Belated Monkey Monday: winter solstice 2009 edition. 22 December 2009 1:48 am
Posted by Tracy in : geekery,health,health at every size,monkeys,politics,random,school,seasonality,sustainability,whoops,writing , trackbackSo I know tonight is officially the longest of the year, but I’m also subjectively sure that my longest night of 2009 was last Thursday, when I finally came up with a way to organize my sociology paper into a more-or-less coherent whole. That was at 11 PM, and of course it took a few more hours for the writing to really start to gel. Whee. I ran into a spot of technical difficulties at 2:40 PM the next day, when I had settled on a conclusion and all that was left was cleaning up, cutting the big block quotations down to size, and so on… Google Docs sent me the error message that it couldn’t save my changes, and I noticed it hadn’t been able to do so since 2:15 PM. Eeks. I’m still not sure what caused the choke-up, but I managed to work around it by opening the most recently saved version of the paper in a different web browser, and rescuing the last few paragraphs into it by cut and paste, but the confusion did cost me a bunch of editing. So the final mess ended up way longer than intended, and I may yet revise it to satisfy my obsessive-compulsive superpower, but not today. Today is for the policy portfolio, which I had hoped to have turned in by now, but self-imposed deadlines be danged, sleep is more important.
Here’s my one-page summary of the issue, the stakeholders, and my strategy about what I think should be done about it. Can you dig it?
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I propose a radical transformation of our current weight-centered food and health policy, beginning with a complete and unconditional surrender in the war on obesity. We have fought fat for too long, it has cost us too much, and ironically, the harm done far outweighs the good.
Now, I will not deny that more people are fatter, though obesity rates have plateaued in recent years. Nor do I discount the gravity or magnitude of diet-related health problems—in fact, I argue that weight-centered health and nutrition policy obscures the ways bad food harms people of all sizes. Therefore, I am anything but suggesting we stop working for food and health policy that helps us all eat well. Instead, I advocate sweeping reform—away from weight loss and control, obesity prevention and reduction, and so on—back towards good food for everyone.
Health at every size threatens the status quo. Weight loss is big business—the diet industry alone is worth $30 to $50 billion per year. Food companies exploit the weight-centered view of health by selling low-fat, low-sugar, low-carb, low-calorie, and smaller-packaged products. Though overweight and obese people are a majority of the U.S. population, anti-fat bias is, if anything, stronger than ever. Funds abound for research on correlations between weight and disease; even studies showing the negative effects of anti-fat stigma often conclude in favor of weight loss. Yet I have hope: after all, half of us will always be heavier than average in the heaviest 50% of the population (belated update, 1 February 2010; I should have known better than to conflate mean and median).
My background paper shows how the weight-centered approach to food and health is at best misguided, misleading, and patronizing, but at worst outright insults and alienates the very people it supposedly serves. We can—and must—do better. I plan to approach many public figures involved with food system politics, from First Lady Michelle Obama and Surgeon General Regina Benjamin to New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. Yet change must not proceed only from the top down; if the growing food movement is to confront charges of elitism and achieve a broad base of support, it must incorporate health at every size into its challenges to a system badly in need of reform. A world where good (fresh, nutritious, locally grown and sustainably produced) food is accessible and affordable for all is one where everyone—fat, thin, and in between—is finally free to eat well.
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Ansley
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Betty
