France in the 50s and 60s) and because I wasn't sure how to apply the "method," such as it were, to anything I had experienced. But I think now I have.

In Barthes work, mythology means something both less grand and more profound than the original meaning. Rather than simple moral tales, he uses this term to connote meanings that have become naturalized or taken for granted and thus susceptible to be glossed over, dismissed, or accepted at face value. He also does not use this term to stand merely for 'stories,' but takes nearly any aspect of culture and submits it for analysis. This use of the everyday as data would be pioneered, sometimes with interesting and sometimes banal results, in the field now commonly known as "cultural studies."

The "text" for analysis I obtained at the vegetarian restaurant Bridges, on McMaster's campus. I had just come back from the doctor with some vague symptoms, and although I wasn't able to be tested immediately, she suggested that what I was experiencing might be treated with "more fibre." So I was on the lookout for something healthy. So I got a lentil curry with basmati rice. I carried it back to the sociology department, my school home, and ate it in the lounge there.

As I ate, I stared at the container and realized what I had done. I had fallen prey to what I called in my other blog "the dearth of ecological thinking." I described this problem of thought as the tendency to prioritize what is near to one's own body, experience, and place as necessary for inspection in order to protect one's health, environment, and so on, at the expense of neglecting that it is all interconnected. I used the example of Wes's recent experience in his co-operative: one of the members published information (in the co-operative's newsletter) on compact flourescent light bulbs, showing that they have a small amount of mercury in them. This was enough to convince the writer that she thought they were dangerous; clearly she wanted to convince others of this too. This ignores, however, that under conditions where we obtain a sizeable amount of power from coal, and that given coal contains a certain amount of mercury as part of its impurities, and that given this is thrown out into the atmosphere (and later the environment) as part of the combustion process, that using an ordinary lightbulb derived from conventional power consisting of a great amount of coal power (as it is in Ontario) will ultimately leave more mercury that she will have to worry about in the future.

What relevance is this to my take out? It was the container: my healthy meal was housed in a plastic sarcophagus, number 6 polystyrene plastic, that God only knows how long will take to break down once it was carted off to the landfill. (I assume, perhaps falsely, that even when these plastics are recycled, as they can be in Hamilton, that most of it doesn't end up recycled, as I found out in Heather Rodger's book Gone Tomorrow: The Secret Life of Garbage, where she reveals that in the American case only about 5% of plastic is ever recycled once it is put in a blue box.) That plastic is hardly going to have a benign impact on the environment, and ultimately my health - or anyone else's.

Readers of my blog may protest that, yes, the plastic isn't great but it doesn't have a lot to do with my particular health issue of having too little fibre. And indeed it doesn't. The point is that I focused on a very narrow conception of health (my symptoms and the problems that might underlie it) while ignoring the much more comprehensive issue of the environment (and what I put into it) that also affects my health. These kind of issues surround other problems as well: how good is it for our health and the environment to truck organics everywhere? Would it be better to buy local, but pesticide treated, produce? And so on.

The Secret History of the War on Cancer

I just finished reading Devra Davis's book (which is the title of today's entry). She starts with observations that, even given epidemiologists' controls taking into account better detection and an aging population, the cancer burden of nearly all countries in the world is going up. The rest of the book is essentially answering why.

The answers she comes up with are not pretty. First, there is quite a long history of not doing anything about the problem despite knowing a lot about it: for instance, though occupational hazards associated with cancer were described in the 16th century (that's not a typo), many of the practices continue to this day (one example being asbestos mining, a material which has been banned from most European countries but which is still actively mined and turned into consumer goods for export in Canada and the United States). Second, often times scientists ignored what others had learned: the hazards of cigarette smoking, as one example, were well known because Nazi scientists had done extensive research on the practices. (One plausible explanation of this, that scientists would have found anything that Nazis had researched repugnant, fails to hold up, as many of the advances they had made in other areas, such as rocketry, were quickly incorporated into mainstream scientific research.) Third, fingerprints of industrial influence and even outright deception and fraud are all over the record of cancer research. Davis points out that one of the ambiguous legacies left to us by cancer research is that a great deal of what we know has been funded by industry, so at the same time it made possible what we know, it also provided strong incentives for findings to be suppressed or distorted. Scientists in the area also routinely failed to reveal their financial interests, often being employed by the companies whose potential carcinogens were being called into question.

The book contains some rather useful and interesting - as well as shocking - miniature histories of individual carcinogens, places, and researchers. For instance, the history of American companies, with the cooperation of Congress, spent years attempting to make a "safe cigarette" was eye-opening. Davis's other fascinating excavations are numerous - some of the most memorable in my reading include the following. For some time, asbestos was used to filter cigarettes; Sarnia, despite having no asbestos mines, has an incredible burden of mesothelioma (lung cancers associated with asbestos exposure); entire towns picked up to move as their lands became uninhabitable from industrial pollution; many research laboratories failed to install even rudimentary means of protecting workers from exposure (something on which, Davis tells us, the communist Russians had bested Americans); common medical procedures greatly increase cancer risks; any many other stories aside.

The book is also peppered with anecdote, interviews, and discussions Davis has had over the years in her capacity as a cancer researcher. She does not allow their stories, emotional as they are, to detract from her careful histories and powerful statistics that she uses to indict those who think that cancer is well under control. The result is that while the processes and numbers she talks about do not remain abstracted the book does not denigrate into either a polemical biography nor a merely sentimental plea for justice of the few discussed in her book, but rather point to the need for comprehensive change.

First entry - and hopefully not the last

I've been something of a slacker when it comes to blogging. For a while I've had one on MSN's "spaces" but added very little to it. It's not that I've had nothing to say; but I tended to let my PhD work take precedence over everything else. (Doctorate students who are reading this will understand this, as will practically anyone who works or has kids or access to high quality television programming: reading for pleasure becomes a distant memory, the gym seems far away although in reality it's 5 blocks down the street, and blogging - well, that's nothing but a decadent hobby.)

I'm hoping to revive those glory days by once again making the most important thing in cyberspace - my opinion - freely available to everyone out there. In reality I'm quite joking about the importance of my opinion. It's more of a "scratch pad" for ideas, and in the process, hopefully somewhere my writing can improve a little bit. When you've got a 200-300 page dissertation to put away in a few years, anything that might improve your writing can't be too bad. Keep your eye on this space for rants, opinions, polemics, observations, and (much less frequently) insights. And, good God willing, an update at least weekly.