Toxic Messages from the "Health" Industry

I learned from an Anti-Flag lyric booklet that 80% of 10-year-old girls think they are fat. 

That statistic did not skip me. For several years of elementary and middle school, I tore pages from waiting-room magazines that would teach me calorie-burning exercises. I googled and wrote down the calories burned by soccer, biking, downhill skiing, cross-country skiing. I found online tips for how to eat less--watch yourself eat in a mirror, use blue plates instead of red, never eat a serving bigger than your fist. I decided that the most I should eat per meal was around 200 calories, for a total of 1000 a day. I kept a notebook of measurements of my body that I wanted to shrink and weight goals I wanted to reach--less than 100 pounds, ideally, but I thought I could settle for just 100. Starting in first grade, I tried to find out surreptitiously how much other people weighed so I could compare myself. 

And all the way, I resented bitterly the fact that I can’t just skip a meal or live on lettuce the way some people can get away with. I could send myself into insulin shock and die if I stopped eating or dieted severely. I hated that every day in elementary school, the nurse watched me calculate and deliver my insulin based on the carbs my mother had carefully marked down for me, and that meant I had to eat all those carbs or I would end up eating sugar tablets. 

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Eventually, I got myself out of that spiral, more or less. I eat a lot. I don’t look up diet tips or exercises, I don’t count calories, and I try to believe in body positivity and assert to myself that I have every right to take up space. I can’t always believe it, but I am trying. 

Then every now and then, I run into a specter of the brutal nutritional masochism I used to believe in. The last day of an environmental program last week, an invited speaker--a pediatrician, in fact--came to talk to the participants about food, with the overriding message that we are conferring on ourselves a death sentence by eating sugar and chemicals. I’ll call him Chris. His total lack of nuance and class or disability analysis left me astounded and deeply uncomfortable, and with a few thoughts on the “health food” industry. This industry touches everything from the industrial and unhealthy agricultural system; to the marketing that sells us unrealistic beauty standards and diets on one hand and fast food on the other; to the racism, ableism, and classism that undergird the way we think about eating and health. 

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Now, I absolutely think there are conversations to be had about food and chemicals. My favorite book in middle school was Fast Food Nation, after all, and I can still recite a particularly eloquent sentence from it about artificial flavorings. However, talking about the depredations of the food industry and the ways our food poisons us need not be hurtful or lay the blame exclusively on us as consumers. Neither healthy food nor the luxury of choice is distributed equally, and therefore neither can the blame be. 

The doctor, Chris, who spoke at this program acknowledged no such nuance. The first words out of his mouth, about our unquestionable need for all of us to get out of our comfort zones, warned me that this talk was probably not going to be pleasant to sit through. On the surface, being told that getting out of your comfort zone is a good a idea is not necessarily a red flag--so why did it set me off? Because the kind of person who declares that everyone is perpetually limiting themselves by staying where they are comfortable is probably not the kind of person who will acknowledge that for some of us, it’s hard enough to find any zones where we are comfortable, and trying to leave that zone could actually be harmful. 

The lecture worsened from there, veering into the nutrition territory. As he railed against sugar, insisting we would feel better if we ate much less of it, I found I could not sit silently, shaking and furious, and muttered, “Try having a low blood sugar…” Then I asked him directly: “What about hypoglycemia?” 

His advice was that to avoid an insulin spike, someone having a low sugar should eat something slowly absorbed, like beans. Scientifically, this is somewhat like telling someone in anaphylactic shock that they should take aspirin instead of epinephrine. There’s nothing wrong with aspirin or beans in another context, but when someone has veered into danger territory, with an allergic reaction or with hypoglycemia, those response are not just useless but dangerous. I told Chris, “No, actually, if you’re type 1 diabetic and you have a low blood sugar, you have to eat fast-acting glucose and specifically not eat things like beans, or milk, or chocolate, because they won’t absorb fast enough…”

He responded by mansplaining my own condition to me. He made no amendment to his argument that sugar is the devil and by eating it we are asking to die. My point, which he did not listen to, was not just that his prescription for treating a hypoglycemic episode was completely inaccurate, but also that for some of us, sugar is more than something that can kill us--it also keeps us alive. 

Besides the scientific fallacy and exclusive narrative, he was also promoting an insidious, ableist message that, since sugar was to be avoided at all costs, certain people for whom that’s impossible are condemned to live unhealthily; in addition, by evading any discussion of the corporations that pump sugar into our foods, market aggressively to children, sell cheap food to the poor, and use untested chemicals or those with known harmful effects, he placed the blame for the US’s poor health and obesity squarely on the shoulders of consumers. If we don’t eat what and how he wants us to, we’re killing ourselves, and if we can’t eat what and how he wants us to, too bad. 

Food is a universal right and necessity, but it is not inert or democratic. Just as all water sources and safety protocols are not created equal--consider the case of Flint, Michigan--not all people have access to “good” food. Lacking any class analysis, a lecture on what foods are good for us and which are harmful might be nothing more than an information delivery: here are your facts, take it or leave it. 

But the global, or even just US, food system is not an all-you-can-eat buffet, with all our options laid out for us to choose at whim. For all I’m apparently doomed to die because I eat too much sugar, I have the class privilege to be able to shop for fresh and even “organic” food. That’s not a reality for a lot of people, especially those in urban areas, usually low-income and/or communities of color. Places without grocery stores, farmers markets, or other access to fresh, local, or unprocessed foods are known as food deserts. People living in such areas are not actively choosing to eat against their interests. They may not even be unknowingly doing so, but simply because they have no access, geographical or financial, to “healthy” food, the food they eat is higher in chemicals, calories, fat, sugar, and artificial ingredients. The health sadism industry would tell them that they are choosing to kill themselves. What is actually killing them is the work of brutal demography, marketing, and neglect, products of racism and classism. 

One size does not fit all, not for diet prescription and not for clothing. It is not possible to expect--to demand--a poor, overweight person living in a food desert to shop only at Whole Foods and wear a size 6 or under. Yet this is exactly what the health sadism insists upon. Just as there is no acknowledgment that the same eating habits might not--and need not--work for everyone, there is no space in the narrow health mindset for people who exceed a certain weight or possess a certain body type. While being overweight does not automatically equate to being unhealthy, the health industry vilifies and shames such bodies. The doctor at my program not only trotted out the fearmongering about obesity and diabetes but also dredged up that discredited metric, BMI. BMI serves the singular purpose of reducing people to a number and a judgment that may have no correlation whatsoever to their actual level of health. A skinny person can be unhealthy just as easily as a fat one can be in perfect health, but such possibilities go against the narrative that we’re sold, and so instead we are shamed for daring to present a body for which one size doesn’t fit all. 

But blame and shame is what this industry is all about. Until Obamacare, I probably wouldn't have been able to get health insurance when I leave my parents’ plan because of my preexisting conditions; people in general who are deemed less healthy or desirable are offered worse insurance and higher premiums. There’s even a market that’s grown up around this, buying people’s life insurance in the hopes that they will die quickly and turn a profit for the investor betting on their death. For people who don’t fit the standards of health, who don’t have the ability to leave our comfort zones and reach for the so-called “peak performance” that Chris lectured about, our industry and society have made a judgment that we are better left to our own devices, with little support, because apparently it’s our fault. Chris went so far as to derail on some bizarre tangent that ended in the implication that people with mental illness are selfish--an ultimate form of victim-blaming. All the while, while accusing us of being selfish, lazy, or stupid for our food and lifestyle choices, he was trying to situate his comments within the narrative of helping us, educating us, allowing us to see the light and then make our own choices. Such a supportive, unimposing tone might have been his ideal, but tell me again why impartial, well-meant education equates to vilifying people outside the body-type fantasy or with disabilities?

To illustrate briefly that there was no way that this lecture was encouraging or kindly delivered, Chris began by asking if any of us had eaten bread for lunch. I was the only one who hadn’t, not out of conscientiousness around the calories or sugar or whatnot, but because I can’t eat wheat. Chris proceeded to shame all the people who had eaten something breaded by telling us that bread was the single worst food we have and nothing could have been a worse choice to eat, and that we were essentially shortening our lives right as he spoke. 

Perhaps, to give the good doctor the benefit of the doubt, that is technically true. However, it is also true, at least for me, that Chris was rapidly decreasing my mental health as I sat there listening to him, and so in my opinion that does at least as much damage as whatever dreadful items we might have consumed at lunch. 

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A final quibble: although Chris was invited to speak at an environmental program, his talk had nearly nothing to do with environmental issues. He spoke about toxic chemicals far less than he shamed us for eating bread and sugar. Yet food and the environment are very closely linked, and there is a plethora of topics joining the two issues that he could have chosen from, yet he preferred to lecture us on nutrition, accusatory and patronizing, with no regards for the significant sway held by class or disability or anything that might differentiate a person from Chris. There are ways to talk about food and come off as empowering and enlightening, revealing to us the ways we are held captive and manipulated by a toxic food industry, and there’s a whole movement grown up around food justice, discussing exactly what he blithely ignored: that food is not an inert entity and everyone’s choices of what we can eat are not created by the same chef, so to speak. 

Instead of validating the person I was years ago--counting calories and terrified of fat, cursing that I didn’t have the ability to starve myself--Chris could have acknowledged that health is a different place for every person and that we can't all eat or exercise our way there in the same fashion. Without any kind of nuance, the lecture was just a slap in the face from the punitive and ableist nutrition status quo I’ve been struggling to sever relations with for most of my life. 

Patriotism: Can We Use It To Save This Place?

Today was the third 4th of July that I’ve spent outside of the United States in of the last four years, and maybe because I’ve got almost 4,000 miles of distance between me and the flag-waving and fireworks and history-rewriting nostalgia back home, I have a few reflections on the nature and uses of patriotism.

I started off today by making a playlist of deliberately unpatriotic songs, songs taking aim directly at the policy or mentality of the US. There were a lot of songs.

One song that I decided to include, though, has a somewhat different tone: “Power and Glory,” by Phil Ochs. I stocked my playlist with plenty of Ochs’s far more critical or cynical songs, but “Power and Glory” is the closest I got to praise for my country. It celebrates--if that’s the right word; acknowledges or admires might be better--the country itself, the land and the people, not the government or history or so-called morals or policy or the like. And it declares not just that the land is beautiful and valuable but that it is not equal, not free, not strong--or rather, only as equal and free and strong as its citizens. I don’t know if I’d call the song patriotic, exactly, but it has a message that I think deserves equal airtime on my list, alongside such excellent titles as “Blood-Red, White, and Blue,” “Stuff is Messed Up,” and “When You Don’t Control Your Government, People Want to Kill You.”

Overall, the idea is that we can appreciate and build off of the possibility and the places and the roots that we may have even while we despise the surreal nightmarescape of our corporate government and national (in)security state (or, more succinctly, the “subliminal mindfuck America,” as Green Day nicely puts it).

Beyond the satisfaction of having a slightly more balanced playlist, I think that if we are going to redeem, rebuild, reclaim, or even maintain the world we have, we are going to need more than hatred for the places that we live. Not necessarily our countries by any means, but the places that we all, however enthusiastically or reluctantly, call home.

The borders that outline the 197 or so countries of the world are arbitrary, we have to remember, and fundamentally hold no meaning beyond what we give them. Borders, whether militarized, hotly contested, or porous, are a construct and a tool; they are not natural, permanent or necessary. Most of them came about because of imperialism and capitalism, by map-drawing fiascos like the infamous Sykes-Picot treaty or by forced seizure like the Mexican Cession and the treaty of Guadeloupe-Hidalgo. Borders are largely created by and for the benefit of those who hold the most power, who can redraw the map and make that paper reality come bloodily to life. Borders, then, are tools to maintain power inequality.

In order to foster the belief in a nation-state, and to foment the useful force of patriotism within that state, the populace needs to believe in the borders--that they are natural, permanent, and necessary, which they are not. We need to believe that borders protect our interests--that the people on the other side are as outside of a snowglobe that we must not allow them to penetrate. Borders, and the concept of nation-states, help chiefly to develop and maintain an us-versus-them dynamic.

As an aside, cultural identities, a set of traditions, an attachment to a certain place--these are not bounded or determined by the nation-state within whose artificial borders one resides. Dispossessed people stripped of their land can still feel deep roots there; a person far from home can still partake in a culture outside of the nation-state associated with it. Nationalism in some cases can be a defensive force to unite people against the predations of an occupying power or assault; this is not to deny that. Yet it can just as easily be channeled to support a hateful and exclusionary ideal of what a “country” represents and who it belongs to--who has the power to tell its story.

Conventional patriotism, then, refers to the sentiments of allegiance to an entity that does not actually exist, an artificially contrived nation-state or territory whose borders have been arranged to serve the interests of some particular group in power.

There are less narrow definitions, however. The patriotism of songs like “Power and Glory” is not the patriotism of fealty to the United States in the sense that we owe our country anything, but rather that we live in a place worth loving, and--because we recognize that it is deeply flawed--worth fixing. Worth fighting for, for our own sakes, not worth dying for in the interests of others.

There’s another song I put on my playlist, by the band Desaparecidos, that begins with the lines “I want to pledge allegiance to the country where I live/ I don’t want to be ashamed to be American…” and then goes through plenty of reasons to be ashamed. I do feel ashamed of my country. But I don’t want that shame to extend to the point where I believe that everything shaped by the US is irredeemable. I don’t want to be ashamed of being born and raised in the northwestern hemisphere, because it is not inherently the place nor the people that makes it a beacon of shame. I believe that there is “patriotism,” of a sort, outside of allegiance to a country.

There is also patriotism in believing that we can take the bitter divisions and the dangerous fragmentation of the world we live in and make it better, that struggling for reform and not offering only adulation is the duty of a citizen. I don’t believe that merely reforming our countries and governments will be enough, but I do believe that activism could be construed as patriotism, that the struggle for a better world is a patriotic act. Dissent is the highest form of patriotism, as they say. To unspool that statement reveals the assumption that the activism is being undertaken in the service of one’s country. My allegiance is not to my country, and I would not call my activism patriotic; my ideal endgame is not just a nicer version of the governmental and societal status quo. But by all means, if the sentiment of so-called patriotism can be re-harnessed for activist work, that would be appreciable. I don’t think it’s the best route to encouraging people to make some part of the world better, but it’s something. In this sort-of-free country, it is a duty of morals and conscience, let alone patriotism, to dissent in this age of profitable terror, corporate tyranny, sacrifice zones and sacrificed people.

“Love will save this place,” writes Naomi Klein in her anticapitalist clarion call, This Changes Everything. Building a livable world, salvaging what we have not ruined, repairing what we can, forging solidarity among everyone marginalized and cast off, refusing to leave anyone behind--this process must be one of love. To build that vague and fluffy-sounding Better World that we all dream of will fail, unequivocally, if we cling to our narrow loyalty to our various nation-states and their imaginary borders. Love will save this place--non-divisive love. When loving your country means hating or mistrusting the people on the other side of the border, that is not love. That’s bigotry. The kind of patriotism we need is an allegiance to place, to the value of the earth, to the awe that “Power and Glory” tries to get at. An allegiance to each other. Solidarity.

There’s a slam poem I recommend, called “To the Oklahoma Progressives Plotting Mass Exodus,” by Lauren Zuniga. Its message goes out to all the liberals wishing to abandon ship and leave the throttling atmosphere of deep-red states, and urges them to stay--that they will be needed there more than anywhere. Multitudes of voices are needed to weave the love that will save us. There can be no abandoned areas--no sacrifice zones, politically as well as environmentally. The solidarity that we will need is predicated on faith, but not faith in a “country” or a romanticized and militarized image of what we think our national character ought to be or once was. The faith we will need is in each other.

And if you want to call that a different kind of patriotism, well, it’s probably the best use we can get out of that word.

To Go or Not To Go: Some Thoughts on the Implications of Brexit

Some of the initial shock and sensationalism has subsided since Britain’s exit from the EU last week, but questions, vacuums, misunderstanding and possibilities persist. The immediate response seemed to be, among the informal majority-youth online communities I was keeping track of, an outpouring of dismay and disbelief that the United Kingdom would really go so far as to leave the European Union in what was widely deemed a sort of shortsighted tantrum, motivated solely by xenophobia. The New York Times and other senior largely mimicked that hysteria, but here and there, when I searched for them, I found small voices of opposition or calm, better analyzing the nuances of the “Brexit” for the positive facets as well as the disappointing.

Though sites like Twitter and Tumblr exploded with posts calling the Brexit a betrayal of the youth by older voters, and lamenting it as an inconceivably stupid and terrible move, we ought to first stop and consider exactly what Britain has done: left the EU. This is a game-changer and a notable event, but is it really a crisis? To answer that, one might have to ask whether the European Union is actually a beneficial entity to begin with, for the UK or for any other country. Upending this status quo may well be a good thing.

Think of Greece, which considered exiting the Eurozone last year because of its ongoing neoliberal strangulation. That exit didn’t go through, but the austerity policies forced on Greece met with a resounding denouncement in a vote by the populace. The Syriza government has largely kowtowed to the demands of the Troika, but there was real resentment against the ways in which Greece was forced to manage its economic crisis due to its membership in the EU.

Britain’s resentment is premised on different grievances, though the fallout of austerity has not skipped them either. Can the Brexit vote, too, be viewed as a rejection of the EU’s neoliberal economics, the harmful doctrine of rapacious capitalist globalization? Could the UK’s exit be considered a triumph for the delegitimization of that globalization? Was it a resounding expression of anti-elite anger coming from the working class?

At least, it offers a serious shock to the accepted status quo of the EU. Every entity may seem unquestionable until it is shaken, and perhaps it’s about time the EU was shaken.

The EU serves a couple of functions: it is a dysfunctional and not very democratic bureaucracy, a military tool to fall in line with the US, and a neoliberal enforcement machine. However, if any country ought to leave the EU for chiefly reasons of disillusionment with and opposition to globalization, it would seem more logical that that country be a country like Greece, Ireland, or Spain, whose economies have been severely damaged since 2008 and whose people have been punished by austerity. That it was Britain, not quite one of the most economically downtrodden EU countries, that exited brings into question the triumphant rationale put forth by some of the far left, such as the Socialist Party in the UK, which endorsed the Leave position--that this was at its core a major denouncement of the EU’s neoliberal, anti-working-class politics.

In a referendum, it’s a yes-or-no vote, and we don’t know precisely who voted for what reasons. It is probably no more truthful to make the sweeping statement that the Brexit was a resounding defeat for neoliberalism than it is to say that it was an absolute victory for racism and xenophobia.

It’s important to recognize that although the working class in majority voted to leave, that doesn’t mean that their rationale was overwhelmingly based on opposing the EU and economic oppression. That level of class consciousness can’t be assumed, and we don’t know, again, why which people voted the way they did. We ought to remember, too, that a lot of working class support goes to people like Donald Trump, in the US, as well as to the left, because legitimate frustration at being systematically disempowered can just as easily be channeled into anger at fellow have-nots of a different condition--be that race, citizenship, etc.--as it can be aimed at the elites.

But as skeptical as we should be of the monolithic narrative that says this represented a working class revolt, we must also be skeptical of the monolithic narrative that says it was entirely a stunt pulled in the name of racism, xenophobia, and nationalism. Certainly, those forces are on the rise in Europe, and other countries--Netherlands, France, Germany--have seen their right wing elements take heart from the Brexit and raise their own calls for referenda on exiting the EU. And certainly the Brexit owes its success in part to racism and xenophobia.

Still, it is an exaggeration to say that the older generations, by supporting Leave, committed a mass betrayal of the youth, who largely voted to stay, and although conservative mentalities predicated on nationalism and xenophobia may have motivated many of the older voters, they are also the ones who may remember Britain before the EU and are more able to evaluate its negative effects. Memories of stronger working class protections and less neoliberalism may also exist more with those older voters. Still, it is irresponsible and dangerous to discount the fact that the youth considered the forces of racism and xenophobia such significant, central threats that they voted en masse against the Brexit.

We have to acknowledge that right-wing bigots drove the leave effort, but that staying did not guarantee tolerance and good economic conditions. It is a fallacy to memorialize the EU as a functional and beneficial entity. Furthermore, there was a deficit of multifaceted narratives before the vote, with the Leave campaign mainly orchestrated and amplified by the right wing. The left was divided, with socialist support for the exit while the Labor party remained uncertain, and Jeremy Corbyn declined to take a strong position that could have clarified leftist support for the exit. The right wing managed to control most of the narrative around motivations for leaving, but it need not--must not--be reduced to a black-and-white party-line divide.

Rather than concluding that staying would have been the lesser evil, though, we should try to analyze all the points of this exit: that it reflects both the racism-stoked frustration with immigration and the refugee crisis as well as frustration with the austerity policies and general dysfunction of the EU.

In the short term, then, the exit will be turbulent, as it is overwhelmingly portrayed as a victory for racism, not anti-globalization or the working class--although, as a point of interest, the coverage by the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal are treating the Brexit as more of a class revolt than racist stunt. In the long term, it may help to precipitate or lay ground for more exits from the EU on explicitly economic grounds; other countries or territories may be emboldened to follow suit, such as, in Europe, the ones worst impacted by the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis and the austerity politics that followed: Greece, Spain, Ireland. Puerto Rico, facing a massive debt crisis of its own, has also raised the question of exiting the US’s damaging sphere of influence, in similar fashion to Britain and the EU.

It is interesting to note, though, that while the media wails over the lack of coherent leadership or plans for Britain, and as people from immigrants in the UK to British students in the EU face uncertainty and new obstacles, the effects on people are not nearly always at the forefront. The New York Times ran a piece the other day that focused on Obama’s concern that the Brexit may spell disaster in the realm of trade, both for Britain itself, which will have to renegotiate its own deals that formerly were covered by the EU, and, perhaps more significantly, for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the Atlantic corollary to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a nefarious neoliberal power-grab. Without the UK to act as the US’s tool in the EU, it will be a great deal harder to force through the unpopular and harmful TTIP. In this sense, then, the Brexit is a victory for anti-globalization and anti-neoliberalism, for a challenging of the status quo that could yield very positive, democratizing effects.

Even if the Brexit were driven by class consciousness and workers rejecting the undemocratic EU, those concerns will not just vaporize with the UK out of the EU. Neither will xenophobia and racism produced by the shifting of demographics and the influx of immigrants and refugees simply disperse. For one, there is a genuine refugee crisis in Europe that people are reacting to--but that crisis is largely of the US’s making, with some European collaboration. Exiting the EU will not help countries deal with the floods of refugees. Better strategies and goals on that front would include pressuring the US to end its wars in the Middle East, ceasing to funnel weapons and military aid into that region, actually providing humanitarian aid through agencies like the UN, and easing the burden on Mediterranean countries by accepting more refugees elsewhere, especially in countries like the US.

As for the immigration issue, the ruling classes and racists of Europe will have to reckon with their lovely policy-ideology contradiction: they depend on the free movement of people so as to provide easy sources of cheap labor for exploitation, yet they simultaneously desire a kind of fortress-Britain, an imaginary, isolated and homogenous society. The Brexit will not solve this issue for them. Like the US, there is huge dependency on immigrant labor, and measures like mass deportations and increased border security will have a serious impact on the demographics and availability of exploitable labor in Britain. To deal with these issues and provide a workable alternative, the shaky left in the UK will need to clarify, solidify, and amplify its platform, membership, and movement.

As Lenin commented, a “United States of Europe” would be either reactionary or impossible--and we are witnessing now that it is both. At this stage, it is most important to recognize that there were valid reasons for leaving as well as bigoted, and time will have to tell which reasons can seize the day and the leadership vacuum, and guide the country from here on out.