What I’m Writing
A new survey shows some crucial differences between voters who oppose abortion rights and those who support abortion rights — abortion opponents, it turns out, are hostile to women’s rights more generally.
Planned Parenthood’s impossible choice. The Trump administration forced the organization to choose: Receive much-needed funding for low-income women’s health care, or refuse to even tell women where they can have a safe, legal abortion — a potentially deadly proposition.
Why is nothing good getting done in Congress? Blame Mitch McConnell.
Ken Cuccinelli’s re-write of the Statue of Liberty inscription is fundamentally anti-American.
What I’m Reading
Sarah Maslin Nir on kidnapping and murder in Benin is predictably excellent.
The New Spiritual Consumerism. I like a good skincare routine as much as anyone. But imbuing it with morality is just a cover for deep inequality.
Non-binary, pregnant, and entering the most gendered role of them all: Motherhood.
I’ve never actually listened to Joe Rogan but he’s the working man’s Gwyneth Paltrow and this is fascinating.
The View From Here
The way Americans eat is the killing us. Almost half of American adults are diabetic or pre-diabetic. Close to a million Americans die every year from cardiovascular disease. “More Americans are sick, in other words, than are healthy,” Dariush Mozaffarian and Dan Glickman write.
Obviously we need a functional and affordable national healthcare system, and it’s been heartening to see Democrats debate the ins and outs of how to best achieve that. But the above-linked Times op/ed makes a compelling case for treating food as a healthcare issue, too — because all the healthcare in the world won’t be of much help if it’s just patching up preventable disease caused by poor diet.
This can be tricky territory for feminists to traverse, in large part because research on diet tends to use weight and obesity as metrics for health, and feminists tend to push back on diet culture and size-ism. Women’s bodies are policed from all directions; we are subtly and blatantly told that there should be less of us. Fat people, and fat women in particular, face very real discrimination that results in lower pay. Women and girls are encouraged to obsess over every bite we put into our mouths. We are told, explicitly or implicitly, to forgo pleasure so that our bodies might appear more pleasing to others. That’s a terrible way to live.
But the truth is that most Americans don’t seem to be eating in ways that are nourishing and pleasurable. We have, instead, a national eating disorder, brought about not just by our personal choices — although of personal choices factor in — but by our culture of over-work, hyper-individualism, and troubled relationship with pleasure.
There’s a reason food in America is fast (and why a third of Americans eat fast food on any given day). We work more hours than our European counterparts — an hour more each work day, or 258 more hours every year. That means more lunches at desks, or burgers grabbed on a 15-minute break, or McMuffins in the car. It also means more pizzas or fried chicken buckets for dinner, or cooking that is more accurately warming up fried packaged food. A lot of people don’t like or don’t know how to cook, and we have no formal way of teaching that basic skill. And many others would try, but cooking means time: Going to the grocery store, schlepping food home, chopping, actually cooking the food, and cleaning up. If you’re on a tight budget, perishables are a risk — get home late from work one day and the week’s meal plan can be totally screwed. Picky kids with a taste for McDonald’s can also be hard to sell on a salad, and if you’re an exhausted, over-worked parent, fighting to get your kid to eat may not be how you want to spend your only free hour on a Tuesday evening. Low-income parents also can’t afford many of the luxuries of the wealthier — after-school activities, family vacations, cool sneakers — and fast food can be a small luxury to show love.
Women do most of the food preparation and food shopping in the United States. Women with less than a high school degree do more food preparation than any sub-group and, if they are married to men who also lack a high school degree, get the least amount of help from their male partners (men without a high school degree are the only group that does less cooking today than they did in 2003). Like childrearing and most other things women disproportionately do, at-home cooking is depoliticized; suggest that perhaps we should address it on a policy level and you’re a Nanny State socialist who wants the government in your kitchen (when everyone knows the only appropriate place for the government is in your bedroom). In reality, though, the government is already in our kitchens, subsidizing low-cost, low-nutrient and calorie-dense food, and cutting breaks to the companies that mass produce it. Our lives are already shaped by policy choices — they’re just more likely to be aimed at helping big companies, not individual Americans, and are therefore invisible to most of us.
There are political reasons we eat the way we eat. And there are political solutions to the ill health that our eating causes.
There have already been some important shifts. In D.C., for example, people can use SNAP benefits to buy fresh produce at the farmer’s market. The Times op/ed offers some other ideas that could make a big difference:
Medicare, Medicaid, private insurers and hospitals should include nutrition in any electronic health record; update medical training, licensing and continuing education guidelines to put an emphasis on nutrition; offer patient prescription programs for healthy produce; and, for the sickest patients, cover home-delivered, medically tailored meals. Just the last action, for example, can save a net $9,000 in health care costs per patient per year.
Thinking about food not just as fuel but as a fundamental part of our health is a crucial shift. And most progressive folks will get on board with positive incentives — carrots that motivate healthier choices. Where it gets controversial, though, is when the sticks come out. Soda taxes, for example, do actually work to decrease soda consumption. But a great many progressive detractors argue that they’re a regressive tax that penalizes the poor, and are therefore bad policy. I disagree there — a soda tax alone isn’t going to fix our health problems, but it’s one valuable item on a long policy list. The Times writers suggest pairing it “with subsidies on protective foods like fruits, nuts, vegetables, beans, plant oils, whole grains, yogurt and fish. Emphasizing protective foods represents an important positive message for the public and food industry that celebrates and rewards good nutrition.” This is key: Increasing the cost of nutritionally worthless food is going to work best when paired with a decrease in cost of nourishing, beneficial food. And in the U.S., high-quality and affordable healthy food can be tough to find. Anecdotally, I am always shocked when I travel and see how little healthy food costs outside of places like New York City and Washington, D.C. Even in otherwise-pricey cities — London, Paris — fresh produce is beautiful, plentiful and affordable. And of course people have more disposable income to spend on it when they aren’t paying out the nose for health care (or scrambling to pay down astronomical debt from medical bills, which bankrupt a whole lot of Americans).
Fast food companies, and companies that make low-nutrition quick meals, should also pay for the harm they cause (I would add factory farms into that as well, which are significant contributors to environmental devastation). And there is absolutely no excuse for what we feed our kids in public schools. If we care about our children, we owe them nutritionally sound, fresh, healthy food. Yeah, they’re going to want tater tots instead. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t raise a generation of kids to expect nourishment instead of a carefully-tailored blend of salt / sugar / fat.
The subtler stuff is harder to change — what we crave and why we crave it; how we eat without much thought; how our to-go food culture breaks down social and familial bonds. We also fetishize the American way of eating and hyper-consumption (just look at all of the Democratic candidates for president having to performatively inhale every deep-fried state fair food) at the same time as we see fatness as a sign of sloth and personal failure. We obsess over all-or-nothing food laws, as if elimination or strict rulebooks are the key to health (or at least weight loss) — no gluten or no dairy or hyper-low carb or fat-free.
Food as a slow pleasure that nourishes and feeds your body, eaten in a setting that nourishes relationships (with others, off of your phone), remains an indulgence enjoyed by a lucky minority, not standard eating procedure. And it’s killing us.
Food matters because it’s how we survive, and how we keep our bodies healthy to survive better and longer. It matters because eating is among the greatest human pleasures, and cooking a source of incredible creativity. Sharing a meal bonds us together. There is a place, of course, for a quick bite on the run and for the efficiency of a coffee to go. But our food culture, and our food policies that are aimed at corporations that make food rather than people that eat food, are making us very very sick.
Read the op/ed in the Times. The authors are correct: Every presidential candidate should have to tell us what they’ll do to feed America well.
xx Jill