Warfare In Food, Fat, and Class
Irradiated by LabRat
Via Chas Clifton, an article by Rod Dreher on the intersection between food, class, politics, and culture, and some of the weird eddies and patterns thereof. His article is specifically about the breed of “fuck you, nanny liberal” conservative that takes perverse joy in eating the opposite of what the “blue elite do”- junk food rather than arugula and organic grass-fed beef. I agree with Chas: read it all, and some of the comments for good measure (they remain surprisingly civil, or have for as far as I’ve been reading), not least because it’s resistant to excerpting and this post will mostly be a collection of thoughts in reaction.
- Several of the commenters brought up a point Dreher didn’t, which is that our food culture- and that of many other nations- is a relic of a time when the average citizen would spend most of the day on his or her feet, sometimes working so hard as to require two or three times the calories to get through the day at “maintenance” that the average citizen with a desk job does. The diet associated with the South and Midwest isn’t saturated in fat and starch because Southerners and Midwesterners are particularly more stupid or indulgent than other regions, it’s because they were the agricultural center of the nation and eating the greens without the pork fat or broccoli instead of mashed potatoes would have been about as productive to the average eater as eating steam. There were still sedentary people, and for that matter fat people (including fat people doing just as much of the physical labor as the skinny people), but the average working life was still not one that primarily involved sitting still.
- A common strain of thought I saw in the comments (firmly to be expected from something aimed squarely at a conservative audience), was the idea that obesity is running rampant because we’re moving more and more to more government- and insurance-funded health care, and thus obese people don’t bear any “costs” for being obese. I regard this as utter bullshit. Being obese IS a cost, and a steep one; insurance and Medicare aren’t funding liposuctions or any sort of magical fat-loss, or even doing anything more than somewhat mitigating the health problems associated with morbid obesity. You can’t pay your way out of crippling arthritis, runaway diabetes, sleep apnea, or doing ordinary errands being a giant and daunting physical challenge, even with someone else’s money. These aren’t inconveniences, being very obese is miserable compared to being thin or even moderately overweight. That isn’t even going into the social costs, which…
- …Dreher doesn’t seem to believe exist. I know it’s pretty much standard for conservatives to see themselves as standing athwart a wholesale abandonment of personal responsibility, but the degree of divergence between the America I live in and the one he apparently does is so great as to make me wonder if we’re inhabiting parallel dimensions. In the one I live in, being fat is regarded as not just undesirable but essentially sinful- perhaps the fact that Dreher agrees with that view in a classic-Christian sort of way is why he doesn’t see it as standout or as another cost associated with obesity. Being fat is like extending a blanket invitation to the world to remind you that you are, and usually accompanied by either a lecture on self-control akin to the one Dreher delivers or instructions that seem to assume that you were raised by wolves and have absolutely no idea that cake is fattening or that you should move around some. Befriending or being family to someone who is noticeably fat is like having a permanent ticket to a movie consisting solely of the world’s rudest people offering the most gratuitous abuse or obvious advice. For whatever reasons obese people are obese, because that state is not sufficiently unpleasant as to be discouraging is clearly not it.
- Speaking of cake, a brief pause for a minirant: What IS it with the cake? I eat cake on exactly two occasions, my own birthday or the birthday of someone sufficiently intimate to me to want to include me in that night’s meal. The vast majority of other people that I know, fat or thin, do pretty much the same. Literally the only person of my acquaintance who has such a sweet tooth they eat cake on a semiregular basis isn’t fat. Is there a secret town in America whose population consists of fat people who subsist solely on cake, donuts, and bacon?
- Moving on to the actual topic at hand, one observation I had is that not only did we essentially lose a generation or two of Americans in which knowing how to cook a variety of nourishing foods from scratch was a bog-standard adult life skill that everyone acquired in the family home, we did a switcheroo on the class associations of this skill. Immediately postwar during the prosperity and technology boom of the fifties, cooking became associated with the lower classes and immigrants who couldn’t afford food that was largely pre-prepared or prepared by someone else- or at least, not having to do much or any cooking for yourself became associated with wealth and status. Sometime around the eighties, yuppies kicked off a home cooking boom in which the type and cost of ingredients scaled up a good deal (setting the origins for those Whole Foods shoppers in the class-warfare game), and cooking from scratch for yourself became associated with wealth and higher class in itself. Knowing how to turn a bag of rice, beans, and maybe one dubious piece of meat into a hearty meal for six became a lower-class thing; then later knowing how to turn the same ingredients (with the price of the meat much higher for its new associations- have you seen what oxtail costs lately?) into a delicately spiced meal for two became the mark of the food snob. Meanwhile relying largely on preprepared or processed food remained the middle norm.
- It’s easy to focus on morbidly obese people who have flagrantly excessive and calorific diets and damn well know it and are suffering dramatically from the physical consequences, but in my experience this actually consists of a very noticeable minority. Most of “fattening America” seems to eat pretty similarly to the America that hasn’t gotten all that heavy. Maybe all the fatties are hiding in closets at night eating boxes of bacon-donuts, but most Americans who have a weight problem and don’t fall into the “fuck you Michael Bloomberg, I’m taking this 20-piece chicken bucket to my grave” camp seem to be if anything more conscious of what they eat, and that it should be smaller portions of not-cake, than folks who aren’t carrying around a gut. (This effect is perhaps only apparent to anyone who has been on a diet and watched lots of perfectly normal-looking folk eating things the dieter’s doctor has told them will make them physically become the Death Star.) Again: “eat less, move more!” and “you just need to be shamed more/told not to eat giant gobs of sugar and butter because clearly you don’t know” do not seem to be working.
- …Which is not to try and claim that diet, class, or our cultural eating patterns DON’T have anything to do with it. Being obese is miserable and you will catch hell for it, but eating is something very basic you have to do several times a day, and the habits we form with respect to what reads as “food, yum” to you, how often you eat and in what contexts, and where you get your food form very early and are tremendously ingrained because eating and drinking are the most basic things organisms MUST do to get on. They are difficult habits to change because evolution favors doing what worked well enough the last time to get fed, and novelty-seeking in times of abundance (which are now a more or less permanent feature of life for first-worlders) carries a lot more costs than benefits.
Which is ALSO not to say that we can’t lose weight because hardwired evolution brain is controlling everything we do, but changing our eating habits is actually pretty difficult. The background desire to do so is low to begin with, which then doesn’t help when you also have to cope with doing something radically different three or more times a day to satisfy a basic physical need, every damn day, for results that are slow to appear and give positive feedback. Throw in the fact that our appetites tend to calibrate around “the usual” as opposed to “what we actually need” (which can lead to undereating as easily as overeating- the habit matters most) rather than what we actually need and it can take a long period of new habits to recalibrate, and “fuck it, I’m having some chicken nuggets” becomes a pretty understandable temptation, even absent the class warfare.
Oh, and all the usual sources trying to give us advice on how to diet and exercise and lose weight are also full to the brim with bullshit it’s hard to recognize unless you already have a pretty good background in nutrition and physiology, so even if you make a superhuman feat of self-control you may not get good results anyway if you were following bad advice. (Free hint: one weird tip will never work.) To make it even more fun, some of those people giving out ludicrously terrible advice have M.D. after their name. A type I diabetic of my acquaintance was told after diagnosis in adulthood to eat a low-fat diet, to spare their heart, a low-carb diet, to keep their blood sugars under control, and a low-protein diet to spare their kidneys. Pointing out that this left literally no macronutrient options on the table for consumption in abundance enough to keep a young adult alive did not seem to register.
- I’ve done a lot of bashing on Dreher here, but I actually agree with much of what he wrote- just not with his fat sinners, thin moderates paradigm. He’s dead bang on that cooking is a disappearing skill, and that cooking quality ingredients from scratch is actually much cheaper than primarily living off fast food and preprepared and processed food, because the base ingredients are pretty cheap and the ones that aren’t aren’t meant to be the bulk of the meal unless you’re throwing a luxury feast. The treatment Jamie Oliver got in Huntington DID have a lot more to do with class warfare than with what was actually benefiting or hurting the schoolchildren. (Saying this makes my teeth grind, because Oliver makes my teeth grind and I happen to think his own attitude of re-educating the ignorants is part of the problem… so inconvenient when people respond with spiteful ignorance right back.)
August 15th, 2012 at 5:13 pm
…posted right after I sent a big chunk of feature in for code review and freed up the rest of my afternoon. Perfect timing! This topic is catnip for me.
What I find most frustrating about the glib “silly fatties, just eat right and exercise!” advice is that not just that most of it is flat wrong, but that the folks ladling out the bullshit — Dreher included — seem to regard it as an easy problem that’s been definitively solved.
This is becoming one of my most treasured pet peeves. Yes, in fact it turns out that carrying around too much body fat will change your metabolism and thus the way you respond to various macro- and micronutrients in your diet, as well as things like sleep and exercise. A person might find it nearly impossible to drop an appreciable amount of fat without cutting way back on carbohydrate intake, then hit a point at which it’s nigh-impossible to drop any more fat without adding most/all/even more carbs back into their diet.
August 15th, 2012 at 8:10 pm
but that the folks ladling out the bullshit — Dreher included — seem to regard it as an easy problem that’s been definitively solved.
Like most religious conservatives, once something is framed as sin- then it becomes a problem we’ve known how to deal with for two thousand years.
August 16th, 2012 at 2:27 am
“Is there a secret town in America whose population consists of fat people who subsist solely on cake, donuts, and bacon?”
Um…
If you find it, could you drop me a line?
August 16th, 2012 at 5:12 am
Great post. I agree that, if obesity is such a problem, why doesn’t Medicaid cover weight-loss treatments, including hormone imbalance problems.
You do a great job in pointing out the obesity/home-cooking connection. I’m astounded at how many young people can’t cook for themselves. I’ve always thought high schools should require students to take basic life skills classes (cooking, housekeeping, budgeting, etc.) before graduation.
August 16th, 2012 at 5:46 am
[...] I don’t trust Raichlen, but I’d really like to sit down and talk about his ideas with someone like LabRat, who knows a lot more about this stuff than I do. By the way, that linked post over at the Atomic [...]
August 16th, 2012 at 7:05 am
I’ve also been astounded to meet adults who seemed totally competent in the rest of their lives, but who literally couldn’t cook. They just ate out all the time, not when they were in a particular hurry or when they wanted a treat, but every single day (!!!). And these were not necessarily young adults living away from their parents the first time (though even that situation I find a bit weird — in all those years of adolescence you never had to help with dinner?)
I also recall one or two weird experiences where a woman told me with what sounded like pride that she (or her mother) could not cook at all. Which was very intriguing, as I sort of got the sense they saw willful ignorance of cooking skills as some kind of feminist gesture. Very sad to me, but interesting. When I felt that unspoken vibe I have responded by mentioning that my dad taught me to cook - which I think is the answer to the feminist argument — making everyone equally ignorant and dependent on others to feed them is a sad way to make everyone equal. If you remember and hate the old model of women being expected to cook for everyone, the answer is not to not teach your daughter to cook, but to teach your son too.
August 16th, 2012 at 7:15 am
I read this book recently. Very interesting, and I think very relevant to this discussion. One thing that popped out is how much ‘home economists’ actually pushed the idea of cheap, high calorie, sometimes processed foods at one point, and how little of the dietary science movement was originally based on anything scientific — it seemed more about helping poor people manage their money (eat more white bread and beans), or cultural assimilation of immigrants (stews and spices will give you indigestion and must be avoided).
http://books.google.ca/books/about/Revolution_at_the_Table.html?id=NXULJejXRWoC&redir_esc=y
August 16th, 2012 at 8:13 am
“I’ve always thought high schools should require students to take basic life skills classes (cooking, housekeeping, budgeting, etc.) before graduation.”
They did when I was growing up. It was called Home Economics. It was mainly for girls, but taught all those skills.
August 16th, 2012 at 9:05 am
I can’t ever read a critique of modern diet without going back to Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, Chapter 6:
The question of “why don’t people eat right?” is hardly a new one. Granted that George was talking about the underfed working classes in the industrial midlands, but the arguments sound awfully familiar just the same. And given the choice between fighting obesity versus fighting undernourishment, I have to say that I’ll accept the contemporary problem as a sort of progress.
August 16th, 2012 at 9:30 am
Great article, Labrat. It aroused a response in my blogging mind, which you’ll find at:
http://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2012/08/obesity-and-medical-reality.html
Basically, I agree with you, but I’ve added some medical considerations to the mix. Melody Byrne has commented on my article, adding another perspective.
Thanks!
August 16th, 2012 at 1:02 pm
As an aside I notice that whenever articles like this come up they tend to use ‘organic’ as shorthand for ‘healthy food.’
Now organic farming has all sorts of things that can be said for and against it but it torques me to no end that it’s become the assumed code word for ‘not fattening, super duper healthy wonderfood grown by local small-farm hobbits in the fucking shire.’
August 16th, 2012 at 3:30 pm
Great post LR, and one thing I noticed didn’t get covered was the difference in portion sizes… They are at least a third larger than they used to be! Re cake, I’ll tell you Southerners WILL eat cake almost any time! Pies are for ‘everyday’, but cakes are done for church, birthday, death, marriage, and all kinds of ‘other’ reaons… One other point on Southerners, not having the capability to keep foods cold is one of the reasons for so many fried foods. You fried it and ate it then.
August 16th, 2012 at 5:15 pm
Good post LabRat. I might add a couple of thoughts re class and… what, “timing”?
Growing up in a newly “respectable” family- ie, upwardly mobile, with immigrant grandparents on one side- in the fifties, led to some mixed messages, but luckily the lingering old- world habits of my Italian side coincided just barely with the “return” of real cooking to the US general culture.
That is: my grandparents were basically peasants and ate very well indeed- grew all their vegetables, had a small apple orchard and grape arbor, kept pigeons and rabbits, and expected game and fish from my Dad- IN GREATER BOSTON. They made wine from both grapes and flowers, and harvested dandelions and mushrooms; baked bread; and went in to Boston for real cheese (Parmesan) and salami.
Also: BOYS (and men) cooked- no fuss about it. They were not necessarily the primaries; women did most- but you were expected to be able to do it for yourself or fill in. My very macho father expected “service” almost as though home were a restaurant, but would happily take the stage to show us how to make osso buco or risott’ or humble polenta, which my very “Anglo” mom was uneasy about because they were not formulaic- women’s 50′s cooking outside of some literary and Francophile circles was very Paint- By- Numbers…
I think the food revolution you attribute to “Yuppies” got going a bit earlier than you think- by the time I left home in the 60′s I brought my Mediterannean ideas and practices to low- income New England Bohemian life without any conscious transition. Living by the seaside, hunting, going to the Italian market for cheese and wine (CHEAP dry red wine- didn’t know any other), while cooking and thinking about it and beginning to read Julia etc all just flowed together.
It hasn’t stopped yet.
BTW- I believe Rod Dreher had a weight problem once- college or adolescence? I wonder how this may have affected him. He DOES seem to like food,but maybe fetishizes it more than one who grew up naturally with healthy food.
(And before anybody gets uppity about “healthy”- I use butter, eat meat, and have never eaten anything “lite” or low- cal in my life, or magarine, or no- alcohol beer, or decaf coffee…)
August 17th, 2012 at 10:00 am
Ok, let me disqualify myself in advance: while I know various overweight people, I have no experience with the morbidly obese. That said, my experience mirrors what Clausewitz says about war: “War is very simple, but in War the simplest things become very difficult.”
All the talk about special diets, exercise, medical treatment, etc. - this is all unnecessary and very possibly unhelpful or even counterproductive. For someone who has no specific medical problem, the answer is very simple. One of my friends calls it: “eat like a human”.
In other words: Eat fewer calories than your body requires to exist. Simple, problem solved. This is, of course, very difficult to actually carry through on a day-to-day basis. Food is easily available, being hungry is unpleasant, and there are a whole host of social issues to deal with.
I suppose my point is: there is a lot of bullshit out there. There are a lot of people wanting to make money by selling their special diets, snake oil pills, or whatever. Anyone serious about weight-loss needs to realize just how simple the solution is, and at the same time accept that there is no easy way to implement the solution.
August 17th, 2012 at 11:32 am
Clearly that works great and that’s all there is to it. You can tell by the way people all over the world drop pounds effortlessly. Pay no attention to that whistling noise the point made sailing over your head.
August 17th, 2012 at 1:03 pm
Yeah, I don’t know… I’ve always been at a good weight and never had to endure being hungry, I just eat when I’m hungry and that’s it. Whatever the reason for my relative thinness, self control or an ability to endure hunger or any kind of calorie counting plays no role that I can see. And I’ve had friends who were overweight or even quite obese and with some of them I actually never noticed any particular difference in how much we ate or the quality of it. Sure, I know others who drink pop all day, but then I know thin people who drink pop all day too.
Considering that it takes very few calories over or under per day to add up over the course of years, and considering how a person’s needs can easily change from day to day given their particular activities, to me it seems like a relatively minor disregulation of metabolism (how hungry you feel, how much you tend to fidget, etc) could easily lead over a few years to major differences in weight without really major differences in behaviour.
In a normal healthy functioning organism, homeostasis usually doesn’t need to be deliberately consciously calculated, it happens on a much more automatic physical level. It’s having to deliberately override your bodies signals and fight what it ‘wants’ that’s unusual, to me.
August 17th, 2012 at 2:31 pm
“That isn’t even going into the social costs, which… - …Dreher doesn’t seem to believe exist.”
I do kind of wonder if the social costs don’t vary depending on the social milieu, though. In a social environment where a majority are overweight, there sometimes seems to be a sort of group-bonding thing around it, and in some groups heaviness does have associations of being ‘normal real people’, ‘psychologically healthy,’ etc, paralleling some of the food associations discussed in that article. And in this context being one of the few skinny ones (particularly if one is also eating noticeably differently, or exercising more) can be judged as ‘thinking you’re better than us’, or being uptight or obsessive or even having poor self-esteem.
Not that the negative social costs don’t strongly exist at the same time — we all read the same newspapers, magazines, watch the same TV, etc… just that sometimes the messages we get from others are complicated and contradictory.
August 17th, 2012 at 4:06 pm
It always cracks me up that Robert Lustig, Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at UCSF, calls fructose “poison.” Maybe people are fat because the people giving them diet advice are fucking stupid, like Robert Lustig and our own “HAY GUIZ FOOD PYRAMID LOL” government.
August 17th, 2012 at 7:16 pm
I’m one of those “eat like a farm hand, work like a bookkeeper” types. When I think about it, cut back on the high calorie food in large amounts, and get my butt out for a walk instead of collapsing at the end of the day, I lose weight, but slowly. If I go on a crash diet, it works for about a week, I lose a few pounds, then it comes to a grinding halt. Guess I’m one of those “if you starve yourself, your body will keep every calorie it can because it thinks it’s a famine” types.
As for the food puritans who want to tell me how to eat, what to eat, and how much to eat, they usually get a cold shoulder at best. I know that my eating and exercise habits suck, I don’t need nor do I want another adult telling me. I don’t overindulge just to show them who is boss, but nagging me doesn’t work unless I put a ring on your finger.
August 18th, 2012 at 6:46 am
I’m not sure there is an ‘obesity epidemic’, in fact I’m not sure there has been any significant increase in the general populations physiques over the last 20/30 years (I can only speak of my own personal/professional observations here in the UK). There are of course many ‘morbidly obese’ people out there (I know I nurse some), but then, there always have been.
The ‘problem’ is that there has (as with almost every aspect of our lives) been an increased emphasis made on it. The demonstrably biased and inaccurate use of the BMI is an example. The constant harping (here) on how ladies average dress sizes have been steadily rising ignores the relevant point that the average heights have been rising at the same rate. I read a report recently which showed that almost every British Olympic athlete was classed as clinically obese by the standards of todays medical judgement.
I suspect, as with the proliferation of new mental health categories (http://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Have-Fear-Psychiatrys-Transformation/dp/0199793751) and the doubts raised about their validity (basically making normal behavioural and emotional mechanisms into new and exotic illnesses and syndromes, all of which require expensive treatments, drugs and support structures), that the obesity epidemic exists solely because of the profits (pharmaceutical companies, health bodies, etc.) and power (another reason to limit both personal and social choice), but then I’m a cynic.
An example of what I mean is (http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/health/top-surgeon-blasted-over-remarks-1223263) where a surgeon stated that life-saving surgery for cancer patients should be cut in favour of gastric surgeries (which of course just happened to be his speciality) because of the “terrible suffering of being overweight”. In other words ‘screw those terminal cancer patients I want money for those who have chosen to overindulge on pies to pad my already extensive ban-balance’!?!
As with smoking, I suspect the statistics around the ‘costs’ of obesity are manipulated to show what they wish to show.
Obesity (except in the very rare extreme cases) is not a disease, it has limited effects on lifespan and health (check the data, and not the published cherry-picked variety, if you disagree). As others have said, it’s just another way the ‘new puritans’ can feel superior and gain power. (I tend to counter ‘discussions’, with puritan acquaintances, like this with the actual figures of gastric cancers in vegetarians/omnivores, and the rates of lung cancer/Alzheimers and Parkinsons in non-smokers, which always leaves them spluttering - I’m available at reasonable rates for parties, Bar mitzvahs and weddings
)
Oh, and “What IS it with the cake?”, that’s like asking ‘what is with bacon?’. You do realise that they’re the food of the Gods, don’t you?
August 18th, 2012 at 8:00 am
Cake? One slice on Saturdays along with my only meal for the day (big bagel sandwich).
According to the fitness folks and the BMI guide, I am the strongest overweight - obese female at my gym: 5’1″, 145 lb, bench 80 lb, squat 290 with a bad hip. I do at least 30 minutes of cardio six days a week, plus two weight sessions a week. According to the nutrition”experts” I should need 1600 calories a day to maintain my weight. B.S.! My metabolism is so darn efficient that I have to eat less than 1300 cal/day, high protein moderate carb, in order to shed two pounds a month. Aside from the Saturday treat, I do all my own cooking, mostly because of the expense of eating out.
Um, yeah. Hot button topic, sorry if I’m ranting.
August 18th, 2012 at 1:56 pm
FWIW, I think to talk about an ‘obesity epidemic’ you have to look at a longer time period than 20-30 years. At least a generation, maybe a couple of generations. But there are certainly some chronic diseases that are rising over the past generation or two, and that appear to be linked to body fat percentage or to diet or to fitness level. But I think if you look over a more realistic time scale — yeah, we are getting fatter, not just taller.
I’ve also seen plenty of data that suggest that the link between obesity and health is a lot more complicated than we often assume… it’s not just small = healthy, big = unhealthy. OTOH there are certainly some medical conditions that do have clear links to body fat percentage…
But yeah, I think sometimes we worry too much about the kilos and not enough about health itself — e.g., are you fit, can you do things without getting out of breath, do you have a good muscle mass, low abdominal fat, etc (since abdominal fat seems to be what’s really mainly the problem). Some health problems are correlated with weight but not all those are actually _caused_ by it.
August 18th, 2012 at 2:00 pm
BMI is stupid and has long long long ago been shown to be a pretty poor measure of ‘fatness’. In order to interpret it you have to already know the person’s approximate body composition! Which makes it pretty circular.
I have no idea why it hasn’t been done away with and replaced with waist/hip ratio or something even better. Waist/hip ratio is no harder to calculate but with the benefit of telling you far far more useful information.
Or do something even more precise…
August 18th, 2012 at 2:01 pm
Or rather than ‘more precise’ I guess I mean ‘more accurate’, because that’s really what’s the problem. No point in having a number to three digit places that also happens to give you the wrong conclusion.
August 19th, 2012 at 8:04 pm
LittleRed1:
Holy crap! Nice work.
August 20th, 2012 at 10:15 am
I started eating less bread and more vegetables, drinking lots of water, and doing hot yoga three days a week, and I’ve lost 19 pounds in the last 7 weeks. I’m pretty pleased.
August 26th, 2012 at 9:00 pm
When someone comes up with a real answer, will anyone listen?
August 30th, 2012 at 12:45 pm
He’s dead bang on that cooking is a disappearing skill, and that cooking quality ingredients from scratch is actually much cheaper than primarily living off fast food and preprepared and processed food, because the base ingredients are pretty cheap and the ones that aren’t aren’t meant to be the bulk of the meal unless you’re throwing a luxury feast.
These. Cooking is cool, and useful too. Even better: cooking things one has grown. Even a small, limited garden: I’ve baked some great apple-raspberry pies from my back yard.
Getting back to the original topic, the treatment of overweight/obese people as described in the post is what is a sin. (I’ve been guilty of it in my day, and I do repent me.) Mote and beam.