Ezra Klein and Mark Bittman, chattin' away

Wow, since that post a few weeks ago in which I expressed concern that my blog was getting a bit too self-absorbed (due to laziness), I now realize it's getting a bit NYTimes-absorbed (due to laziness.) This is because I subscribed to Bitten and Well (both NYTimes blogs) and they show up on my Blogger dashboard every day. So now it's way easier to go, "Ooo that looks interesting, let me read it and post a short synopsis/opinion on it. Done and done."

Whatever, maybe I'll expand my blog horizon beyond the New York Times (even though they are probably the most fantastic, expertise- and quality-wise) but right now, I'm going to talk about them. Again. Because today Mark Bittman posted a couple of awesome video clips of him and Ezra Klein (economic columnist for the Washington Post... if you're a classmate and the name rings a bell, it's because Joel assigned something by him, though I can't remember what--but I bet it was something about the financial conundrum of mainstream media! Yeah, I know: get outta here!)



If you're not enticed already by the fact that it's just them, talking to each other via headsets and webcams, well then you apparently are not as easily amused as I am. I encourage you to watch it if you have the time. (It's delightfully casual and entertaining--especially when Mark's phone rings and he moves out of the shot for a moment to see who it is, leaving poor Ezra to look around and say something awkward.) But just in case, I will highlight what I think were the most interesting parts.

This first clip--which, slightly annoyingly, is not labeled or identified in any manner in the blog post--is mainly about Mark's beef (pun, yes) with vegetarianism. He says that if a vegetarian is so because he thinks meat is murder, but still eats eggs and dairy, then he is slightly "hypocritical" (I rather think of it as ill-informed) because male chicks and calves born on dairy farms are killed. Which I totally did not know.

Ezra then recounts a visit to a goat cheese farm, where they treated their animals very humanely, and how, when asked what happens to the male goats, the woman who ran the farm replied, 'Well, they go into the meat industry.' He laughs and says, "I love the way she put that ... as if they turn 18 and they get a suit and a tie and a briefcase.. they get sent to learn the meat business."

Although I of course chuckled along with them, there is a sinister truth behind this. And their criticism of vegetarianism is precisely what I meant the other day when I referred to the trendiness and almost elitism behind it, that is often lacking substantial reasoning. As Mark says, if your problem is really moral, go vegan.



This one is a debate on the plausibility of launching an assault reminiscent of the tobacco industry on the processed food industry, whereby junk food would be taxed, and those tax dollars would be used for education about healthy eating. Mark wants this, but Ezra argues that more efficient results might be wrought from simply removing the convenience of junk food. Once again, he gives a brilliant example: a vending machine that used to be down the hall from his office was moved, and now he no longer gets Diet Cokes everyday because he's not willing to go down the street to get one. So it wasn't a dying urge for soda that caused him to grab them before, it was "because it was easy."

I think this is so, so true, and I can give one glaring example in the college world (that may make a few of my friends squirm in their seats): meal plans. Having seemingly free money on your school ID, for the sake of convenience, can be an open invitation to indulge in Chik-Fil-A in the Cathedral Cafe everyday (although I am by no means saying you guys do this, so please don't shun me.) Now that I live off-campus and don't have a meal plan, I usually pack, or wait until I get home to eat, or go somewhere healthier, because no longer do I have the excuse of "Well, I have so many Dining Dollars left that I need to get rid of, so it's okay if I get it." It may take me a few extra minutes in the morning (literally, like only five) to pack, but I save both money and my waistline by doing it. A sacrifice I'm more than willing to make.

Unsafe Chicken Trends

Lovely. Found out via a post on Well that two out of three broiler chickens (which are pretty much any chicken raised for consumption) are contaminated with either salmonella or campylobacter bacteria, which can both cause food poisoning, but the latter can lead to "meningitis, arthritis, and Guillain-Barré syndrome, a severe neurological condition." (Read the rest of the post here.)

Argh. This is pretty much why I've cut back on meat in the past year or so. I mean not just bacteria; there are other factors too, particularly that raising animals for human consumption requires so much more energy--both in feed and fossil fuels--than just growing plants. But I haven't become a vegetarian yet because... well I guess because I don't believe in diets (and vegetarianism or veganism is a form of a restrictive diet.) Because I know myself too well: if I want to eat meat, I will. And anyway, it's not the meat itself I disagree with--it's the way it's raised, butchered, transported, etc. (If, years after declaring vegetarianism, I was at a small farm and they butchered a chicken that they raised from an egg--you'd better believe I'd want some.)

And it doesn't matter to me to be able to say "Oooo I'm a vegetarian/vegan," like it's some sort of a badge to wear. And I know it's not to everyone; to some it is a deeply personal and value-laden commitment. But I can't help thinking that to some, the trendy aspect is a bit too alluring....

so we get free food, right?

The other week I attended a lecture on food for a global studies course (and I haven't written about it yet? Yeah. I know. Shoot me.) and the hippie lady who spoke focused on food as a right. As in a government is obliged to provide sustenance for its citizens. Simultaneously, I'm reading about how feudal lords and aristocrats from China to France stored surpluses for distribution to the poor during famines way, way back in the day when "lord" didn't necessarily signify Jesus and peasants clapped coconut halves together for lack of horses or other viable transportation.

So what about now, in an age where the term "McDonaldization" is taught in college classes? Is food a right or a commodity? Should it be one or the other?

All this talk about the right to food came into context when I read an article called Tent City, in which a journalist lived amongst homeless people in an encampment of tents to try to gain a better understanding of them, their lifestyles, how they came into this situation, etc. While exploring the site, he came across what appeared to be the nucleus of this "city", something called Poverello House (or "the Pov"):

Free meals were available here, no questions asked. [...] At times the existence of the Pov seemed like a kind of miracle of clear-sighted, unconditional generosity. At other times, it seemed like a gigantic enabling machine: The free food supplied by the Pov seemed to be the main reason for the existence of the [tent city].

This brings up a lot of complex welfare-related questions that I (and everyone else, it seems) can't answer. But I do want to address it in reference to this concept of food as a right, and what this might do to people's will and drive to satiate hunger: If we don't have to buy or work for food because it is provided for us by the government, what does this do to our view of it? What does it become? Does it lose its value, in the way that cheap, instantaneous bagged meals handed from a hole in a wall have often replaced Sunday pot roast family dinners? If we're not working to provide for ourselves in a basic sense, but don't have the means (whether economic, social, mental, what have you) to strive for what some sociologists say is the next step: abstract self-fulfillment-- what are we working for?

I don't know, but something tells me it might be drugs. Which makes me think we (the big-wigs, the little man; everyone) should reevaluate our priorities. But, there are cases in which egalitarian distribution of food has not had detrimental consequences. Take, for example, the !Kung San (better known as the Bushmen, or to me, prior to taking an anthropology class, as the clicky tongue people), a hunter-gatherer tribe from Africa that still exists today (although in a slightly Westernized sense). These people survive(d) on roots, plants, and precious few game that they could kill with bows and arrows, and distributed their food equally amongst all members of the tribe.

So, in a way, to them food was a right, as in no one should be excluded from partaking in a feast just because they weren't directly responsible for killing or digging the main course. But, all members (except children) contributed in some sense to the cycle of these peoples' society, so it didn't matter; they did their part somewhere else.

Now, I'm aware that our society is vastly different from that of the !Kung, but my point is this: handing out food isn't teaching anyone the value of it. So in that sense I don't think food should be a right. But if some kind of exchange takes place--not necessarily monetary, because I understand, in the limited sense that someone ingrained in the the middle-class only can, that a capitalist society doesn't always make room for everyone--but if they have to do something for that food--wash their dishes afterward, serve it to someone else, anything!--wouldn't that make them see it as something worth fighting for?

Maybe I'm being too harsh; I mean, these people have been through enough, let 'em have a free meal! Or maybe I'm being naive by assuming all people can or will fight for something they really want (or in this case, need). But it just seems to me that if one country has an obesity epidemic and another (or like half the world) has to deal with starvation and malnutrition, something is fundamentally wrong.

Take your jetpack and leave

When I was a kid, watching the same cartoons my mom watched when she was a kid (and probably in the same position: on floor, on stomach, head in hands), she told me that she had thought the world would be like this by now. (The Jetsons really fucked with the minds of impressionable young baby-boomers, giving them false expectations of flying cars and the ability to steal money from the wallet of your dad without repercussions.)

But it's worth pondering, with all the technological advances we've had in computers and music and movies and telephones and the like, why not in other arenas? Like food? Why can't we press a button and out pops a pill that dissolves into the perfect little army of nutrients that our bodies need? Where the hell are you, science?!

But then again, maybe we do have these new forms of non-natural foods; they're just not in the neat little plastic package we expected. Take for example: energy drinks! energy bars! virtually anything energy related that isn't coffee or tea! I also found an article about food pills (and other futuristic follies) that mentioned food for soldiers, namely MRE's (meals-ready-to-eat) and CM's (compressed meals). Seems one of the only ways to partake in futuristic cuisine is to enlist yourself in mano-a-mano combat.

But really, obviously, if you know me or my blog at all, you will know that I am relieved that pill food did not take off, and, thus, worried about the products out there that are inching towards it. My reasons are many, from scientific to social. First of all, there are aspects of food that just can't be manipulated into a compact package. An article I found about "nutraceuticals", another ploy to present healthful aspects of food in a pill form, states:

The problem, it seems, is that food is too complicated to be stripped down to its chemical components, and that the whole is far greater than its parts. Most nutraceutical studies are done in vitro, not in humans, and a free chemical in a Petri dish behaves far differently than when it is bound to food and sent through the body.

Chemistry aside, there are also capitalist pressures that should make one wary about any food product touting  a plethora of health benefits. As this witty writer for the New York Times Magazine says:

Humans deciding what to eat without expert help — something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, “Eat more fruits and vegetables”?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition — much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters.

 Finally, although the Jetsons are misleadingly posed around a kitchen table, forks in hand, if food really did come in pill form, imagine the loss of the aesthetic pleasures of eating. I mean, what do we all do, whether one is a vegan or lives on a McDiet, when we meet up with friends in the afternoon, a date on Saturday night, extended family on the holidays, Mom or Dad or Son or Daughter or Wife or Husband at home every evening? We eat. Snack. Feast. Nibble. Nosh. Taking a pill makes hunger and nutrition seems like a medical malady, something that needs to be cured. It's not; it needs to be satisfied, with real, whole foods.