Editor’s Note: Happy Thanksgiving from the Media Consortium! This week, we aren’t stopping The Audit, The Pulse, The Diaspora, or The Mulch, but we are taking a bit of a break. Expect shorter blog posts, and The Diaspora and The Mulch will be posted on Wednesday afternoon, instead of their usual Thursday and Friday postings. We’ll return to our normal schedule next week.
by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Wednesday is the heaviest travel day of the year in the United States, as millions of Americans head home to celebrate Thanksgiving. Some of you are probably reading this dispatch on PDAs as you wait in an interminable line at airport security. Here’s some food for thought.
At Grist, food writer Michael Pollan officially declares himself a Rules Guy. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean he won’t accept a Friday dinner invitation offered after noon on Wednesday. Pollan thinks that our healthy eating skills are passed down to us as part of food culture. In this era of drive-through windows and meal replacement bars, a lot of the old wisdom is falling by the wayside and Americans are finding themselves adrift in a sea of calories. On the eve of Thanksgiving, Pollan provides some helpful guidelines for avoiding the food coma:
[M]any ethnic traditions have their own memorable expressions for what amounts to the same recommendation. Many cultures, for examples, have grappled with the problem of food abundance and come up with different ways of proposing we stop eating before we’re completely full: the Japanese say “hara hachi bu” (“Eat until you are 4/5 full”); Germans advise eaters to “tie off the sack before it’s full.” And the prophet Mohammed recommended that a full belly should contain one-third food, one-third drink, and one-third air. My own Russian-Jewish grandfather used to say at the end of every meal, “I always like to leave the table a little bit hungry.”
But wait, there’s more!
Unions representing airline pilots and flight attendants are advising their members to avoid the the TSA’s new backscatter x-ray scans because of concerns about the long-term health effects of x-ray radiation. Crew members who refused scans have been subjected to new “enhanced” pat-down searches. This week, the TSA granted an exception to pilots, but not to flight attendants. As I reported for Working In These Times, all crew members go through the same FBI background check and fingerprinting process. “Don’t touch my junk!” has become a rallying cry for passengers, particularly white men, who are not accustomed to being asked to give up any part of their body’s autonomy for the greater good. Is it a coincidence that 95% of pilots are men and three-quarters of flight attendants are women? [Update: The TSA has relented. The agency announced Tuesday that flight attendants will now get the same exemption as pilots.
Adam Serwer argues in The American Prospect that it’s easy to demand tough security measures when the presumed targets are faceless Muslims in a distant country. When air travelers are asked to compromise their own privacy in the name of security, the tradeoff suddenly seems very different.
Employee health insurance deductibles are skyrocketing at Whole Foods and CEO John Mackey is trying to blame the increase on health care reform. “This is very important for everyone to understand: 100% of the increases in deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums in 2011 compared to 2010 are due to new federal mandates and regulations,” Mackey wrote in a corporate memo. In fact, as Josh Harkinson reports in Mother Jones, Mackey’s memo is pure, organic BS. The provisions in the Affordable Care Act that might increase costs won’t go into effect until 2014, so it’s hard to figure out how federal policies could be responsible. Health insurance costs were rising by about 5% per year, year after year, before the Affordable Care Act passed. The truth is that health insurance is getting more expensive because health care is getting more expensive. As Harkinson points out, one of the reasons that health care is getting more expensive is because corporations like Whole Foods are pushing more of their employees into part-time work to avoid covering them. Of course, when those workers get sick, someone has to pick up the cost of their care. So those who have insurance, including some of Whole Foods’ own employees, have to pay more to make up the difference.
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However, the funding includes $2bn taken from SNAP (food stamps to you).
Which, given the recent stats on the hike in the poverty rate doesn’t seem quite right.
Worse
This follows an even larger reduction in SNAP funding — over $10 billion — imposed to help cover other, unrelated expenses in the federal budget.
The old Reverse Robin Hood still in full working order! (What did that $10bn go on, I wonder?)
There is a House Bill (HR 5504) which contains S 3307 without the SNAP cuts – but that’s gone nowhere so far, and it looks as if the House will pass S 3307 by the end of the month.
As report after report has detailed, Americans have been getting sicker and heavier over the last few decades.
By sicker, I don’t mean getting more colds, I mean heart disease, diabetes, reproductive health problems and cancer.
By heavier, I mean even with respect to the fact that given a normal range of body types, very few people look like waifish teenage fashion models and that’s perfectly fine. Really, it’s fine. No, I remember when Type II diabetes was commonly referred to as adult onset diabetes, but you just don’t hear that as often now that children are getting it and there’s an epidemic of obesity in infants and under-10s.
This isn’t a matter for a moral philosophy break, either, it has serious policy implications. Americans are consistently blamed for costing the health system too much because of irresponsible diet and exercise patterns, but that claim doesn’t withstand close inspection. In the health care debate, obesity in particular comes up as one of those things the ‘rest of us’ shouldn’t pay for, due to the superior virtues of being able to afford fresh produce or personal trainers (I’m looking at you, Kutcher), which obliquely undermines the entire argument for universal health care.
While there are some lifestyle factors at work that people can address on their own, these major demographic changes have come on much too rapidly to be solely accounted for by biology and personal choices. More, putting the blame solely on individuals often seems to prevent our taking responsibility for collective action to fix the economic and environmental causes of all this bad health.
Though what if you knew that even some of the obesity epidemic was being caused by additives we’re absorbing from food containers and consumer goods, from bad official nutritional guidelines, or from agricultural chemicals? What if you knew that the government standard for testing to see if synthetic compounds were safe, or were being consumed in safe amounts, came to believing the manufacturers’ solemn word that no one will drop dead on contact? What if you knew that some people were profiting from creating an environment in which it’s almost a miracle that anyone is healthy and fit? Would you think differently about how the problem should be solved?
Also, you don’t have to imagine if all that were true, because even obesity can be partly caused by synthetic compounds that have been introduced to our environment and food supplies with extremely little safety testing. And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg.
If you’ve never experienced the CDC’s Evolving Map of Obesity Rates, then do yourself a favor and check it out. The graphs are simple: a color-coded maps that get updated every year. Yet the ugly truth revealed is harrowing: Obesity rates that would have been considered unimaginably high as recently as the 80s would now be considered unattainably low. Each year the situation deteriorates. We are barreling headfirst into a health nightmare. 2008 was the worse year on record with 6 states having obesity rates above 30%.
Over the course of long Presidential campaign I was struck with how intertwined the major problems facing the U.S. and the world really are. And, while the debate moderators considered it obvious that the economic collapse would prevent the incoming administration from working on anything else, I was seeing it as another piece of the puzzle. Here are some of the major issues government should be addressing:
1. Global warming/death of life on earth
2. Economy/jobs
2a. Auto industry failing
3. Dependence on foreign oil and resultant cultural/security issues
4. Obesity and resultant health costs
Barack Obama wants to invest in infrastructure. Yesterday, many of the nation's governors pushed infrastructure spending as a job creation tool for America. I hope this involves more than building new roads and bridges because it's an opportunity to reinvent the country in ways that can begin to address all of the problems listed above.
How about a nation connected by high speed electric rail? Joe Biden is for it. How about downtowns accessible by rail, by bike, by foot but not accessible by car (helps with fitness too)? How about an auto industry that begins to phase out gas-powered cars and is required to immediately increase production of electric cars? We're paying for that industry's survival anyway.
What else? Please put some bones on this “green new deal” in comments.
The Evolution of Mike Huckabee
By Kerry Trueman, Eating Liberally
Ah, the ghosts of Christmas past. Here’s a souvenir from the days when Mike Huckabee was a morbidly obese diabetic whose doctor gave him ten years to live if he didn’t shape up.
That was four years ago. Huckabee took his doctor’s warning to heart and shed more than a hundred pounds by adopting a healthier diet and
becoming a marathon runner. Now that he’s half the man he was, Huckabee’s a great poster boy for eating right and exercising. He’s one of those rare Republicans, along with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’s been willing to condemn the sale of junk food in schools.
He’s also one of the only two Republican presidential candidates (along with John McCain) who’s willing to concede that climate change is a real crisis. But as progressive as he may be on issues like the obesity epidemic and global warming, Huckabee doesn’t believe in evolution. Guess he hasn’t seen this video:
