Re-stating Asad Haider's post, below, into a statement about USA
consumption generally, works for me.
Gene Coyle
On Oct 8, 2009, at 5:23 PM, Asad Haider wrote:
>The NYT article talks about the Atkins diet and other fashionable
>fads, but the problems with industrialized agriculture are far more
>fundamental than that and can hardly be dismissed as "vegan liberal
>elite propaganda". I'd refer you to Michael Pollan who makes a very
>well-argued case for diversity in our food instead of breaking
>everything down into carbs, proteins, minerals and other chemical
>components and then arguing about the relative importance of each:
>http://www.michaelpollan.com/indefense.php
Yes, of course, I've read all his books, which are often fine in
their own ways, but this is a somewhat separate issue and Pollan's
view is too narrow to really grasp it. The Atkins diet, however we
feel about it (certainly it ignored the important issue of the
quality of meat, the methods by which it is cultivated etc) did
represent something of an epistemological rupture in nutrition,
irreducible to its often dogmatic vilification of carbohydrates. The
rupture was the attack on the idea that people get fat because they
eat too much. The new concept was that certain kinds of food, which,
due to the operations of the food industry, people eat in
unprecedented quantities (including the angelic hippie or yuppie
foods free of animal-derived villains) have altered the operations
of the body (specifically the hormones which regulate metabolism).
No reason to ignore the content of the article because it happens to
mention the Atkins diet early on. Don't forget that the dominant
nutritional ideology put carbohydrates at the base of its notorious
food pyramid--any ideology critique will have to deal with that, and
perhaps emphasize it in its initial moments.
The importance of this concept is that it shows that frequently
people don't get fat because they eat too much--actually, they eat
too much because they are fat. Here we are running around making fun
of people who are often genuinely ill and telling them to stop
eating so much, when it is really medically quite difficult for them
to eat less!
What does this have to do with overconsumption? Well, it is one
example of the need for real conceptual shifts instead of simple
inversions. There is an ideology of the marketplace that says more
is better, and a certain kind of opposition now wants to argue that
less is better. But if Americans eat less of the things they
currently eat, leaving more for the rest of the world, it does not
help anyone much; it just means that throughout the world people
will be satisfying basic energy requirements while getting obese,
diabetic and malnourished (in terms of micronutrients and any
beneficial compounds science has not yet isolated beyond the
antioxidant fad), and yet will feel strangely hungry all day. A
resolution to the food problem can only come from seriously high-
tech innovative farming solutions, which may breach the "organic"
orthodoxy (some good journalism on that: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/02/spoiled-organic-and-local-so-2008
). One pleasantly sci-fi example is the hydroponic skyscraper, but
it all means an end to the reliance on grains and the sensible
integration of livestock, which will eventually be killed and eaten
by those interested in participating in order to convert non-
nutritive substances like grass and worms into nourishment for
humans (Pollan is pretty good on this).
Anyway, me or any other American having a smaller serving of fries
has nothing to do with that.
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