The Education of Desire: We are what we do, we are what we eat

Perhaps I'm a bit late in jumping on this particular bandwagon, because when I started searching for more information on a couple of closely related problems (obesity and food waste) I found more than I can handle in one post.  Other folks have also been thinking about the irony of this country's enormous waistlines and the equally enormous amounts of food waste making its way to the landfill.  We also hear talk of food deserts that help account for obesity among the poor, but I only recently began to wonder if anyone had been connecting the dots. Clearly they have.

This week's news media also reported on topics that are at least tangentially related to the waste/obesity problem: Herman Pontzer's articles in the New York Times,  pointed out that (as the Daily Poop version of the story put it) "It's the Sugar, Stupid," and that all the exercise in the world isn't going to make us as healthy as our distant ancestors if we're consuming crap. And in this week's New Scientist, the cover story ("Eat Your Way to Dementia") is about the relationship between type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer's disease. 

The last two months of house-renovation have increased my awareness of food waste because the combination of beastly weather, minimal air conditioning, and odd sleeping accommodations has put the kibosh on cooking (I've been way too hot and tired)--with the result that I spent this morning cleaning out my fridge, ridding myself of spoilt food, shriveled limes and carrots, and a couple of mystery life forms.  Mind you, the compost and the Bokashi bins can handle almost all of this, so that I don't really have to throw much away.  But that's not the point. 

This stuff was bought at a premium, represents many folks' labor and time (from farm to market), and bloody well should have been eaten.  Not only eaten, but cooked well and healthfully.  What the news articles have done is to fortify my resolve to accomplish several items in a new program of food-consciousness. 

First, it's really a good idea to plan one's meals and not rely (except on rare occasions) on serendipity.  My daughter bragged in a text message last night that she had planned a week's meals for two and spent $57 on them at Whole Foods. She's also tracking how they use leftovers--which isn't a bad idea either.  Simplifying food preparation in hot weather so that ingredients can be used more than once saves time, energy, and effort, and it helps prevent waste. So I'm going to set aside an hour or so one day a week (probably Wednesday morning) to plan the week's meals in time to shop on the way home from school on Thursday, when I have an early morning class. 

In addition, since before too long I'm going to be pinching food pennies again (i.e. when I retire, which could be as early as a year from now), I'm going to need to be considerably more mindful of how much I spend. I won't scrimp on quality, but if I end up paying $5 a pound for really good tomatoes, I certainly need to make sure that we actually eat them before they go off. 

My biggest challenge will be to address the issues that Herman Pontzer raises about what we've evolved to eat.  This is actually something I've been aware of for rather a long time, having conducted research on breastfeeding and maternal nutrition in hunter-gatherer cultures as a grad student.  I'm also really puzzled by what seems to be an increasing intolerance to the kinds of grains that our Neolithic ancestors domesticated for us.  Purely gathering cultures didn't eat these grains, which came along after people settled down and began to raise animals and crops.  Still, I do wonder if modern modifications to wheat varieties and increased refinement (the quest for gummy white bread) might be at least partly responsible.  I've already started using farro in pilaf and risotto-like concoctions; now I'm thinking of grinding some and trying it in bread. 

Another article, on the effect of modern European diets on Native Americans, makes a similar point,   as does a report on the Westernization of Asian diets. Both of these populations suffer mightily from diabetes in increasing numbers, and at least part of the culprit is radical dietary change over a relatively small amount of time in evolutionary terms.

It just seems like plain common sense to eat whole foods, high in fiber, low in--but not absent--fats, and free of transmogrified sugars and other chemicalized foodstuffs that have been developed to entice us to eat "food" that's not good for us. (See the 60 Minutes programs on "Tweaking Tastes and Creating Cravings" and the toxicity of sugar for examples of how we're being seduced into desiring what's bad for us.)

The simplest path to health seems also to be the cheapest: eat simply, grow herbs to enhance flavors and provide micronutrients, stay away from heavily processed stuff that comes in fancy packaging, and cook from scratch as much as possible.  New information about fermented foods seems to back up the practices of many simpler cultures (sauerkraut, kimchee, miso, cheese), so taking your dairy foods in the form of a good yoghurt doesn't sound all that bad.  Thanks to Mark Bittman, I've recently reduced the amount of cow's milk I drink and have since suffered far less from heartburn.  I haven't completely sworn off the stuff, because I love it (1%) in coffee, and am not fond of completely eliminating things that still offer some nutritional benefits.

While it's clear that eating more like an Archevore or following some version of a paleo-diet might well improve overall health, that's fodder (sorry) for another post. After all, if everyone suddenly abandoned wheat, corn, dairy foods, and minimized fruit consumption because of its sugar content, the American economy would collapse.  But we certainly do need to pay a lot more attention to what we eat and what we throw away, and make decisions that lead producers away from creating more and more junk.  Spending a bit of time reading Dana Gunders's position paper for the National Resources Defense Council, "Wasted: How America Is Losing up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill", or Jonathan Bloom's book American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of its Food (the link is to his blog, Wasted Food) can go a long way toward raising our collective awareness of the ironies and inconsistencies in American food-life; obesity, hunger, plenty, over-indulgence, and waste are all tightly woven into a culture riddled with greed, inattentiveness, consumerism, and advertising designed to make us keep doing what we're doing. But we ought not to be doing it, else we will become it.

I vote we stop. Soon.

Image credit: Vincent van Gogh's Wheat Field with Crows seemed appropriate for this post, not least because the crows can be seen as harbingers of his death.  I showed this in my Art History 2 class a couple of weeks ago, along with Akira Kurasawa's short film, Crows, via Biblioklept (from Akira Kurosawa's Dreams); the painting is from Wikimedia Commons.

Stupidism

It may be a sign of age, but I do try to be moderate in most things (I lack "passion" some would say); every now and then, though, something really gets up my nose and a rant just bubbles up--kind of like a spit-take. 

It's not enough that both political parties are yanking stuff out of context to support "arguments" about what the other guys are doing. The most egregious of recent examples is being used by the Republicans to paint Obama as being "anti-small business" because he insisted that we don't do anything on our own in an unfortunately worded (i.e. longer than one sentence) comment about our dependence upon infrastructure. 

But the so-called "Liberal Media" (capital letters--as on the truck I occasionally follow down the highway to Dallas that sports a bumper sticker in the window that says "I don't believe the Liberal Media"), in their efforts to sound more non-partisan, occasionally feed the shark.  Last Thursday morning, in NPR's coverage of Romney's speech before the American Legion, a reporter on Morning Edition quoted one of the most blatantly racist remarks I've heard spoken publicly in some time.  A woman, when asked what she thought of Obama, said "I just don't like 'im; can't stand to look at 'im. I don't like his wife; she's far from a first lady. 'Bout time we get a first lady who acts like a first lady and looks like a first lady."

Say what??  How are we supposed to take that?  We'll never know, because the report didn't include any follow up.  Did the reporter ask her what she meant by her remarks?  (Note: Apparently Ari Shapiro didn't have time clarify; see the Wonkett post linked below).  But it's certainly a sound bite--one that rankled some folk other than me (the Obama Diary; Left In Alabama; Wonkette). What are we to make of this?  How can we not see this as racist, without more context? Unless, of course, she didn't think Laura Bush looked or acted like a first lady, either. Hillary Clinton was, of course, one of those uppity wimmin who didn't do much of anything first-lady-like, but somehow I doubt that this woman's remarks were directed at the most recent Mrs. Bush.

I usually applaud NPR for the length of its stories, but this one short bit, designed (I guess) to show how much support Romney has among older vets, failed miserably because it leaves so many questions to be asked--and answered.  Is NPR editing for effect?  Boy would I love to have heard what else that woman had to say; maybe she just didn't like all the sundresses and bare arms.

Every day, probably five or six times every day, I get requests from the Dems to fork over another 5 bucks to address some quip by some Republican.  I told the nice lady on the phone a few months ago to just take my name of her call list because 1) I'm not going to answer anonymous calls and 2) I'm smart enough to give what I can (or want to) when I can or want to.  I  pay enough attention to the news to know that whatever problems I have with Democrats pale compared to what the so-called Republican party wants to do.  My friends--and even my parents--thought I was a right-winger when I was a kid--but compared to those guys in Tampa, I'm a flaming Communist. This is not only not my father's Republican party, it's not even my own from 1964.

As the saying goes, everyone's entitled to their own opinion; but they're not entitled to their own facts (or, as C.P. Scott editor of the Guardian, reportedly once said,  "Comment is free, but facts are sacred").  The Republicans ignore factcheck.org and fundamental rules of logic at their peril, because what little faith I have in American intellect leads me to hope that most of the populace will wake up before the election and decide en masse that they don't want to joint the Stupidism movement.

A post-script:  I got a chance this morning to unload on a survey conducted by the Obama campaign; in my comments, I asked that the Democrats refrain from taking quips out of context and reporting or using any information that couldn't be verified as factual.  If anybody actually reads my remarks, I'll be happy; I'll be ecstatic if anybody actually pays them any heed. Also, as I was looking for an illustration for the post (knowing that I wanted something to do with the old "three wise monkeys" story), I ran across this on Wikimedia:

It's by Stuckist  artist Peter Absalom; whilst Stuckists are a rather laudable group (they oppose the kind of conceptual art that particularly annoys me), I was reminded by the picture that their name was chosen in much the same spirit as I've decided upon "Stupidism" to describe our present political malady.


Image credits: The Three Wise Monkeys relief decorates the Toshogu temple, one of the UNESCO World Heritage sites at Nikko, Japan. The Peter Absalom work is noted above, but I also got that from Wikimedia Commons.

Little Utopians

We've begun to put the interior of the house back together as things get finished off one by one. On Saturday, as I was replacing some family photos on one of the shelves flanking the fireplace, I noticed a book I hadn't realized that I had.  During the living room paint job, the books remained on these shelves (I'm going to paint them later), so I hadn't had to move them--else I'd have noticed the book a couple of months ago.  I have a rather large collection of books for various ages of children, most of which have been passed down through generations of my family.*  But I still buy books I don't already have, by authors I have loved well, and especially if they're artfully illustrated.

Rather recently, I think (although with the current state of my memory, who knows), I happened on a Ten Speed Press reprint of Kenneth Grahame's Dream Days, illustrated by Maxfield Parrish.  It's a lovely facsimile edition, complete with the black and white plates of the original facing the first page of each story.  Most folks are only familiar with The Wind in the Willows (and probably because of the Disney film rather than the book itself), but Dream Days is the collection of short stories that contains the inspiration for another Disney film, "The Reluctant Dragon."

The astonishing thing about this little book, and its predecessor, The Golden Age (also "profusely" illustrated by Parrish), is the view of children as curious, inventive, literate, engaging people, bent on building their own little utopias within their own landscapes.  Grahame, who appears to have been just such a child, reminds me of J. M. Barrie, whose Peter and Wendy is just about the wittiest book I've ever read.  Both Barrie and Grahame seem to be writing both for the children themselves, and for the parents who would be reading the stories to them.  We see this same phenomenon today in clever animated features clearly meant to engage different audiences (Rango comes immediately to mind), but the "literature" I see on the shelves for kids today seems not to be nearly as well tuned.  Mind you, it's been quite a while since I actually bought a book for a child that wasn't a copy of an old childhood favorite, but their section of the bookshops is so over-stuffed with toys, games, movie tie-ins, and other trumpery that whenever I do want to buy a book-gift for a new baby, I have to search through the Times children's book reviews and order online to save myself the angst of wading through the mire to look for a new title.

But yesterday, I spent a little time in the kids' portion of Half Price Books, looking for a copy of The Golden Age, to no avail.  I did see a few copies of The Wind in the Willows (most had the Disney art on the cover), but nothing else, so I went to the Nostalgia section to see what might be there.  I yearned for two Tom Swift books, but had already latched onto a tenth-edition copy of  Tom Brown's School Days, and a My Book House collection of Tales Told in Holland--both for the quality of the illustrations and prose.  Once again, early twentieth-century children were clearly exposed to far more literate and instructive reading material than their early twenty-first-century counterparts are.

At some point I'll have to post a rant about this condition on The Owl of Athena, and talk about other of  Grahame's books on Owl's Cabinet. But for now, the fact that the children he writes about would undoubtedly fit in quite well with those who populate More News From Nowhere makes an account of this week's literary adventures fit best on The Farm.

*Owl's Cabinet of Wonders posts on some of these: The Peter Patter Book, October 2008, and Fiddling Away the Summer, August 2008.

Image credit: The Maxfield Parrish illustration for "Dies Irae," 1906, from Dream Days by Kenneth Graham (the edition I mentioned was published by Ten Speed Press in 1993. ISBN 0-89815-546-0); the image is from the New York Public Library Digital Gallery of Maxfield Parrish's work (Image ID: 1698241).