Calorie labeling: aw jeez

So Ezra Klein points out one of the "prevention" provisions of our shiny new healthcare bill, as is is job, wont, and duty:

One of the bill's provisions is a menu labeling proposal for chain restaurants with more than 20 locations. The proposal requires chains to post the caloric content of each item (and the total calories of combo meals) next to its listing on the menu, the menu board, and even the drive-through menu kiosk. This goes into effect next year, and will be one of the most visible effects of the health-care bill. You can read the provision here (pdf).

The early evidence on menu labeling has been undeniably mixed, but this is good information for people to have. In 20 years, I think we'll be baffled that there was a time when it wasn't easily available to us.

So here's my thing. The immediate parallel, to my mind, is the nutrition facts labels on food products. I know I have a hard time imagining buying prepared foods, whether that means orange juice or microwavable Indian food, without being able to see what-all's in 'em.

But the difference is you have a choice. I can pick up, buy, unwrap, and eat a candy bar without ever looking at the calorie count or the saturated fats percentage or the nature of the carbohydrates locked within it. When that number is splashed big and loud and in red on a menu--a menu that in some situations will be the equivalent of a poster--that is a whole different story. Furthermore, nutritional information gives you much more than the bare number of calories. At least it gives you information that you can use to manage your diet in the way that works for you, if you so choose.

I understand that its inescapability is the point of the provision. But my god, what about the eating disordered in this country? Many will be perversely overjoyed: no need to privately estimate calorie counts, round up wildly to be "safe," google around for others' tallies. But many will also be terrified. They will be terrified that if they consistently pick the lowest-calorie option when obliged to eat out at a chain restaurant, their friends and family will notice; and they will be terrified that on the occasion that they venture, manage, or feel obliged to pick a higher calorie option, someone--anyone who knows what they picked, whether a dining companion or a server or a bystander, will be thinking, "what is that fatass doing eating anything but naked lettuce." Fat people who want to be left alone to eat a goddamn meal will face even more detailed commentary and well-intentioned, yet ultimately hurtful advice from friends, family, and random strangers than they do now. "Normal" people (i.e. those not included in the previous two categories) will find themselves competing with themselves or others to limit their calories while restaurants compete to offer the lowest calorie options (with no incentive to do so with regard to nutritional content or to provide customers with the ability to consider nutrition, rather than calorie-counting, themselves).

This is not to mention three larger points: 1, not all calories are created equal; 2, weight loss is not health. It is not necessarily not-health, and I am not saying that this provision is the only mechanism in the bill (lord knows if it were Ezra would be singing a much different tune), but I would really like to see some work on urban food deserts, for example, before we start giving ourselves even more tools for public body and diet shame.

Finally, 3: in many ways one of the biggest issues around food and health for Americans is that our culture can't conceive of food as food. It's all calories and good fats and bad fats and antioxidants. Having to intellectualize and moralize the shit out of everything we eat is not good for us. It leads to deprivation/binge cycles, depriving ourselves of things we need because they're "bad," sometimes relying on companies or fads to figure it all out for us (read: diets). Many of these diets are not very nutritionally sound, and almost none of them promote healthy relationships between mind and body--which is really one of the bases of health.

I think this further standardization and commodification of food into points which are good or bad but ultimately to be conquered will do nothing to help this pathologization of food and plenty to further it.

Compare:

MeMe Roth: "We’ve gotten ourselves to the point where we’re behaviorally and neurochemically dependent upon food."

Michael Pollan: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy."

Our culture, sadly, is much more in tune with the former sentiment than the latter. I don't think putting calorie counts on menus nationwide will help.

Colbert: 1 Beck: 0

Amazing.

(Blogger didn't like the embed code, I don't know why. Alas.)

Free speech

I'm sure yesterday was a wonderful day filled with the scent of victory and napalm in the morning for Bill O'Reilly:



I don't believe for a second that O'Reilly cares about abortion as much as he pretends to; he's in it for the ratings and the attention. But he must currently be feeling some bizarre combination of disavowal ("I'm just a journalist, man") a la Limbaugh and total power trip.


I'm not saying that Tiller was killed because of O'Reilly. I do think this kind of intense, emotionally provocative, and hateful rhetoric does encourage crazy people to do crazy things, but it's certainly not just Billo who produces it and it's not just abortion that attracts it. By many standards, Billo here is a model of restraint. But that doesn't change the fact that words do have power and guys like Limbaugh, Beck, and Billo will never accept that when it might require them to back down and learn a little humility.

A small aside

In Josh Marshall's (much longer) post on what to do about bondholders of too-big-to-fail institutions, I couldn't help but notice this (emphasis added):

...as I spoke to economists who are extremely knowledgeable and I think not at all inclined to be carrying the water of the bondholders, what became clear to me is that it's not just a question of our having no good theory of how to unwind a crisis like this, 'we' also don't have a good handle on the facts of the situation, which makes everything much more perilous. Sort of like defusing the time bomb without having put the bomber on the rack long enough to have him tell you how it works.

It just sort of freaks me out how the use of torture in 24 and by our government has permeated our cultural consciousness to where this kind of simile is naturally in reach when discussing a pretty unrelated subject. I know this is so not what the post is about--and on that I don't have much in the way of an opinion--but it struck me.

DipNote love continues

DipNote has a post up inviting suggestions for foreign policy priorities.

I started reading through the comments, but I had to stop. I discovered, see, that while the commentariat at the more wonky political blogs that I tend to read (as opposed to less wonky and more big-name, like Politico and DKos, which I don't really read) generally self-select to be intelligent and knowledgeable, the commentariat at an Official Government Blog is going to be...less self-selecting.

This isn't to say that the thread is full of trolls (though there was one bit of KEEP GITMO OPEN spam) or people writing in ALL CAPS ABOUT RANDOM CRAP (cf. Gitmo spam)--it's not. For the most part, from what I read, it's people writing in good faith, trying to answer the question. That's wonderful. And regardless of the quality of the feedback and whether it's taken very much into account--I rather doubt it'll set much of State's agenda going forward--it's a great thing to be doing.

Mostly, I was just struck by how little sense people seemed to have of what "foreign policy" means in terms of the State Department's jurisdiction. It does not mean immigration policy. Depending on what exactly you want to talk about, it doesn't necessarily mean the War on Drugs, even when we're talking about crossing into Latin America, and certainly not when we're talking about federal criminal penalties for marijuana. It definitely does not mean anything to do with education policy.

Like I said, it was surprising. However, there were also some great thoughts there too and, it seemed, impressive individuals (oh hai 17-year-old abolitionist who has started two organizations and been working since the age of 12). It's worth taking a look just to see what's on people's minds.

Also, it really depresses me when people still fail to spell things like Hamas or Barack. On the other hand, it makes me smile to see an American living in Kuwait abbreviate the country as "q8". This is why DipNote > Briefing Room.

The meaning of the word

You know what has been bugging me lately? The word "oversight."

It means both a mistake--accidentally missing something--and the function of overseeing a process or entity to make sure that everything is as it should be. That is, its two meanings are not quite directly contradictory, but they're close.

Both meanings are commonly used in political vocabulary. I guess to me, the latter definition is the primary one (I'm not saying this is a general fact, it's just my personal use), so whenever a political figure refers to a negative event as an "oversight", as in an innocent mistake ("I'm confident it was an oversight and we can move on"), I find it jarring and somewhat eerie.

I guess the anthropological side of me is wondering about the dual function. I wonder if the closeness of the words reflects, or could be used to stand for, the general acceptance that government is an imperfect set of institutions and processes and that it will routinely fail in its primary duties: oversights as failures of oversight.

I don't mean to imply that it's consciously used that way at all or that there's really any linguistic-historical there there. I just find it interesting in light of some thoughts I was toying with for my Anthropology of Policymaking class last quarter.

Slang and political journalism

Oh, wow. Ta-Nehisi Coates goes all out:

Slang goes out of style for a very good reason--at some point the words or terms of the day fail to properly describe a new day, a new situation, a new time. The reason why people who aren't a part of group sound stupid using slang, is because they often don't understand the words they're using on any deep level--they're just parroting what sounds cool. Ditto for all these cats running with this team of rivals notion. When you repeat that line--something which Obama is more than happy to see reporters do--what you're basically saying is "I quit. I refuse to respect my subject enough to think about what he specifically represents."

The best thing about the human brain is that it's original. None of us think the same. When thinkers amd writers refuse to employ that originality, when they opt against telling us what is particular, what is specific, what is unique about this moment in time, when they decide to go with the easiest received wisdom at hand, as opposed to deliberating, as opposed to banging their heads on the wall until they arrive at something new, than they are not writers or thinkers any more, but henchmen in the employ of propagandists. I say that as an Obama fan. Stop fucking pushing the cliches this dude is feeding you. Wake the fuck up and think for yourself. This is exactly how we got into Iraq. This isn't a damn game.

The middle

"[T]hat is FDR's lesson for Obama. Politics is not a battle for the middle. It is a battle for defining the terms of the political debate. It is a battle to be able to say what is the middle."

--Big Tent Democrat at TalkLeft


This is what I mean when I talk about language and naming in politics. This is why I follow politics as closely as I do (other than because I'm a junkie)--because I want to see not just what people are saying but how they are saying it. Because how they say it reveals how they think about these problems, how problems and their potential solutions are positioned in people's minds.

Probably my single greatest disappointment with Obama so far (though he may yet come through) is that he is uniquely well positioned to redefine the terms of American politics and has not done so. He is a candidate premised on "change" and a fresh perspective, coming at the end of a political and ideological era, with outstanding command of language. That he has not done more to obliterate Republican framing of politics, problems, and people and replace it with a more progressive lens makes me put my head down on my desk.

http://punkassblog.com/2008/07/21/and-every-time-i-read-one-i-remember/

That is an absolutely essential post and everyone should read it.

All I can say is, listen to your children (when we all grow up) when they tell you something's wrong.


In other news, this Tennessee tragedy continues to make me sick.

Basically, a bitter man who couldn't get a job, was about to be taken off food stamps, and had been divorced by a woman who attended a particular UU church decided to walk in with a shotgun and just start shooting. He killed a man and a woman, 61 and 60 years old. Some people there said the man protected others with his body.

His stated reasons for doing this were that he hates liberals, who are ruining the country, and gays. (The church had been supportive of LGBTQ members and hosted a sex ed event for teens, among other things).

I hope Karl Rove & Co. are happy. Not because they managed to BLAME TEH LIBERULZ OMG IT HURTZ but because, as always, these divisions are largely imaginary and created; and they are created in rhetoric, in language, advertisements, coded phrasing. Rove's electioneering tactics have been instrumental in furthering this one.

This is about child marriage in Yemen.

And when I say "child," I mean "girl," of course, because strangely enough this only ever seems to happen to female children.


In Yemen, girls are often married as young as 8 or 9. Sometimes it's because their families can't support them, sometimes it's because their families are afraid they'll be kidnapped and forcibly married by someone else (the article just sort of mentions this offhand, but WHAT THE FUCK), but largely because, as the article says, the fight against Communism in South Yemen (back when Yemen was divided) was won with its replacement with fundamentalist Islam. Just like, oh, Afghanistan. What was that about containment again? Boy, the Cold War sure was great, huh? (More on this later).

When Yemen was still divided, there was a law in the South saying that girls could not marry before age 16, boys not before 18. Since reunification and the rise of hardline Islamism (I have no idea if that's how, say, President Bush would use the word, but I know what I mean by it--again, more on that later [I decided this was too long and I'd save it for another time]), the law was revised to say that girls could get married whenever so long as they didn't move in with their husbands till age 15. Right. Fat chance.

The article was spurred by the fact that Nujood, a ten-year-old girl, ran out of her husband's owner's house, hailed herself a taxi (in rural Yemen? Nobody explained how this was possible), and went to the courthouse. It was the first time she had ever traveled anywhere by herself. The judge granted her a permanent divorce--she was lucky enough to find a sympathetic judge, rather than one who would have disregarded her and had her husband or father stand for her in court, which would no doubt had left her still "married" (I refuse to dignify this situation with that term).

Now she wants to be a human rights lawyer like the one who took her case, or maybe a journalist.

It just breaks my heart. When I read that last bit I could just hear a little ten-year-old girl's voice saying, "When I grow up..." and it's so terrible. Neither she nor the other girl profiled in this article had ever even been told what sex WAS before they were repeatedly raped and beaten before even reaching puberty. Yemen has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world (Afghanistan's still worse, though), because girls are having massive numbers of children before they're physically ready.

When challenged, conservative Yemenis defend the practice as traditional, etc (there's even a proverb about how an 8 year old bride guarantees a great marriage) and point out that the Prophet Muhammad married a nine-year-old. Now, from what I understand (although no one can really know), he married her for political reasons, not for domestic servitude or sex, and he did not use her as such. It would definitely be an incredible act of hypocrisy to preach what he did about marriage and women and then do such a thing. (Such acts have, of course, been seen, but rarely have they taken place among successful prophets to my knowledge.) He seems by many accounts to have been pretty much devoted to his first and primary wife.

All that aside, there are three two [same as above: got too long] things I want to discuss here.

1: I know you have all heard it before, but it cannot be repeated enough and it would be a disservice to omit it: women and girls are little better than property in places like these. They are domestic slaves. Rural Afghan men usually take a second wife when their first is too physically worn out to work the fields, haul water, grind flour, etc. day in and day out, let alone have more children. The first wife will stay in the house, take care of babies, and do some cooking and cleaning while the new, strong, young wife (anywhere from 8-18 or so) does these incredibly arduous chores--alone, or with other women in the family. The men hunt for prestige and chat with each other. Opium farmers marry off their daughters to pay off debt, for Christ's sake.

And if you think there is no relationship between that sort of thing, honor killings, etc. and the way women are framed as objects, prizes, and/or babymakers here in this country (amazing, isn't it, how starlets change overnight from WYLD PARTY GRRL to Loving!Mother! as soon as they show a bump), then in some sense I envy you because your life is a lot less depressing than mine.


2: I want to discuss the relationship to the Cold War. The containment policy has been repeatedly cited as a model of international policy that combined force with diplomacy, caution/restraint with courage, and pragmatism with principle. This is all true, and our lame duck president et.al. could have learned a lot from the practitioners of containment.

However, the fundamental flaw in containment and, in fact, in every bloody thing the glorious "West" has done since we first figured out we could take brown people's land, is underestimating or misunderstanding the people we are trying to manipulate.

The people fighting the Cold War didn't think it mattered who replaced the Communists when they got rid of them. This was because rather than seeing the Yemenis, or the Afghanis, etc. as people with a grievance in need of an outlet, a hope, and a strategy, they saw them as brainwashed pawns of Stalin and Mao. (There was a doctrine whose name I forget that promoted international development because poverty was the best seeding ground for Marxism, but even that--while on the right track--had a paternalistic overtone). And they figured once that brainwashing was dealt with, they would go back to being powerless, harmless, dumb-ass little brown people.

Only it doesn't work like that. Inequity among nations continued to grow, the people were no less poor and hopeless than they were before, and fundamentalist Islam took root in the wake of Communism--in part as a backlash to some of the Communist ideology (atheism, gender equality, sexual freedom, and so on). And guess what? Different name, same problem, they're still pissed at us and they still know how to shoot.

I just think it's incredible how little it is discussed in the public discourse the degree to which we have created our own problems. The West colonized. The West fought wars that it couldn't quite win (I'm talking about the British way back when, not us now) and left chaos. The West drew borders to fit its own interests, never stopping to think how those borders might affect the situation on the ground and how that, in turn, might cause it problems. And the West (with the U.S. having taken over from Britain) continues to strut around like everybody's cocky big brother who you're just itching to punch.

Yet we talk about "radical Islam" and terrorism and this and that like they're endemic. Like they just grew out of the ground without any help.

Someone on Shakesville once discussed the U.S.'s profound lack of a sense of history. I think it's very deeply tied to our political cycle ("What? That wasn't me, that was the other guy! Clean slate!") as well as to our constant conviction that we can create ourselves, as exemplified in the American dream, the lucky break, the second chance, etc. Our pasts do not have to define us, so our mythology goes.

It's a wonderful attitude, but sometimes it's just not workable. In the case of the Middle East, it's plain stupid.