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August 3, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
August 2, 2002
Ralph Nader
The Labor
Party
Chris Floyd
Moral Maze:
Bankruptcy Made Easy
Jeremy Scahill
Saddam,
Chemical Weapons and Donald Rumsfeld
Jeffrey St. Clair
Dark Deeds in the Black Hills:
Daschle Dooms the
Sacred Land of the Sioux
August 1, 2002
Steven Higgs
Activists
Under Siege
Anthony Gancarski
Draft
Picks:
Staffing the Latest War
Zeynep Toufe
Invisible
Children: AIDS,
Africa and Selective Vision
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel and Squawk:
Angelina Jolie, the NYT
and the Attack on McKinney
July 31, 2002
Amelia Peltz
Inside
Ramallah:
How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing?
M. Shahid Alam
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
Bernard Weiner
20 Things
We've Learned Since 9/11
Philip Cryan
Discourse
and War in Colombia
Neve Gordon
A Feast
of Bombs:
Sharon's Endgame for Palestine
July 30, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Branding September 11
PS Burton
Financial
Journalism:
A Very Small Cog
Tom Stephens
Hypocrites in the House:
Fast Track After Midnight
Dave Marsh
Censorship
Goes Global
July 29, 2002
Linda Belanger
Why Do They Do It?
Alfredo Castro
Colombia's
Disappeared
Anne Brodsky
Inside Pakistan and
Afghanistan with RAWA
Andrew George
The Fires
of Summer:
Don't Blame the Greens
David Vest
A Blind Mule and
a Box of Medals
July 28, 2002
Bob Geary
Our Dinner
with Fidel Castro
July 27, 2002
Ian Daoust
The New
Mahler, Seattle Style
Gavin Keeney
Zizek
and Lenin
Ralph Nader
Citigroup
Heal Thyself
M. Shahid Alam
American
Presidents (Poem)
Mokhiber / Weissman
Push Back: Women Take
on the Corporate Beasts
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Five
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
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Weekend
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August 3, 2002
Proverbial
Wisdom
Fat Americans
by Susan Davis
"The platter kills
more than the sword."
(England, 1384; Illinois, mid-20th century)
This proverb meant something different in the
late 14th century than it does today. Most likely it was an
attack on the corrupt and illegitimate luxuries of the church,
expressing an attitude shared by all European peasants. Late
medieval people were more likely to starve to death than to come
down with gout, and church reformers depicted priests as bulky
gluttons.
Piero Camporesi, the historian of Italian
food, tells us in The
Magic Harvest: Food, Folklore and Society that "the
fearful threat of famine [hung] over people's lives at least
until middle of the 19th century..." Most of the population
were "malnutritti," the malnourished. Even "during
the century of scientific and technical advance, when the railways
had begun their rumbling progress," Camporesi writes, "some
people still ate foods made of acorns just as they did in the
mythical golden age, when the hard labor of cultivation was unknown...
.The terrible contradictions of human mythologies!"
As Camporesi puts it, diet is the red
thread of history. "When the dark days of famine came,
peasants tried to make bread," "the fundamental element,"
"with an infinite variety of materials...": Rough
grass, roots, vetch, thistles, hawthorn, sawdust of young trees,
and vine shoots ..." were baked and choked down, "but
the 'refuge' of the rich was profoundly different from that of
the poor," and "in human history nothing reflects class
differences so profoundly as diet."
That may be true, but by the 21st century,
the old relationship between body size and class has been inverted.
The rich are thin, and everyone else is getting heftier, at least
in the United States. Here, as is well known, income inequality
has increased dramatically over the last thirty years, and more
than a quarter of American children live below the federal poverty
line. At the same time, 60 percent of adult Americans are overweight,
and nearly 18 per cent of Americans are categorized by public
health officials as obese. Even more concerning, the proportion
of obese children is now 25 percent. Obesity and poor nutrition
are implicated in a host of serious diseases, including one that
used to be called adult onset diabetes. It's now so common among
children that doctors can't call it that anymore. It's now "Type
II Diabetes."
Here in Illinois, the size of people
is astounding. Midwesterners are notorious for consuming high-fat,
high cholesterol meals. A cluster of eight states in the Midwest
and the upper south --Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia,
Arkansas, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana -- are among the ten with
the highest mortality rate for coronary heart disease. Together,
they make up a region dubbed "Coronary Valley," actually
the ancient southern Mississippi River plain. Historically,
black and white people in the upper south raised pork and corn,
and often fried their food. 19th-century settlers from Europe
brought sausage, pastry, and beer to the Midwest, reinvigorating
the high-fat, high calorie pattern.
These dietary habits made sense when
men and women labored in farm or factory for 12 and 14 hours.
But today these preferences persist in the context of sedentary
work, lots of driving, and reliance on processed foods. Recently,
I took my son out to dinner at a family-run Italian restaurant.
Like a lot of kids, the only thing he'll order is chicken fingers.
He got them, but since this is the Midwest, the deep-fried slivers
of chicken came with a side of pasta, a plate of french fries,
and "for free," a plate of fried cheese. I'd never
seen fried cheese before, but it's very popular in this part
of the country.
It isn't just outgrown habits that are
causing the American body to expand. It's new habits, too. Most
families eat more than seven meals a week away from home, and
because they eat on the run they are inhaling more restaurant
and processed foods. Poor and working families are more likely
to eat at fast food restaurants where nutritional values are
lower and calories higher. Food manufacturers have increased
the calories in their products over the last decade, making them
sweeter in an effort to get people to buy and eat more. Sugar
is incredibly cheap and it seems to have as much of a stimulating
as a satiating effect on eaters. Sodas and french fries are
where the profits are in the fast food business. Putting two
and two together, the hot "rollout" in the frozen food
locker this season is cinnamon sugar-sprinkled french fries.
For several years, I've been pondering
portion sizes -- the very image of the lethal platter. Why is
it that when you go out to eat, they try to stuff you instead
of feed you? Why has a plate of spaghetti or roast beef or Chinese
food gotten bigger and bigger, until we leave restaurants lugging
a week's supply of leftovers back to the fridge?
It turns out that this is a deliberate
restaurant strategy, or so my students who have studied "food
service marketing" tell me. Restaurant managers believe
that customers go home feeling more satisfied if their guts are
aching, because being overfed makes Americans feel they've gotten
a real bargain. The managers are convinced that if you eat two
of their meals, one in the restaurant and one at midnight in
front of the TV, you have them in mind twice a week instead of
once. This is eating as advertising.
Overfeeding is used in all price ranges
except the most expensive, where the reverse principle operates
and you pick lightly at a few slivers of belly of tuna comforted
by a caper and an asparagus spear. In most restaurants, profits
are made when the volume of inexpensive foods or "sides"
increases on the plate. Commodity prices for most vegetables,
starches and legumes are so low that restaurants have been able
to double serving sizes with out doubling prices. Portion sizes
have gotten so large that one can easily consume 2200 -- 2400
calories in a single mid-price restaurant meal, more than the
total an adult needs for a day. How can this be possible when
an uncounted number of people in United States don't get enough
daily calories?
The super-sizing strategy gets extreme
in the fast food industry, the part of the restaurant business
that markets most heavily to kids. Here you really have to step
back and marvel at the magic of capitalism. The fast food folks
figured out how to make it more profitable to sell highly processed,
mechanically shaped, frozen, artificially flavored and deep fat
fried segments of potato, than it is to sell a plain baked or
boiled potato. The key is volume. As Eric Schlosser shows in
Fast
Food Nation, McDonald's has driven potato prices so low
that they can sell a pound of cooked French fried potatoes for
twenty times what they pay for it frozen.
Piero Camporesi writes that Westerners
are of two minds about fat bodies. On one hand, in Christian
tradition, especially as regards the Pentecost and Final Judgment,
"lightness and agility were associated with salvation, purity
and beauty, while ugliness was indissolubly linked with corpulence,
slowness, heaviness, bad odours and (obviously) damnation."
But on the other hand, in the age of the malnuttriti, "the
code of female beauty" was "florid and soft with white
flesh." Cushiony, creamy female bodies were considered
beautiful and desirable, and powerful men tried to look large
and well fed.
Camporesi laments that "the plump
Venus no longer walks in our lands: she belongs in the past..,"
as slenderness is not only considered beautiful, it signifies
wealth and moral worth. But Piero, caro, come to Illinois!
Susan Davis
teaches at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. She
can be reached at sgdavis@uiuc.edu
Today's Features
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
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