Understanding and Insight

I first learned about Living Below the Line at the Wellington Candidates Meeting - it was not auspicious introduction. James Shaw mentioned that he was doing it and therefore he wouldn't be putting on weight to look like the other Wellington Central candidates; the audience laughed in that way people do when you mention fatness - there doesn't need to be an actual joke. And I sat at the back rolling my eyes - "because obviously there is no correlation between poverty and fatness in New Zealand."

"Living Below the Line" is a five day challenge where people live on $2.25 a day, with the purpose of both raising money and awareness. Apparently: "it allows thousands of people in New Zealand to better understand the daily challenges faced by those trapped in the cycle of extreme poverty"

This 'understanding' is facilitated through a completely arbitrary set of rules: you're not allowed to accept anything free, you must include the cost of a whole packet of anything you use a bit of, you don't have to count the travel to get food, you don't have to worry about the cost of cooking fuel, and you can use whatever fancy pants equipment you've got in your kitchen.

I find everything about it, the rules, the blogposts, the tweets, horrific and offensive on a very fundamental level.

Poverty is not a fucking game.

Poverty does not have rules except you have to do it again tomorrow. Poverty is not new or exciting. Poverty is not neatly quarantined to one area of your life. Poverty is not something you can control with neatly defined parameters. And it does not come with prizes.

If people want to use stupid gimmicks to fundraise then I'm probably not going to both writing a blogpost about it. But to pretend that this highly structured game will promote insight or understanding is an insult to the women and men (but mostly women) who have to feed themselves and other people with inadequate resources year in and year out.

Fit to eat

If you're anything like me you would have had lots of friends liking Child Poverty Action Group recently. I was all prepared to join in, until I saw they were promoting this post with a cheerful "What are our kids eating? And what is our government doing (or not doing) to encourage them to choose an orange over an oreo?"

First it reminded me of the endless ridiculous games of substitutions that you see in women's magazines and "healthy food" (Next time you feel like eating chocolate try a tin of tuna instead). Which made me think of Sarah Haskins, swapping a six pack of beer for a fifth of whiskey:

So I was happy for a while. But when I recovered from my distraction I was still grumpy. Why should children be choosing Oreos over oranges - why can't they have both, and lots of other food as well? Why is an anti-poverty group calling on the government to promote a diet mentality among kids?

The post they linked to was called "Not Fit To Eat"* was talking about a $2.50 pack sold in a South Auckland dairy, that contained Oreos, two packets of chip like things, and an orange drink. I agree that that is not an adequate lunch, but each of the individual components, and the pack of the whole, is totally fit to eat.

What I found most ridiculous about the response to this pack, was the emphasis on how cheap it was - as if that was a bad thing (someone made their horror at this food being cheap explicit in the facebook thread). I do not understand how anyone concerned with poverty could ever have a problem with any food being cheap. I have so often heard people tutt-tutting about the fact that a litre of coke is cheaper than a litre of milk - as if it is the cheapness of the coke that is the problem.

The person who had found this pack asked the dairy owner "aren't you ashamed to be selling this?" Why is it more shameful to be selling this for $2.50 than anything else? Dairies make their money through high margins - if their is shame in their trade - surely it is selling food for more, rather than selling food for less.

You know there was a time when calories weren't as relatively cheap as they are now. Cheap calories can give people the ability to stay alive, and they're fabulous. I understand being angry at the expense of other nutrients, such as milk, vegetables, fruit, meat and whittakers dark almond chocoalte, but why is this so often discussed as if the cheapness of other fooods is the problem?

This seems to be my week to be grumpy about how people on the left talk about food and bodies.** But I think it's really important. It is totally possible to talk about food and poverty, without buying into a worldview that fetishises food and buys into an ideology that sees food in terms of morality. I really should write a grand theory post about why this is bad one of these days - but the really short reason is that one of the purposes of this ideology is to blame individuals for the effects of poverty. This is not something we can co-opt - it is something which will co-opt us.

And because no post like this would be complete without it, here is a link to the fat nutritionist's If only poor people understood nutrition.

* I think it is written by my co-blogger AnneE - so I'd be interested in hearing her perspective

** Who am I kidding, every week for at least the last five years has been my week to be grumpy about the way some people on the left talks about food and bodies.

Cake is not the opposite of diet - and no diet day thoughts

So I'm reposting some of the blog posts I wrote years ago over at The Hand Mirror. This week I have felt the irritation at International No Diet Day rise slowly (mostly fueled by the facebook group), and I wanted to write a post about why it annoyed me so much. Then I realised that I've already written that post so I decided to repost it instead (i've edited quite a bit, to finish the sentances and elaborate on the ideas).

In my experience No Diet Day's are most commonly observed at Universities, and usually by eating cake, chocolate and ice-cream at a dessert evening or some such event. Sometimes, when you have an anti-feminist women's rights officer, they're observed by giving away diet coke and fruit (because International No Diet Day becomes Love Your Body day and what better way to love your body than fruit, diet coke and yoga - I really wish I was making this up, but I'm not).

My superficial criticism of No Diet Day is how easy co-opted and perverted it is. An article from ABC in Australia:

In the 936 office Drive Producer, the lovely Lynn, got up especially early to spend most of her morning baking, in order to provide her colleagues with the most delectable Pavlova and cake.

Annie Warburton and the team from Mornings spoke with Stephen Dimsey, State Manger of Life Be In It Tasmania, to get some sensible tips for those who enjoy their food but want to stay in shape.

Then later on Stephen says: "What we're saying is that whatever body shape you are, make sure you're a healthy body shape," Talk about making the kind of sense that's not; I don't think I could translate that into English if you paid me.

But I have just as much problem with the dessert based versions International No Diet Day, which are organised on campus by people who are actually feminist.

I don't think dessert is the opposite of dieting. I think to suggest that it is is to perpetuate a shallow, unhelpful understanding of the role of food in our society. Food and control are so tightly linked that the only other alternative to controlling your food intake is losing control of your food intake. You can't just 'not diet' for a day - because the gremlins in your head about food and your body will still be there - interrogating every food choice, everything you do. To suggest anything can be achieved in a day is too hide how deeply people are affected.

The opposite of dieting is actually making food about food. I know that's an uphill battle. I know the vast majority of women students are nowhere near there. But I don't think having one day a year where you're 'allowed' to eat chocolate is a step in that direction.

In the end kicking those grelins to death is an uphill battle. Whatever the state your personal set are in I don't think it makes any difference whether you eat dessert or don't eat dessert on a particular day. And I think the suggestion that you should or shouldn't deal in any particular way actually makes it harder.

What is ultimately frustrating is that my experience of dessert evenings is that after a certain point people will start talking about how gross they feel and how someone should take the food away so they'll stop eating it - it's not an anti-diet dessert evening without people completely reinforcing ideas about food and control and food and power.

If I had a time machine, and could go back in time to when International No Diet Day was invented (my mind says 1989, but I'm too lazy to look it up on Wikipedia), I would make a suggestion that rather than make it 'no diet day' - how about 'no diet-talk day?" I don't know if it would actually help (and not being so easily commodified it would be less popular). But at least it presents the response to eating disorder culture and body hatred as something that involves many steps, rather than something you can just turn off.

Please workplace tell me how I should eat

The Victoria University staff club is strange in many ways. It is tucked away in the library, undergrads aren't supposed to go there, and know very little about it. But, despite the secrecy, it is very unexciting - except the alcohol is quite cheap, and sometimes the food is nicer and less over-priced than the rest of the university.

The staff club also has a mission, and that mission is to tell the people who eat there how to eat. As you go down the corridor every side is telling you to eat Blueberries! Low fat! Omega-3 Oil! and so on. Then they usually have little plastic triangle display things on every table - the sort that some restaurants put wine or specials on, but the staff club puts advice on how not to eat too much. Including one that said: "Eat like an Eskimo" followed by lots of praise of fish. Where do you even start?

1. Eskimo? For reals? After that shall we play Cowboys and Indians with any natives we can find on campus?

2. Advice about food is so fucking ridiculous. Why on earth should we eat like we lived somewhere where almost nothing grows? The fact that human beings have been able to subsist on large parts of the planet shows how resilient we are, and what a wide range of foods (as a species) we can survive on. The fact that historically people living in some areas have eaten predominantly fish, while people living in other areas have had very limited access to fish, is a reason to shut up about the one true way of eating.

3. These are workers at the university and post-graduate students. Are we somehow expected not to be able to feed ourselves? Are we in imminent danger of death from a blueberry deficiency? Is there a special section on the health deprivation index about how badly off staff and post-graduate students at the university are?

The Fat Nutritionist has a great post about how the vast majority people on weight-watchers are based on their socio-economic-gender-ethnicity profile are already going to live FOR-EVER. The same is true for the majority of people who work at university or those with post-graduate degrees.*

I'm not suggesting that this information would be anymore productive in, say, a meatworks tea-room. But given that you can't get more urban-liberal-middle-class than the staff club at a university, and the behaviours that are described as 'healthy eating' are the behaviours of urban-liberal-middle-class women more than any other socio-economic group. What is the purpose of bombarding those most likely to be already aware, and following, the behaviours that have been designated 'healthy' with?

I would suggest that the purpose is self-satisfaction - the purpose is rewarding the virtuousness, as much as it's about compelling compliance in those who eat there (they are after all only posters - the staff club doesn't even sell that much fish). I want to explore this some more, and look at the impact that a moral model of food has on those who do not follow it. But I don't think it's a coincidence that eating-places are most likely to push these messages among those who are presumed to be already following htem.

* And this in itself is telling. As PhD Comics can tell us post-grad students subsist on instant noodles and free food that can be scavenged around campus. While this stereotype isn't entirely true, it does have a basis in reality, as post-grad students are lacking in both money and time - which makes acquiring nutritious food you want to eat tricky. And yet, post-grad students generally survive the experience, and go on to live to ages that befit their socio-economic position.

Talking of people killed by capitalism...

Folole Muliaga's daughter gave evidence at the inquest of her mother last week (see here although the link will break soon). The daughter talked of the way she was treated by hospital staff, who discharged Folole Muliaga because her bed was needed, and didn't tell the family how to care for her.

We were told that we should eat lots of vegetables. I found this lecture difficult to take because we were made to feel like failures and to blame. While I found these lectures very upsetting I was very polite and nodded my head.

The nurse who gave these lectures didn't ask what the Muliaga family ate, before telling them what was wrong with their diet.

The idea that we can all control our own health, if we have the right 'lifestyle' runs strong in our society. The underpinnings of this idea can be challenged in so many ways. But I think we need to reject the underlying ideology and see that the blame that Folole Muliaga's daughter felt isn't incidental to this idea, but it's raison d'etre. We're supposed to be distracted from all the other reasons why poor pacific island immigrants die in South Auckland, and blame the woman herself.

Foloe Muliaga's death is a tragedy for so many reasons, but the hospital system's culpability shouldn't be ignored, just because of the horrific role played by the power company.

Note about comments Comments are also closed on this thread, until the right wing idiots go back to where they came from.

To become skinny find a woman to cook for you

This is an image from the Icarus Project, a radical mental health support network. I saw it when it was reprinted in a local zine (more on that later): You can find a larger version here. [Image description: It's a poster headed taking care of the basics. It is divided into 5 parts: eating, sleep and rest, exercise, schedule and herbs, meds etc. Each has a cartoon drawing, half with people who are doing things in a way that is portrayed as unhelpful, the other half with people who are doing things in a way that is portrayed as helpful.]

I wish I was disappointed; I wish I expected more of so-called radical organisations. But no, when trying to illustrate unhelpful eating patterns for depression they show a fat person eating a burger and fries, and they contrast this with a thin people eating a home cooked meal served by a woman (the headline is my alternative title for the Eating Well illustration).

The illustration is not radical. Fat-hatred is not radical. Food-hatred is not radical. People can pretend that their disgust at a burger and fries* comes from their dislike of multi-national corporations. But their disgust at a fat body is in plain view.

* Which as far as meals when you're depressed go seems pretty good to me. It has protein, carbohydrates and fat. It will fuel your body.

Electoral Politics Friday: The Greens encourage the comodification of water

It's election year so of course the greens are amping up the Moral Panic about food.* This time they've surveyed food to see what they have for sale. The list is full of the usual breathless, random, dividing of food into good and bad (Muesli bar good, chips bad). The discussion on what's available in food canteens has always seemed ridiculous to me, and completely ignores some basic facts about school lunches, and seems to want people to buy things from school that they can make at home (like sandwiches) rather than selling things at school which it's harder to bring from home (like pies). I'm all for getting profit making businesses out of providing food in schools. I'd support the provision of free lunch (and breakfast) in schools. But since this is about moral panic rather than food supply, that won't even get mentioned.

The extent this is about moral panic was made clear in the discussion on drinks. They tell us that 44% of schools sell water and 44% of schools don't sell water, but the 'good' news is the number of schools selling water has gone up. Every single school should (and I'm sure does) have all the water kids can drink for free. It's obscene that schools selling water to kids, and that anyone would laud them for doing so. Even if the greens don't care about commodification, they should care about all those plastic bottles.

* Frogblog couldn't discuss GST on Food without listing food sins:

It’s hard to develop a graded GST system without grey areas. E.g. Should the following foods be in or out; fast food, imported luxury items, stuff nutritionalists say we already eat too much off such as dairy and fats?

Although they were hardly alone in this. It's really depressing that a response to food going up is greeted by an extended discussion which makes it clear how much society doesn't like food, or the poor people who eat it (if I had a piece of KFC, for everytime that KFC had been used as an example, then I'd have enough KFC for a KFC party. And at that party I'd rant about how unsubtle a way it is to hate and blame poor brown people.)

Abortions also make women skinnier....

The Health Select Committee has just recommended extending paid parental leave to six months, to encourage breast feeding.

As a supporter of paid parental leave (or, more accurately, as someone who believes that paid parental leave doesn't go nearly far enough and that parenting should be resourced as the work it is) I should be happy.

Here's the reason the Health Select Committee has decided breastfeeding is important:

The promotion of breastfeeding for at least the first six months, and preferably for the first year, is widely recommended, as it has an important protective role against obesity during childhood and adolescence, and may also protect mothers against obesity and diabetes.

Apparently women are en-slimmening machines. The main value of our breast-feeding, indeed of parenting in the first six months, is preventing fat cells.

This is from the report into obesity and type 2 diabetes; I may write more later. Although what I actually want to do to the report is to batter it, deep fry it, and then slather it with icing.

PS Dear Health Select Committee members:

You keep running together 'Type Two Diabetes and Obesity' as if they were the same thing: "The immediate cause of obesity and type 2 diabetes is well known..." They're really not. One is a disease, it has symptoms, side-effects and treatments. The other is having your weight being more than 30 times the square of your height.

PPS Dear Green Party: Russel Norman's the reason I'm not voting for you, but the reason I'm going to enjoy not voting for you is Sue Kedgley.

Eating disorders are about more than hating your appearance

Hugo Schwyzer wrote a post about veganism and feminism that I found really frustrating. The point he is exploring is an interesting one - as a vegan who once had an eating disorder he is noting the similarities between the two:

The funny thing is that being strictly vegan (off honey entirely) means that I am more attentive to what I eat than at any time in my life since I was crash dieting fifteen years ago.

But, his perspective is extremely limited as he seems to see eating disorders primarily in terms of body image:

Back then, I counted calories and fat grams obsessively. Today, I largely ignore fat and calorie information and read to make sure that what I’m eating is entirely plant-based and devoid of hidden dairy or egg traces. (Damn that sneaky caseinate!) I’m once again radically concerned with everything that goes into my mouth — but for a radically different reason.

Eating disorders are not just about reasons, they're not just about appearances, they're often also about morality and control. Hugo doesn't acknowledge that veganism can feed the food/control/morality connection, which is central to an eating disordered mindset. For someone with a tendency to trying to exert control through self-denial of food (which is rarely a small percentage of a female population), any language around veganism which emphasises self-control and morality is going to make things worse. I guess I've more experience of this than most; I've spent a lot of time in a scene where there are quite a few vegans and lots of young women. I've despaired every which way at the policing and limiting which young women do to each other can happen take on a radical hue, and still be just as damaging.

I don't know if Hugo has tried to think about veganism in a different way (Stetnor suggests one). But I know that a restricted diet doesn't mean that you have to control what you eat. I realised a couple of years ago that I was severely allergic to dairy products. I have to read the label. There are dairy products in most brands of some really basic products (bread and margarine, for example). If someone offers me food, then I don't eat it unless I know it's dairy free.

I don't talk about, think about, or experience this as controlling what I eat. I didn't know that I'd be able to avoid this dangerous thought pattern; I wasn't even sure I could cut dairy out entirely. I was surprised at how easy as it was. Dairy products are not an option, in the same way foods I don't like are not an option. Sure I miss them - other people's cheesy food smells divine, but it's not self-control that stops me from eating them. Avoiding dairy products is a choice I've made.

I've had to be incredibly protective of myself in all this: I've corrected people who say I'm not 'allowed' something, when people describe dairy products as if they were disgusting I'm likely to sing their praises. In order to maintain this as a choice, I have to avoid anything that sounds like moralism.

I'm sure it's much easier for me than people with other food restrictions. My symptoms mean that I have every reason to avoid dairy products. But I don't actually need the threat. Most of the time I don't think "Wow that cheese looks yummy, but if I eat it I'll feel ill and end the night crying on Betsy's couch about much I hate my life."* I think "What shall I eat?"

Even if I experienced every piece of cheese I didn't eat as a massive battle for control, I'd be very careful never to talk about food and control. As a feminist, in the society I live in, my first goal when talking about food with people I know has to be to avoid reinforcing or triggering eating disordered thought patterns. I can have all sorts of conversations about food, but I need to have them in ways that won't make other women's eating disorders worse.

I think the way Hugo talks about veganism fails that basic test.

* Then after about half an hour of my whining at her she'd say "Could this be because you ate dairy products?"

It's not anti-feminist to go on a diet, it is anti-feminist to write a diet book

I've just read two very irritating articles in the guardian. Both purport to be about feminism and dieting - but both make Linda Hirschman's version of feminism look like it belongs in 'Notes from the First Year.' Zoe Williams article is called You're Vain and Stupid and the first sentance says: "Women who fixate on their weight should relinquish their right to be taken seriously." I don't even know where to start with this - when did women even win the right to be taken seriously? But the real reason Zoe Williams argument is not feminist is because it asks the question 'why do women fixate about their weight' and answers it 'because they're stupid'.

Feminism's most basic tenet is women's problems are structural and political, not individual. "Because women are stupid" is rarely a feminist answer to any question.

Even more annoying was India Knight's reply to Zoe Williams (who are these people? I don't know either - apparently they're people that guardian readers would have heard of) titled It's not anti-feminist to go on a diet (thanks to Big Fat Blog for the link). This is a misleading start, because India Knight didn't just go on a diet, she wrote a diet book. At least part of her living now comes in telling other women how to lose weight. If this article is anything to go by she drums up business by making fat women feel worse about themselves (she asks "Why is it good to be pleased that you look like a pig?")

What is so awful, so anti-feminist, about her article, is the narrative she tells about being fat:

You may occupy a great deal of physical space if you're very fat, but in everyday life, it's as though you weren't there. Sales assistants stare blankly through you. Men pretend you don't exist, or start calling you "mate". You wonder whether your children are embarrassed to be seen with you in public (the answer to that one is yes, probably). You wish you could go for a bike ride with them, but you're too self-conscious, because you look like a potato balanced on an ant. You can only buy clothes in specialist shops, and these clothes are as undesirable as you have started to feel. Your self-esteem - well, I was going to say "plummets", but it's hard to plummet when you've reached rock bottom.

She's right - it sucks to be a fat woman in our society, it really fucking sucks. But every single example she gives isn't directly about being fat, it's about how people react to fat people. Her argument appears to be that men treat fat women like shit, so the solution is to stop being fat. That doesn't resemble any kind of feminism I know.

She reaches a low point when she suggests weight loss as a solution for an abusive relationship:

just as I cheer for the woman whose husband puts her and her weight down every single day. One of these days, he's going to have to stop. One of these days, she and her new-found confidence aren't going to take it any more.

On first glance this is relatively trivial issue, which reminds me about everything that irritates me about the Guardian. But it's actually about a much more fundamental issue, which is how we define feminism. This is what happens when we suggest individual solutions for collective problems. We all need to find ways to live as best we can with the problems that living in a misogynist world creates and I'd never criticise anyone else for feeling the need to lose weight or obsess about food. These sorts of survival mechanisms are neither feminist nor anti-feminist, they're what you've got to do. It's when your survival mechanisms make life harder for other women, for example if you denigrate fat women and reinforce society's idea about the relationship between morality and food, then that's anti-feminism. I think Emma Thompson summed up this dilema brilliantly:

As an artist, you can choose not to sell women down the river. When I decide, for instance, not to diet myself into a starved condition to play someone like Dora Carrington, then that's a political act. And I was being lampooned by male journalists, saying: Who would want to sleep with her? She's not that kind of shape. So I paid the price, but I would never betray other women in that way. I just wouldn't do it and I've never done it. She pauses.... God, I've gone on every single diet under the sun, but I've never got slender in a very particular way for any role.

No being a feminist doesn't give us magic powers to exit from a world that's obsessed with our bodies. But it does mean, at a minimum, that we have a responsibility not to add to that pressure. For Emma Thompson that means she didn't lose weight to play Carrington, for most of the rest of us it's simpler, but possibly incredibly different, we have to stop talking about food and our bodies in any way that reinforces the hatred other women have for their bodies.

That certainly includes writing a diet book or saying that fat women look like pigs.

I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore

Today I was at a community house for local activists/radicals/anarchists and found this sticker posted underneath by the water dispenser:

Surgeon General's Warning:
Consumption of soft drink bevarages may result in
Rotten teeth, diabetes, obesity, malnutrition, osteoporosis, & Cancer

Well it wasn't exactly like that, because it was all in caps.

I took it down, and tomorrow I'm going to leave this in its place:

To the person who put up that sticker, and everyone else who couldn't be bothered to take it down.

I have gotten tired of taking down messages that reinforce mainstream ideas about food and bodies. Rather than just removing that sticker, I am going to explain why I find it problematic - in the hope that one day peopel will stop putting such messages up - or at least other people will take them down before I see them.

1. I have no idea why you thought this message is necessary. Presumably you believe that there are people out there who have been deprived of the information that soft-drinks can lead to rotten teeth, and there only way of accessing this information is through alternative chanels. We obviously live in very different worlds.

2. Telling people that they shouldn't eat a particular food because they might get fat, is about as un-radical message as you can find. I'm not even going to go there, you should know better.

3. As activisits we should be focusing on health collectively rather than individually. We challenge the system of unemployment rather than blaming people for not getting a job. Surely we should challenge the system of food production rather than blaming people for getting sick

4. Think for a second about people who have the diseases listed - would you really be ok with someone with rotten teeth reading that? Are you even aware about the link between rotten teeth and poverty? Is this just another way of making sure that only middle-class alternative types feel comfortable in this space?

So lets stop with the moralistic bullshit around food. Let's treat food politically or ignore it. Repeating mainstream messages is not an option.

PS: Surgeon General? Can we please stick to the bureaucrats we are actually inflicted, without borrowing other people's.

Bought and sold

The more I read about 'health' research, the more sceptical I am of any edict about diet or lifestyle. It starts by doubting the headlines (housework prevents cancer), then you read the articles and get sceptical of science journalism. So far you're only blaming the messengers. But then you go on the internet and find the articles the press-releases are based on, and they don't prove anything. It's when you read the articles in their entirety, and see badly designed study after badly designed study, which don't prove anything, despite what their authors claim. Theoretically journal articles are supposed to be refereed to ensure that they actually prove what they say they prove. As articles that clearly don't prove what their authors claim are allowed through this process, why do we believe any of it?

And yet, I was still surprised to read an article arguing that a diet high in saturated fat did not make people more prone to heard disease.

Malcolm Kendrick appears to be making two claims: that there's no evidence that a diet high in saturated fat causes elevated cholesterol, and that there's no proof that elevated cholesterol levels leads to an increase risk of heart disease, or death. Read the article yourself - I'm sure you'll hear more about it - he's got a book coming out (the parts about cholesterol lowering drugs are particularly interesting).

I'm not saying I believe Malcolm Kendrick - necessarily. In fact I make it a matter of principle to disbelieve everything in the Daily Mail. There's some really bad logic in the article (almost all foods on saturated fats were rationed in the UK during and post-war, but the level of heart-disease doubled - this is supposed to be evidence that there is no link between heart disease and saturated fats. Unless there was more than one risk factor for heart disease). I wouldn't be surprised of Dr Kendrick, or others doing this research had some connection with the meat and dairy industry (if you were part of the meat industry wouldn't you pay him?)

But at this point everyone is being paid by someone. Food is manufactured for a profit, as is food advice. Malcolm Kendrick gives the examples of the 9 memeber panel that decided to lower the recommended cholesterol level - 8 had ties to the pharmaceutical compnaies that produce cholesterol lowering drugs.

The ridiculous nature of nutritional advice can be seen when the anti-carb people fight the anti-fat people. Each side is very good at demonstrating why it's a bad idea to demosing an entire food-group, but the argument behind this isn't that demonising a food group is probably a bad idea, but that we need to eliminate the right food group (and I'm sure the anti-carb people are funded by industries that are high fat, and vice versa).

We have a puritanical attitude towards food. The idea that virtue will be rewarded, and that virtue is the elimination of pleasure, and the quest towards perfection, describe most mainstream conversation about food (and as a political activist I must point out far too much non-mainstream discussion as well). This fits in well with the needs of our food producers (which is for us to buy their products, in case you were wondering). Meat producers can make you feel virtuous when people are worrying about carbohyrate, bread produceers when people are worrying about fat. The people who make chocolate, donuts, and deep fried potatoes know that these ideas of sin and virtue serve their intersts as much as anyone else's - because it's only within that context that people can transgress by eating.

At this stage willing to believe that it's dangerous to smoke, and eat arsenic - but it appears that we've got to take everything else of faith. Personally I've got other things I'd rather spend energy believing in.

Hating your body is for losers*

I think it was a New Year's Day party that my parents were holding; I would have been thirteen or fourteen. It was near the end of the party and all my mothers' closest friends were talking, trying to get up the energy to round up their kids and leave. One of the women started explained this great diet she was about to go on and even though it was fifteen years ago I can still remeber the details she described. But what I remember more was noticing other people's reactions. None of the men cared about the conversation, and my little sisters and their friends just kept on playing, but every single woman in the room was treating this as important information that deserved respect. Then I noticed that I was paying attention to the conversation - did this mean I was a woman?

Jill, from Feministe wrote a really good post on the proposal to print children's BMI on their report. It's not her argument that I want to respond to (although I agreed with 99% of it), but the position from which she wrote. She starts: "When I was in elementary school, we had annual weigh-ins. I dreaded weigh-in day more than just about any other day of the year." and continues:

From there, I spent most of my life engaging in restrictive eating behaviors, and volleying back and forth between extremes of “being skinny will make me happy and so therefore I’m only going to consume 800 calories a day” and “this is ridiculous, I’m a feminist and I’m not going to buy into this shit, so I’m going to eat whatever I want, even if that means binging and gaining 10 pounds in a single month” (that’s where I was at last month, and now I’m miserable). Even at 23, I still feel completely out of control when it comes to my weight, and I still go back and forth between a desire to be thin and an ideology which conflicts with that desire.

What I think is so important in what Jill wrote is that for many women feminism does not solve our relationship between food and our bodies, it just helps name the problems. It's also a lot easier to talk about food and body politics in the abstract, which can leave everyone feeling that they're a bad feminist for not figuring this stuff by themselves.

A lot of women on this heartbreaking, rage-inducing, thread that piny also talked about the conflict between feminist and their feelings about their body. Or go further, that feminist analysis just adds a level of guilt to what they're doing, that they should be strong enough and smart enough not to let this society get to us.

Which is bullshit, we do the best that we can, but none of us are strong enough and smart enough to deal with all of this on our own. (I say all of this deliberately, because I think body and food issues are about society's image of women, but they're also about so much more. They're about control and losing control. They're a way of conforming with what women should be, and a way of resisting.)

If we're going to do anything that allows us to take up space, we're going to have to do it together.

As a feminist, that much is clear. I'm just not sure what I do with this anaylsis; what it means for the way I talk to other women. I am reaching breaking point in terms of listening to the female dialogue around food and our bodies that exists among the women I know. If I never again hear someone insult her body, or what I'm eating, it'll be way too soon. I don't want to listen anymore for me, and I don't want that to be around for other women to hear.

That doesn't get me anywhere much. Being comparatively noisy about the fact that I think the common discourse about food and our bodies is really fucked up makes that noise a little quieter when I'm around. Which is great for me, but it doesn't help build anything new.

But I'm not sure we can build anything new within this environment. I've seen how activists can make mainstream diet advice look alternative. It's a hegemony so perfect that we can't say anything about food and our bodies that doesn't reinforce the status quo.

More than that, I don't know how to have this conversation without hurting other women, without hurting myself. I've been told that the reason I hold the views I do is because of my size, so challenging a woman who is smaller than me on what she says feels really risky. Food and our bodies are systems that are left to women to police, which works only too well to give us extraordinary power over each other.

I write about collective action, but I don't know how to get there on this issue. I don't even know how to get from where we are now to a point where we can have the conversation that would help us take the next step.

I'm still angry with the women who were at the party that day (feminists all). I'm angry that their feminism didn't even stop them hating their bodies in front of us. I want the generation of feminists I am part of to at least recognise the harm we could do to our daughters (and each other). But I want to go further than that, I want to find a way to stop the harm we do to ourselves, and I don't know how to do that. I'm worried that if we start by asking that women stop degrading themselves and the foods that nuture us, we'll never get any further, because we'll just drive those thoughts underground.

* From a commenter on feministe

Won't somebody please think of the children

In my effort to catch up on issues I missed while life was kicking my ass, can I just say I hate the government. From Scoop:

Coca Cola Amatil (NZ) Limited (CCANZ) and Frucor Beverages Group Limited (Frucor), the New Zealand distributor of Pepsi beverages, have signed the world’s first agreement to stop directly selling all full sugar soft drinks and full sugar energy drinks to New Zealand schools.

The voluntary agreement was signed between the beverage industry and government this afternoon.

CCANZ and Frucor have agreed to stop directly selling full sugar carbonated soft drinks and full sugar energy drinks to any schools (primary, intermediate and secondary) in New Zealand. This will take affect progressively from today and will be completed by 2009.

Both companies will provide alternatives, including no or low sugar soft drinks, fruit juices and flavoured waters.

Coca-Cola Amatil (N.Z) Limited Managing Director, George Adams, says the industry was prepared to do its small part in the battle against rising obesity levels in New Zealand.

I'd be happy to see soft-drink companies kicked out of schools entirely. I think the food provided in schools should be put produced for it's taste and nutritional value, not for profit. But I think this change is worse than the status quo. Coke has some nutritional value, as energy is pretty essential to our bodies ongoing well-being. Diet Coke doesn't actually have any food in there, just a message that the person who drinks it should be smaller.

That's the big worry about McDonalds

While I was concentrating solely on the locked-out supermarket workers, there were some other things going on in the world - well sort of. In my head I berated the snail for daring to care about any other issue, and in our office every Green press release arrived to annoyed rants about its irrelevance. But there were a couple of things I stored up in my mind as being worth writing about.

One was the Health Select Committee's inquiry into obesity. In particular, several fast-food chains were in the news a couple of weeks ago. This is how it was reported in the The Dominion Post:

Representatives of the multinationals fronted up to Parliament's health select committee yesterday and insisted their products did not cause obesity.

Because the only way to evaluate our food is whether or not it causes obesity. Unfortunately this is not just an isolated example, publicly the one quality we discuss about food most of the time is whether or not we make us fat. The only ideological difference is between the right who thinks this is an individual problem, and the left that blames it on the way food is produced (the Super Size Me analysis, as I think of it). I think those who have a left-wing analysis that perpetuate this discourse, are making a serious mistake. Curiousgyrl commented on Alas:

I agree with folks who question the panicked rhetoric declaring an obesity ‘epidemic,’ and who point out the fat hate that drives most of the discussion of this.

But I also think that there is a real problem with an agricultural and food distribution system that provides far more calories per day than needed and in which corn subsidies make processed staples like high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated corn oil ubiquitous. Are there blogs/books etc that address both of these problems?

I don't believe that these are two unrelated issues (although I absolutely don't believe that the number of calories that are produced is the main problem in our food supply). I don't think it's a coincidence that we have an moral panic over at obesity at a time when food is getting less nutritious.

McDonald's response to the select committee was:

McDonald's had reduced the saturated and trans fat content of its food, changed its menu to include healthy options and provided nutritional information about its menu.

A children's Chicken McNugget meal contained less fat, sodium, sugar and calories than a banana, glass of milk, and a peanut butter sandwich, she said.

See how easy it is for McDonalds to fight on these grounds. She's not talking about what's in the food: the vitamins, minerals, fibre, fats, carbohydrates, calories, that we need to live and that will make us strong. As soon as the discourse becomes about obesity, the makers of food don't have to justify what's in their food, and can instead claim that things aren't there. They don't have to look at what is in the banana, peanut butter sandwich and glass of milk, and compare that with what's in Chicken McNugget meal. It's the same with 'health foods', they're another way to commodify food, not a way for people to thrive. It's so much easier to take things out of food, to make them less food like, than to put things back into food, and make it more nutritious.*

Those of us who want food to be made for nutrition rather than profit can't turn the 'obesity' discourse to our side, because one of the points of the discourse is to point the finger in the wrong direction and to pretend that too many calories is the main problem, rather than scarcity of other nutrients.

Ensuring that girls have a great start to life

More bad news in the obesity epidemic: girls who are overweight in their early school years are likely to achieve less academically than their peers later in life, new research shows.

When it comes to the 'obesity epidemic' the Press can't get through the lead paragraph without lying. Luckily the research was available for free on-line, so we can see what a shitty job the The Press did of reporting the research (and also see how frustrating myopic the researchers are).

The research didn't show anything like that - it showed that girls who were not classified as overweight at age five, but were classified as overweight at age nine had lower test scores, more internalised behaviour problems and more externalised behaviour problems. Girls who were classified as overweight about both 5 and 8 had similar test scores and externalised behaviour problems as those who were never classified as overweight. The only correlation for boys was that if they were overweight they had fewer externalised behaviour problems (I guess that's scientist speak for they were nicer).

The researchers pointed out that even the difference they did identify was not that significant - for example the education of the mother had 2 to 3 times as much effect on tests and behaviour as did whether or not girls became overweight. But they concluded with this:

The good news is that some recent school-based strategies have been shown to be effective in reducing overweight, particularly among girls.35, 15 Our study suggests that these school-based programs may have broader effects on school outcomes more generally by reducing overweight in the early years.

OK lets be really fucking clear, any correlation between a negative outcome and higher weight that effects girls and not boys won't have jackshit to do with the weight itself.

I can't believe that researchers can seriously suggest 'being overweight makes people feel bad about themselves, lets make sure we fight obesity'.

The best thing we can do for those girls is stop teaching them to hate their bodies. The fact that this was reported is bad news in the obesity epidemic - rather than bad news for the "obesity epidemic" - shows the refusal to look at the damage that's being done to young girls. It terrifies me that another generation of girls is being taught not to take up space as I write this article, and they're being taught it at an even earlier age than my generation was.

I'm going to end with a letter a mother wrote to Penlope Leach (from the book Baby & Child) asking if she's doing the right thing for her 'over-weight' daughter. I want you to try and guess what age the daughter is:

Unfortunately, though, she also takes after me in a tendancy to put on weight. I've fought this all my life and I'm determined that she shouldn't face the same battles. At home we just don't have fattening foods in the house. She already knows the danger foods and when she asks for something like chocolate or ice cream at the supermarket I show her the 'light' versions and we get those. When she goes out, though, other people try to sabotage our efforts, and not only people who mean to be kind and give her 'treats' either. A teacher at her nursery school insists she has the ordinary snack.

This particular child is four, and the age at which girls get treated like this is only getting younger.

But at least they're protected from the dangers associated with being over weight.

Silence as a starting point

Piny has a really interesting post about what men could do to help women who with eating disorders. Piny has had an eating disorder and I thought his list was great:

Model comfortable eating.
Calm down
Do not overcompensate for your friends’ self-hatred.
Do not allow your friends to tear themselves down in your presence.
Shut the fuck up about your own body issues.

I think the most important idea that I'd add was a similar instruction to shut the fuck up about food. It's is so easy to reinforce eating disordered ideas of controlling what you eat. I'm often amazed at how easy it is for men not to understand this - to use really powerful words casually as if they had no weight or meaning.

I would also take piny's ideas wider. I have known a woman whose anorexia drove her to the verge of death, I have known some women who were damaging their body they were eating so little, and I have known many women whose relationship with food was dysfunctional and damaging.* Eating disorders are not an on/off state, not something that you accuse someone of having, but a continuum of behaviours that huge numbers of women use as a coping mechanism at some time or another, and many women can't escape from. I think the suggestions that piny makes (and the commenters on that thread), could and should be standard steps that pro-feminist men take to try and lessen the damage they do to the women around them.

It gets more complicated when I think about the way feminist women should try and lessen the damage they do. The reason I think it's so important that people stop talking about food, is that everyone I have ever known on the anorexia continuum has talked a lot about food, particularly food and morality and food and control. I have come to believe that, at least in the mild end of the continuum, talking about food plays an important role in maintaining both an anorexic mind-set and anorexic behaviour.

I do believe that stopping talking about food in a destructive way is one of the most important ways women can help women who are on the eating disordered spectrum (and often also themselves). But controlling food isn't a survival mechianism I need, or have been trapped into. It breaks my heart to see women I like and respect reinforcing such destructive patterns. I get angry and upset, I snark, I roll my eyes, I bitch and complain - and none of these are particularly useful reactions. But while a woman lives in an eating disordered world, asking her to get out of that world because of the damage she is doing to other women, probably isn't particularly productive. She needs to stop doing it because of the damage she's doing to herself - and that's a really uphill battle.

Unfortunately this means that there are always more women to reinforce and help maintain each others dysfunctional and destructive attitudes towards food. The good news is I do know women who have managed to move away from an anorexic mind-set, and are now one less voice reinforcing the idea that controlling food is normal and necessary. Their strength awes me.

* I even know a woman who has a relationship with food that isn't completely dysfunctional.

Shut up Sue Kedgley*

Ever since I've started this blog I've developed a secret suspision that journalists sometimes write articles specifically to piss me off. You may think that that's a ridiculous (and ridiculously arrogant) thing to say. But just look at what they had in the Dominion Post today:

Despite regular exposure to healthy messages at school, many children were getting mixed messages at home, a new study suggests.

Massey University PhD student Jacinta Hawkins[*] found that some parents needed to go back to school for school-based healthy eating programmes to work.

During studies of four low decile Auckland schools she found some teachers saw it as a challenge getting the healthy eating message across when children went home. Teachers felt educating parents was beyond the call of duty of schools.

"There are a lot of parents doing a really good job but there are others who the message isn't reaching," Ms Hawkins said.

"It is sad to think it's because they simply don't know any better."

My first issue with this sort of article is that it always acts as if the worst possible outcome from any diet is getting fat. It ignores the problems that are created by not getting enough of all the nutrients you need, and any increased risks associated with particular food products except getting larger.

But in this article I could barely get up any sort of anger about that, because the anti-poor people subtext was rapidly become text. You consistently see this argument in any discussion about food - that the only reason people living in poverty eat the way they do is because they're ignorant. It's not people in poverty's fault that nutritious food is often more expensive than food that is low in nutrients (it's the food manufacturers fault - and capitalism's).

So shut up with you 'messages' bullshit and provide free breakfast and lunch in schools.

* This is what Sue Kedgley had to say about the topic "It is true that many parents are simply unaware of the problems with what they are feeding their children." Well quite, if only they knew, like Sue Kedgley, where to get the best organic produce, and that sushi is so much healthier than fish and chips then all those low decide parents would be fine.

** The researcher in question isn't a scietist or an educator, but a marketing communications researcher - just the sort of people we want to run our education system, or possibly our social welfare program - it's not entirely clear what's being proposed.

Let them eat cake

It just keeps getting worse. Yesterday it was all about ministers randomly decided that a certain number of beneficiaries in the same place was dangerous - in much the same way that more than three people makes a riot.

Now Judith Collins is in on the act, her proposal is selecting some beneficiaries and giving a third of their money directly to a supermarket and (no explanation about what they're going to do about people who don't have a car and aren't walking distance from a supermarket). She said:

It wouldn't have to be everybody who's a beneficiary, but for those who are clearly not looking after their kids in terms of being able to get them fed before they go to school, we should be looking at it.

Now leaving aside how they'd decide which beneficiaries weren't feeding their kids (you want teachers to become spies on parents? If you want teachers to take on a more social welfare role then you'll have to take other work out of them, and also consider the possibility that this wouldn't be best acheived if they were taking a punitive role). The benefit is not supposed to be enough to live on.

For anyone who missed that: the 1991 benefit cuts took the Unemployment Benefit, the Domestic Purposes Benefit and the Sickness Benefit were all cut to a level that you couldn't live on. They estimated the bare minimum required to buy enough food, and then cut it significantly. If people can't live on the benefit it's not because they're doing anything wrong.

If you want to make sure kids have breakfast then give them breakfast at school. Stop with this punitive shit and provide resources to those that need them.

Connections

I've written a lot about food, particularly recently. I've written about my problems with the way food is discussed and my problems with the way food is produced. But I haven't talked explicitly about the connection between my analysis of these two things.

I don't think either of my analyses is particularly unusual. Certainly an analysis of the effects of capitalism on nutrition is reasonably common, at least in the sort of cirlces that analyse the effects of capitalism on anything. Most people with a vague understanding that feminism exists have some sort of analysis of society's obsession with thinness. Many feminists who think about it develop this into a more thorough analysis, which includes an understanding of the role food plays in an eating disordered culture, particularly control of food.

And yet...

Most people make no connection between these two analyses, a fact that I find highly frustration. So many people treat them as two different analyses of food, and you pick one or the other, or if you lay one over the other then they cancel each other out, and there's just one bit of the strongest left (this approach seems to be most common in Britain, I was there a couple of years back and read not one but two articles in the Guardian/Independent (just search the Guardian archives for +poverty +obesity for lots of examples of exactly what I'm saying) that basically said "yes, anorexia is bad for middle-class girls, but we need to concentrate on the problem of obesity among those in poverty, size is a class issue not a gender one.")

What this means is that Supersize Me analysis* has become the common response to the 'obesity epidemic'. Fat is bad, and the poor are fat, therefore it's left-wing to criticse fat. If you're really lucky this analysis will then be extended, as Findlay McDonald did the other week, to say that maybe it's poverty we should have a war on, not obesity.

But this gives up ground that I'm not willing to give up. I think it's dangeorus and distracting to substitute discussions about food with discussions about weight. I think that one of the whole points of our fucked up discourse** around food is to distract us from the fact that the real problem with food is the way it is produced.

'Health' has become a commodity and this is most true when it comes to 'healthy' food. Labelling certain foods as 'healthy' or promoting their 'health' benefits has nothing to do with their nutritional value and everything to do with selling stuff. Often what food is portrayed as 'healthy' has nothing to do with promoting longevity and quality of life, and more to do with promoting certain behaviours and ideas. This discourse* has many different roles, but an important part of it is to hide the completely obvious, which is that capitalism is fucking up our food supply.

We don't fix that by having the same conversations as everyone else, and we don't fix that by focusing on individual problems and solutions, and we don't fix it by treating the two problems as if they're unrelated, because they're not.**

*Personally I think 'analysis' is a little bit of an generous word to use in conjunction with Supersize Me, but since I'm determined to scare quote 'healthy' and 'obesity epidemic' every single time I use them I thought it'd come across as a wee bit petty if I did the same to analysis. I'm trying to think of a good synonym for analysis which implies that it's not actually analysis, but my brain isn't finding one. Oh well.

**I'm sorry, but while 'discourse' is kind of a pretentious word, I think it's also useful. Talking about the 'discourse' makes it clear that you believe that public discussions of a subject are constructed, and that analysing how and why is useful.

***Did my rhetoric hide the fact that I don't know how we do fix it? Didn't think so. I have the usual answers their, educate, agitate, organise, but I just don't think we're going to be able to do any of that until change the way we talk about the issue. I guess that's the educate part (hey maybe I do have some ideas).