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Monkey Monday: welcome to hot mess week. 20 April 2009 8:29 am

Posted by Tracy in : cooking,eating,hot mess,meta,news,nutrition,politics,school , trackback

So last Thursday I mentioned cooking up a hot mess, and considered a series of posts (with pictures) about meals I’ve cooked that tasted way better than they looked. This week, as I attempt to wrangle together my big project for Research Methods, hot messes sound like a fun way to take what I’m sure will be much-needed breaks. BUT. Before I get to all that lighthearted fun, I need to write something about the food politics of a big hot mess in last week’s news.

All the Pepto-Bismol (or store-brand/generic equivalents thereof) on Earth would not be enough to get me through reading the CIA “interrogation technique” memos released by the Obama administration, but here’s a link to the ACLU page with the full documents just in case I develop some seriously hardcore intestinal fortitude. However, I did manage to read excerpts from the memos in in Friday’s New York Times, and that’s how I spotted a bit of food politics so grim I had to reread it repeatedly before circling it in black marker to etch it in my brain as something to write about. So here I go, starting with the description of “dietary manipulation” memo’ed in 2005:

This technique involves the substitution of commercial liquid meal replacements for normal food, presenting detainees with a bland, unappetizing, but nutritionally complete diet.

Translation: we fed prisoners nothing but Ensure. The memos also strongly imply, especially in the next section, which justifies this treatment as “no, really, it’s legal, we swear,” that we starved prisoners:

Although we do not equate a person who voluntarily enters a weight-loss program with a detainee subjected to dietary manipulation as an interrogation technique, we believe that it is relevant that several commercial weight-loss programs available in the United States involve similar or even greater reductions in caloric intake.

Seriously, the justification is, “Well, people do it to themselves, so it must not be torture.” AUGH. Reading this makes me hate everything so much, I hardly know where to begin. Again, I can’t bring myself to read the unabridged memos, so I don’t know if anybody tried to defend keeping prisoners naked because some people are nudists, or reason that sleep deprivation is okay because really, who hasn’t pulled an all-nighter on a big project? Really, these “conditioning techniques” are stuff the prisoners should already have been doing to themselves for their own good…. ew, ew, ewitty ew ew ew ew ew.

And now I really do promise that the rest of this week’s posts will be more upbeat (they pretty much have to be).

  • http://leenaeats.com/blog leena!

    Whoa. That is heavy shit. And totally the way to get me to break–mess with my food. A hungry Leena is an ANGRY Leena. Thanks for posting about this–I totally missed it.