Guestie: On Carrying Patriarchy's Baggage while We Kick its Butt

Thanks Jessie Anne for this contribution. 

Content warning: involves discussion of eating disorders.

I have the pleasure of knowing many amazing feminists; feminists working for social and climate justice, feminists working against racism, transphobia, homophobia. I know feminists who are working in their own way to make their own workplace or industry less patriarchal and misogynistic.  Feminists raising kids to be kick ass feminist warriors. They remind me what strength looks like. They ground me with something healthy to aspire to and be inspired by.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the internalized patriarchy that these women quietly carry around with them every day.  The baggage I don’t know they have which I haven’t had a chance to help carry. I’ve been thinking about how many of us have similar experiences, and if there are things we can do as a movement to help ease that load.

Being a feminist is kind of a tough gig sometimes, and, at least for me, it has meant some pretty high self-imposed expectations that I added to my already hefty list of unobtainable goals; complete with accompanied guilt.

My particular clusterfuck of internalized patriarchal baggage I’m focusing on here is my experience with eating disorders. It’s long and complicated, and not really a story I have time for here. Although I no longer define myself as someone with an eating disorder, in some ways it continues, though less acutely. I think anyone who has experienced an eating disorder know that the lines between ‘recovered’ and not can be blurry at best.  It started with dieting when I was 8, and has at different times involved vomiting multiple times a day for months and years on end; otherwise named Bulimia; the awkward unpopular kid in the class of eating disorders. It has meant a lot of things between that too.

It has meant secrecy, and shame, and often most overwhelmingly, utter mental exhaustion. Sometimes it was so consuming that I had little room for anything else. Sometimes it was less about what was actually going into my body, and more a hatred of my body that was so strong I barely left the house for days. Feeling repulsion and disgust for the skin you live within can be very near debilitating.

I am somewhat at peace with the journey around these issues with myself and my body being a lifelong one. This realization has led me to examine the pressure I have put on myself to be free of internalized patriarchy.

I’m not going to wake up one morning to find myself free from being triggered by comments or situations that make me feel the need to make drastic and unhealthy changes to myself. But I think I now know a place where I can calmly reject those thoughts before they take hold for long; a place which I consider a victory and has taken years of hard work to get to.

For many years I thought, sometimes unconsciously, that I could only be a fully-fledged feminist and activist once I got 100% over my eating disorder and my sometimes-general-self-hate.

Unfortunately, through my own interpretation of what it means to be a feminist, I’ve spent years thinking that I had to one day be a ‘fully formed feminist’ without hypocritical thoughts and with a impenetrable shield that deflects all patriarchal nonsense from piercing my external layer.

In some ways, I’ve labeled myself a feminist-in-waiting.

This may have, in part, contributed to my silence around my eating disorder. Maybe if people knew about it, I thought, almost subconsciously, my feminist membership card might be revoked, only to be returned once I got the ‘total-self-love’ stamp. The unobtainable expectation to be the internally perfect feminist has also led to feeling an added layer of unnecessary guilt. Cause if there’s one thing women could do with a bit more of, it’s guilt, right?

This expectation I set for myself for so long was largely self-imposed and the expectations self-created. But I do wonder how many other feminists out there find it difficult to talk about their own internalized patriarchal baggage. Looking back at conversations and dialogue around issues like eating disorders that I’ve observed or been a part of, I do think that there can be a sense of ‘otherness’ attached to them, which can leave you feeling like these things are experienced outside of our feminist and activist communities. This otherness doesn’t encourage inclusive and open dialogue when they might be experienced in the here and now.

A feminist friend and I also recently talked about the internalised patriarchy we carry into relationships with cis males in our lives. We admitted to each other (this after years of chatting about pretty much everything) how much we often are part of creating a patriarchal power dynamic in these relationships. Once it got down to examples it was kind of funny; and relieving! I wasn’t the only one, and she wasn’t either!

It’s just another example of how the reality of our lives as feminists is still affected by internalized patriarchy. Some of it is pretty hard to admit, too. My friend and I were both left shocked at the fact that we’d never been in a space where we could acknowledge these behaviours with others. Are we the only ones?

A very quick glance around the interwebs reveals many blogs and articles by feminists highlighting similar pressures; the pressure to be a beacon of pure post-patriarchal light in the dark and the silencing which comes with that invisible pressure.

Another friend helpfully pointed out, when I raised this topic, that the pressure comes not only from within the movement but from outside of it.  Impossibly high standards are made for us by patriarchy, and it seems by feminism too. But I think these standards are contributed to by the market-friendly co-opted parts of feminism which are at times hard to identify; the smiling and happy feminist front; the ‘feminism for everyone’, buy your happy relatable feminist T-Shirt here!

Maybe we could set up more spaces to discuss what patriarchal baggage we all carry; maybe that would help share the load. A lot of these issues, the internalized patriarchy shit we deal with in private, are sometimes subtle and unclear, even to ourselves. But it’s important we talk about them, or at least talk about whether and how we do. Because whether it’s a secret eating disorder or recreating patriarchal power relations in our relationships, or whatever else, these things can end up affecting not only ourselves, but those around us, and our wider communities.

I’ve come to realize and accept that many of us can carry the worst parts of what we are working to change within us, and that those parts don’t necessarily fall away when we pick up the axe aimed at patriarchy. The axe helped me cope with them; it even empowered me to eventually move beyond my eating disorder, but there are parts of me that remain affected. And that’s ok.

So what I would say to the 17 year old me, and any other young girl feeling so enraged and empowered by this new knowledge of feminism to put to her experience is this:

Being a feminist is a journey. It’s different for everyone. You don’t live in a silo that separates you from the influences of patriarchy. The parts of yourself that will be, at least in part, shaped and defined by patriarchy will come in different forms and will be different for everyone. But you can positively contribute to the dismantling of patriarchy even while having terrible feelings created BY patriarchy.

Patriarchy is fucked, but no matter how it fucks you up, don’t let it also take away your claim to being part of the movement to dismantle it. 

It must be time for dinner

Just this:
That is just how I look after I've been in the garden. Really.

Insight and understanding

I first learned about Living Below the Line at the Wellington Candidates Meeting - it was not auspicious introduction. James Shaw mentioned that he was doing it and therefore he wouldn't be putting on weight to look like the other Wellington Central candidates; the audience laughed in that way people do when you mention fatness - there doesn't need to be an actual joke. And I sat at the back rolling my eyes - "because obviously there is no correlation between poverty and fatness in New Zealand."

"Living Below the Line" is a five day challenge where people live on $2.25 a day, with the purpose of both raising money and awareness. Apparently: "it allows thousands of people in New Zealand to better understand the daily challenges faced by those trapped in the cycle of extreme poverty"

This 'understanding' is facilitated through a completely arbitrary set of rules: you're not allowed to accept anything free, you must include the cost of a whole packet of anything you use a bit of, you don't have to count the travel to get food, you don't have to worry about the cost of cooking fuel, and you can use whatever fancy pants equipment you've got in your kitchen.

I find everything about it, the rules, the blogposts, the tweets, horrific and offensive on a very fundamental level.

Poverty is not a fucking game.

Poverty does not have rules except you have to do it again tomorrow. Poverty is not new or exciting. Poverty is not neatly quarantined to one area of your life. Poverty is not something you can control with neatly defined parameters. And it does not come with prizes.

If people want to use stupid gimmicks to fundraise then I'm probably not going to both writing a blogpost about it. But to pretend that this highly structured game will promote insight or understanding is an insult to the women and men (but mostly women) who have to feed themselves and other people with inadequate resources year in and year out.

EDEN seeking new governance board members (Akl)

Many thanks to Nikki for the alert:

Kia ora koutou,

EDEN (Eating Difficulties Education Network) is seeking several new fabulous people to join its governance board.  EDEN is a not for profit organisation based in Westmere, Auckland which aims to promote  body trust, size acceptance and diversity on an individual and societal level.

Governance members are volunteers who oversee the management, governance and strategic direction of the organisation. We are proud  to lead a charitable organisation that is feminist, consumer and community focussed.

EDEN aims to:

•   shift view of health from one that is 'weight-based' to one that centres on a holistic view of wellbeing incorporating physical,emotional, psychological and spiritual elements.
•   eliminate discrimination based on size and shape
•   promote body safe cultures
•   support people with food and body image issues
•   empower people and promote self-esteem

We do this via:

• health promotion services
•  education - engaging in successful school programmes, training and workshops
•  social change - informing, advocating, challenging messages and promoting an alternative view
•  support groups
•  resourcing - library, media, web site and drop in services
•  individual change - EDEN counselling services

We are interested in women who may have some or all of the following:

• Is passionate about eating disorders and/or body image issues
• Interest in the governance of a community NGO
• Experience and/or expertise in finance; HR; training and developing; policy development and implementation; strategic planning; business development; fundraising; legal; media, accounting; advertising; IT etc.
• Cultural and disability awareness and experiences
• Able to give 4-8 hours per month
• Proactive team member
• Email and computer literate

For more information and to get an application form contact EDEN at info@eden.org.nz or phone (09) 378 9039

Please note that while EDEN values and considers central, the experiences and expertise of those who are 'recovering' from an eating difficulty or disorder, it is not appropriate for people who are currently in any kind of treatment for these problems, to be on the EDEN governance board. In addition, previous EDEN counselling clients and support group members who wish to apply for EDEN governance roles will require special consideration and these applications will be assessed on a case by case basis.

women on screen

stratos has finally become available on freeview, and i'm loving it. not only the access to al-jazeera programmes, but the documentaries, and the films. tonight i was totally blown away by the interview with the palestian comedian maysoon zayid. i can't find a clip of it online, but as soon as it's available, i'll put it up.


sent to me by email today was a link to the site "every mother counts", a site devoted to improving maternal health care, so that quality care is accessible to all mothers. i'd really recommend reading the various barriers to adequate health care detailed on the site, including lack of health workers, lack of equipment, lack of transporation, lack of access to family planning, lack of emergency care, and lack of post-partum care.

also on the site is information about a film by christy turlington burns called "no woman, no cry", a documentary sharing the stories of women at risk:




finally, i received by email from the director of "the shape of water", details of her next project. kum-kum bhavani is now working on a documentary called "nothing like chocolate":

NOTHING LIKE CHOCOLATE portrays the intimate story of anarchist chocolate-maker, Mott Green. Mott operates an unusual chocolate factory that turns out delicious creations unknown to a world saturated with industrially produced cocoa, much of it produced by trafficked and enslaved child labour in West Africa. With a rich blend of ingredients missing in the large-scale production of corporate chocolate, Mott utilizes solar power, employee shareholding and small-scale antique equipment to make delicious, organic, and socially conscious chocolate. Each step in the production process, from cocoa pod to candy bar, involves ethical and sustainable methods aimed at empowering the community of farmers involved. An anarchist chocolatier, with his tiny chocolate company challenging the global model of large-scale chocolate production, and undermining the exploitation of child labour...

2011 marks the 10th anniversary of a voluntary protocol agreed to by chocolate manufacturers, including Hersheys and Mars, that all their chocolate would be made without exploited child labour in a very short period. Releasing NOTHING LIKE CHOCOLATE in 2011, perhaps at Sundance, will both show people are making delicious, slave-free chocolate, and put pressure on the large corporations to stick to their word.

kum-kum is seeking funding for this project, and if you are interested in further details, you can find them here.

Maia's Hand Mirror Reflections: Calories have got cheaper while some other nutrients have got more expensive

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about food and capitalism and one of the things I said was:

There have been changes in food over the last 50 years, and those changes have been driven by the food industry's requirement to make a profit. I may be wrong, and I'm happy to discuss this with people who know more (or less) than me, but I think the most important change has been that calories have gotten cheaper, but other nutrition has gotten more expensive.

I wanted to explore what I meant by that.

Now I should make it clear that I have no special qualifications to write about nutrition, quite the lack of it in fact. I'd like to know more about the science of nutrition, what we think we know, what we think we don't know, and how we know what we think we know, but I don't. From what I've read there is pretty universal agreement about what out bodies need to fuel and rebuild themselves (calories, vitamin A, Protein etc.) and reasonable levels of agreement about which foods have which nutrients (with some disagreeements about how much of these nutrients we manage to absorb). There appears to be a huge amount of disagreement about what (if any) negative effects various foods might have* and for this post I'm going to leave that well alone for this post. I'd love it if anyone who knows more about nutrition science and history wanted to post in the comments, but these comments are based on what I know. I also want to say that I'm thinking about changes that have happened in the last 60 years, because nothing pisses me off more than people talking about some vague sort of olden days that never actually existed. I'm talking about the changes that have happened post-World War II.

The basic idea is obvious, most people know what calories are (but often think of them as something to avoid, rather than a measure of energy), and that the other things you need from food are vitamins, minerals, fat, protein and fibre.

The idea that calories has got cheaper has also been relatively widely covered. I'm unsure how much this part of changes in agriculture, and how much is about changes in post harvest food technology, but we can produce calories cheaper than we used to.

Now I want to go on the record and say that I think that cheap calories are a good thing. I believe every person on this planet should have enough food to fuel their body without even thinking about it. It makes me furious when people attack cheap calories as if fuel for our bodies was something that only rich people were entitled to.

To me the problem is that other nutrients have got more expensive. Now I'm not sure if this is true absolutely, it probably depends on which nutrients and where you live. I'd love to see the statistics about average income and price of different sorts of food.

Nutrients can get more expensive while food gets cheaper. Growers that make food for a profit, rather than for nutrients, might prioritise other things besides nutritional value when they select which varieties to grow (or the people who make their seeds might be the people who make the priorities).

It is true that other nutrients have got cheaper relative to calories, and it's even more true if you factor in the time it takes to make the food. One thing that has happened in the last 40 years is that the average number of hours each person works has increased. Mostly that's about increased participation by women in paid employment, it's also about the fact that our labour legislation used to be a lot better than it is now, and so fewer people had more than 1 job.

The market in food that doesn't take much time to prepare has increased. There's no reason that food that is quick to prepare can't have both calories and other nutrients. But when food is made for profit it's easier to make cheap food that is low in nutrients.

The politics of food are incredibly important, but the entire discourse around food is based around fudging the reality of how food is made. The so-called obesity epidemic and the focus on calories ignores what the actual problem is.

* It makes sense to me that possible damaging effects of different foods would be hard to understand for a number of reasons. The first is the individuality of it - some people (say me) can be allergic to dairy products, but it's hard to find someone who doesn't need Protein. The second is the difficulty of studying these sorts of things, since if you base your evidence on studying what people do eat then you run into all sorts of problems around controlling for other factors and cause and effect, and when you try and do it the way they do drug studies then you run into the problem that people won't necessarily eat what you tell them to.

Maia's Hand Mirror Reflections: Food

I've written a lot about the politics of the way food is discussed, but very little about the politics of food. I think to understand 'the obesity epidemic' you have to understand the politics of food as well as the politics of the discourse around food (yes I used the word 'discourse' in my first paragraph - I imagine it'll be a long post).

So far when I've been talking about the discourse around food I've generally been talking about individual foods and how they're discussed. In this post I'm going to talk more about diet. Just to be clear in this post when I say 'diet' I don't mean weight-loss diets, but the sum total of what we eat from week to week.

There are a number of assumptions that underpin 'the obesity epidemic' - one of which is that our diet has got worse over the last 50 years. Some people, such as the chair of Fight the Obesity Epdiemic, believe that our diet has got worse since the depression, since in the 1930s people grew their own vegetables. But I'll give most people who promote 'the obesity epidemic' the benefit of the doubt and assume that they don't think we'd be in better health if we died of starvation.

It was a reasonably standard article on obesity in the Dominon Post that made me question this assumption:

It's not difficult to see why obesity is becoming such a problem. We no longer walk or exercise nearly as much as we used to and our eating habits have deteriorated

. What did people eat in New Zealand 50 years ago? Would it past muster with those who hark back to a golden era.

To answer this question I turned to Towards Tomorrow: A Guide for the New Zealand Homemaker, an economics school text book published in 1968. Here's what it had to say about fat:

The fats used in the average New zealand diet are butter, bacon fat, dripping and lard.

and meat:

Meat is the protein food most used in New Zealand and we are among the world's greatest meat eaters because our country is so agriculturally rich. Many overseas visitors are surprised to find that meat is often included in every meal of the day.

Poultry has grown in popularity over recent years. Like meat it is a complete protein, but it is mroe expensive than meat. (There is alarm at the use of hormones to develop birds rapidly because these hormones could affect humans.) Poultry is a delicious 'special occasion' food.

So 40 years ago the New Zealand diet included red meat 2-3 times a day, and most cooking was done in animal fat.

My first thought was that either people are lying to us about what a healthy diet is, or our diet has improved considerably since the 1960s.* My second thought is that the main problem is that it's ridiculous to talk about 'the New Zealand' diet. For discussion of diet to have any meaning at all, we have to look at class, and how the amount of money you have has effects your diet.

In our society we don't make food for nutritional value, we don't make food to nuture us, we don't make food to promote long life and we don't make food to fee ourselves.

We make food to make a profit.

Every decision those producing food make about what goes into that food (starting way back at the genetically modified soy-bean seed, to when soya-oil ends up in a low-fat biscuit substitute) is made based on the need to make a profit. Nutrition is generally only a consideration into whether or not food makes a profit if the government has legislated about the nutirtional content of certain foods, or if it can help sell the product (more on this later).

There have been changes in food over the last 50 years, and those changes have been driven by the food industry's requirement to make a profit. I may be wrong, and I'm happy to discuss this with people who know more (or less) than me, but I think the most important change has been that calories have gotten cheaper, but other nutrition have gotten more expensive.** To give a really basic example, if the amount of vitamin C in an apple has halved, then even if apples have gone down in price a 1/3 vitamin C is more expensive.

That's why I hate Sue Kedgeley, and the Greens soft-drink charge so much. The solution to the change in our diets can't be to try and drive the price of calories back up, rather than try and bring the price of nutrients down.

This is a long, and kind of rambling post. I had a lot more to say, but this is a start, I'll try and expand on some of these posts in the next few days. I refuse to join into the current discourse on food for a reason, because I think it misses the problem. I think everytime we talk about 'healthy' food we're just creating another way they can sell things for us.

I think the any problems with food in our society can only be solved if we go attack the cause of the problem. The profit motive.

*This may or may not be true, I'm not hear to police individual debates on the value of different sorts of food. On an individual level I suspect part of the problem with talking about the dangers of one item of food in your diet, as it's not what you take out of your diet, but what you substitute it with, that makes a difference to your longevity and quality of life.

**I should go to bed, but there's a whole lot more detail in what this means, I'll write it up tomorrow.

Maia's Hand Mirror Reflections: Healthy Living

I realised that I hadn't explained myself very well in my Body Shop thread. Or rather I'd paraphrased an argument without actually making that argument.

I hate The Body Shop, have a for very long time. I've never had a use for the dumb soaps and gels and whatever they make (although I did go through a stage when I was 14 of buying them as presents for friends, if I didn't know what else to get them). They're such a huge part of the idea that it's alternative and a moral good to be healthy, and what it means to be healthy is to fit a traditional idea of beautiful that I'd happily watch as every single one of their stores burnt to the ground.

I wanted to explore the link between health and beauty, and the idea that health is a moral good, a little bit more to explain.

The equation of 'beauty' and 'health' is really common and really insidious. The most obvious example is weight, and (despite rather a lot of evidence to the contrary) the conflation of thin and healthy. In circles (usually middle class and slightly politically aware circles) where it's not acceptable to talk about weight loss straight up, generally exactly the same conversations take place, but people are talking about 'health'. If someone is nervous of complimenting a woman for losing weight, they'll talk about 'healthy' she looks.

But it's much more common than that. Most of the examples are just laughable. Beauty sections in magazines are now called 'health' sections. Hair products claim they will promote 'healthy looking hair' (because ensuring that your dead-cells are healthy should be the priority of everyone). The state of your skin is seen as indicative of your overall health. Performing beauty routinues, like moisturising or body scrubbing, are portrayed as part of maintaining your health.

Some are more scary:

The American Cancer Society offers the "Look Good…Feel Better" program, "dedicated to teaching women cancer patients beauty techniques to help restore their appearance and self-image during cancer treatment."

Of course this is bullshit, you can't tell someone's health by looking at them, and a lot of so called health routinues won't increase your longevity, or your quality of life at all.

Now this is partly just a marketing technique, the more women challenge beauty standards, the more useful it is to have different justification for selling exactly the same products. But I think it's become a lot more significant than that, because health is portrayed as a moral good. This particular conflation is a very powerful one for fucking with people's minds, and very useful for ensuring certain sorts of behaviour (mostly buying stuff, but also not challenging the way our society is organised).

The first step to believing being 'healthy' is moral is to show that 'health' is something that is under your control. Now personally, I reject this idea as deeply offensive, as well as being wrong. Wile there are some things that you can do that will promote the length of your life, and increase the ways you can use your body, most of it is just luck. Either it's your genetics, or it's a result of environmental factors you can't control (like poverty, or being exposed to depleted uranium). It's very tempting to believe we can control our body, how long we live, how far it holds out, but most of us won't be able to.

To give a rather silly example of this I have had a number of people tell me about the quality of their teeth, how they don't have fillings, and they each give a different reason for this (they brush every day, or they eat a lot of cheese). Now it seems to me that it's far more likely that fluoridated water, and improvements in detal practice are the reason my generation's teeth are better than our parents.

That's why I think it's wrong, the reason I think it's offensive is it promotes an idea that everyone could get better if only they tried hard enough. It turns illness into a form of personal failing. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a fantastic article about this in relation to the breast cancer industry (and yes unfortunately it is an industry):

My friend introduces me to a knot of other women in survivor gear, breast-cancer victims all, I learn, though of course I would not use the V-word here. "Does anyone else have trouble with the term 'survivor'?' I ask, and, surprisingly, two or three speak up. It could be "unlucky," one tells me; it "tempts fate," says another, shuddering slightly. After all, the cancer can recur at any time, either in the breast or in some more strategic site. No one brings up my own objection to the term, though: that the mindless triumphalism of "survivorhood" denigrates the dead and the dying. Did we who live "fight" harder than those who've died? Can we claim to be "braver," better, people than the dead? And why is there no room in this cult for some gracious acceptance of death, when the time comes, which it surely will, through cancer or some other misfortune?

The idea that 'health' is a result of our individual actions is now dangerously firmly placed. We can beat heart-attacks, breast-cancer, alzheimer's, arthritis, dementia and everything else if we try hard enough.

As well as being awful in it's own right, this idea turns anything that is promoted as improving health as a moral good, even if it doesn't actually improve your longevity or use of your body.

This idea is so insidious that it has often been adopted by the left, where being 'healthy' can be portrayed as not just morally good, but alternative - or even radical. So we end up reinforcing our own version of the mainstream ideology. Constantly things that are supported for political reasons (say veganism) are promoted for their supposed health benefits, as if good politics and good health, automatically go together (I have a much, much, much longer rant about this particular topic, but it'll have to wait for another day).

I started writing this whole post because mythago asked me "why is buying soap kowtowing to patriarchal, capitalistic ideals about beauty?" I want to make it really clear that I don't think the solution to the problems that I raised is to stop eating in a particular way, or buying a particular product, or trying to live in a way that you find nourishes and sustains you.

What I do think is important is we challenge the ideology which equates beauty, health and morality, and promotes health as something we can control. We can stop praising people for being healthy, we can stop telling people they look healthy, we can stop assuming that just because we agree with something politically it'll be good for our bodies, and we can stop using moralistic language to describe food.

And that's why I hate the Body Shop.

Maia's Hand Mirror Reflections: My Body is Not a Computer Game

This post of mine received a massive response. I shouldn't have been surprised about that - over at my blog I had many 101 posts on food and bodies, that people here won't have seen. I've decided to repost them as a series. They'll run once a week or so. Here is the first

********

The language around food and health is pretty common. People don't just call their own food healthy they feel perfectly entitled to comment on the health qualities of what someone else is eating. Sometimes it's intended in a sarcastic manner 'healthy breakfast', if you're eating a chocolate bar, sometimes it's supposed to be a compliment. All this usage suggests that some foods have 'health' and some lack it, and this quality is the same no matter who is eating the food, which is ridiculous. Brazil nuts are very nutritious, but they're not going to be healthy if you're allergic to them, or if you've a high selenium in-take.

The idea of food being 'healthy' reminds me of computer games, where you lose health if you get shot at or land on the spikes, and gain health when you find first aid. But instead I'm supposed to be gaining health by the broccolli I'm eating right now, but I would have lost health for the chocolate I had this morning.

Our bodies don't work like that; they're not simple input/output machines. Any food that has any nutritional value (and apart from diet soda and the like, almost all food has some nutritional value) can improve the health of a particular individual at a particular time.

Just to be 100% clear, I'm not saying that there is no relationship between what we eat and our health. I'm intolerant to milk, I know that certain foods can make me unhealthy, but that doesn't mean that those foods have some mysterious amount of unhealthy that they subtract from my body.

The effect food has on our health is a relationship between the food and the state of our body atthe time that we eat it. Health is not an intrinsic quality in any food.

So I've proved my semantic point, why do I care? Mostly because I think it's a wider reflection of our eating disordered culture. Generally people who talk about food being 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' are people who are self-conscious about calling food 'good' or 'bad', but it sustains exactly the same fucked up attitude towards food.

But more fundamentally because I think that it is part of a wider project to create a commodity called 'health'. This commodity is becoming divorced from the needs of us as people, both in terms of the actual physical bodies we live our lives in and our wider social needs.

Talking about food

Maia's post below has a go at both my food blog post "Not Fit to Eat" and the Child Poverty Action Group's Facebook page response to it. There's some serious wire-crossing going on in what she and some of the commenters say.
I hadn't seen the CPAG promo for my post and I think the wording isn't the best, because it can seem to shift the focus away from the main point. But a group that works so hard just to get a better deal for kids doesn’t deserve condemnation over this either.

The problem that I and the woman who sent me the info have with a dairy marketing the pack of food shown as a "school lunch" has nothing to do with "promoting a diet mentality", nor with “seeing food in terms of morality”.

The point here is how commercial interests - from giant Coke Inc to the corner dairy - make it so easy and (apparently) cheap to buy food and drink which does not meet kids' needs even on one school day (as Maia agrees), let alone lots of days. And how even the very modest moves by the previous government to do something useful and non-parent-blaming about school lunches have now been scrapped. (Read Carol’s comment on Maia’s post – thanks, Carol.)

It was in that context that I headed my post, "Not fit to eat", and I stand by it: as a school lunch, this pack is not fit for kids to eat.

There’s plenty of useful debate to be had around this issue, but the trouble with the “diet mentality” and “food morality” labels is that they rule out even raising it. And that’s exactly what those who profit from making and selling such packs want. I hope no astute marketeers have found Maia’s post or some of the comments below it, because it's a textbook example of the best way to silence any objection whatsoever to what they're doing.

It’s brilliant PR. Just tell people that there's absolutely nothing wrong with any kind of food, ever. Anyone who tries to say otherwise is either a foolish tool of the meddling nanny state, or an anti-feminist diet freak hellbent on taking all the fun of food away and insisting that no one should ever eat Oreos, only oranges.

Yes, cheap calories are better than no calories. But this is New Zealand, and no or not enough calories is not the main problem. Coke is cheap because it’s incredibly cheap to make – the main cost is making sure as many people as possible keep drinking more of it. And don’t tell me that this insults consumers, by seeing them as helpless sheep at the mercy of advertisers. The campaigns run because they work – but only because they’re combined with cheapness, especially where food money is scarce.

Reading Maia’s post, I kept seeing an odd parallel with the arguments against hiking the price of “liquor” (there’s no catchall word that doesn’t sound wowserish, is there – why is that?). It’s one of the main things the recent commission recommended, along with curbs on promotion. But the industry has lobbied tooth and nail to stop those two things happening, just as Coke and Co lobby tooth and nail to stop anything effective being done about kids’ food. And the government has fallen obediently into line.

Something is at least being done about strongly alcoholic, ready-to-drink lolly-water. Or is this move too, as I’m sure the industry wants us to think, just another dreadful example of finger-wagging do-gooders intent on “seeing food in terms of morality”?

Fit to eat

If you're anything like me you would have had lots of friends liking Child Poverty Action Group recently. I was all prepared to join in, until I saw they were promoting this post with a cheerful "What are our kids eating? And what is our government doing (or not doing) to encourage them to choose an orange over an oreo?"

First it reminded me of the endless ridiculous games of substitutions that you see in women's magazines and "healthy food" (Next time you feel like eating chocolate try a tin of tuna instead). Which made me think of Sarah Haskins, swapping a six pack of beer for a fifth of whiskey:

So I was happy for a while. But when I recovered from my distraction I was still grumpy. Why should children be choosing Oreos over oranges - why can't they have both, and lots of other food as well? Why is an anti-poverty group calling on the government to promote a diet mentality among kids?

The post they linked to was called "Not Fit To Eat"* was talking about a $2.50 pack sold in a South Auckland dairy, that contained Oreos, two packets of chip like things, and an orange drink. I agree that that is not an adequate lunch, but each of the individual components, and the pack of the whole, is totally fit to eat.

What I found most ridiculous about the response to this pack, was the emphasis on how cheap it was - as if that was a bad thing (someone made their horror at this food being cheap explicit in the facebook thread). I do not understand how anyone concerned with poverty could ever have a problem with any food being cheap. I have so often heard people tutt-tutting about the fact that a litre of coke is cheaper than a litre of milk - as if it is the cheapness of the coke that is the problem.

The person who had found this pack asked the dairy owner "aren't you ashamed to be selling this?" Why is it more shameful to be selling this for $2.50 than anything else? Dairies make their money through high margins - if their is shame in their trade - surely it is selling food for more, rather than selling food for less.

You know there was a time when calories weren't as relatively cheap as they are now. Cheap calories can give people the ability to stay alive, and they're fabulous. I understand being angry at the expense of other nutrients, such as milk, vegetables, fruit, meat and whittakers dark almond chocoalte, but why is this so often discussed as if the cheapness of other fooods is the problem?

This seems to be my week to be grumpy about how people on the left talk about food and bodies.** But I think it's really important. It is totally possible to talk about food and poverty, without buying into a worldview that fetishises food and buys into an ideology that sees food in terms of morality. I really should write a grand theory post about why this is bad one of these days - but the really short reason is that one of the purposes of this ideology is to blame individuals for the effects of poverty. This is not something we can co-opt - it is something which will co-opt us.

And because no post like this would be complete without it, here is a link to the fat nutritionist's If only poor people understood nutrition.

* I think it is written by my co-blogger AnneE - so I'd be interested in hearing her perspective

** Who am I kidding, every week for at least the last five years has been my week to be grumpy about the way some people on the left talks about food and bodies.

Cake is not the opposite of diet - and no diet day thoughts

This week I have felt the irritation at International No Diet Day rise slowly (mostly fueled by the facebook group), and I wanted to write a post about why it annoyed me so much. Then I realised that I've already written that post so I decided to repost it instead (i've edited quite a bit, to finish the sentances and elaborate on the ideas).

In my experience No Diet Day's are most commonly observed at Universities, and usually by eating cake, chocolate and ice-cream at a dessert evening or some such event. Sometimes, when you have an anti-feminist women's rights officer, they're observed by giving away diet coke and fruit (because International No Diet Day becomes Love Your Body day and what better way to love your body than fruit, diet coke and yoga - I really wish I was making this up, but I'm not).

My superficial criticism of No Diet Day is how easy co-opted and perverted it is. An article from ABC in Australia:

In the 936 office Drive Producer, the lovely Lynn, got up especially early to spend most of her morning baking, in order to provide her colleagues with the most delectable Pavlova and cake.

Annie Warburton and the team from Mornings spoke with Stephen Dimsey, State Manger of Life Be In It Tasmania, to get some sensible tips for those who enjoy their food but want to stay in shape.

Then later on Stephen says: "What we're saying is that whatever body shape you are, make sure you're a healthy body shape," Talk about making the kind of sense that's not; I don't think I could translate that into English if you paid me.

But I have just as much problem with the dessert based versions International No Diet Day, which are organised on campus by people who are actually feminist.

I don't think dessert is the opposite of dieting. I think to suggest that it is is to perpetuate a shallow, unhelpful understanding of the role of food in our society. Food and control are so tightly linked that the only other alternative to controlling your food intake is losing control of your food intake. You can't just 'not diet' for a day - because the gremlins in your head about food and your body will still be there - interrogating every food choice, everything you do. To suggest anything can be achieved in a day is too hide how deeply people are affected.

The opposite of dieting is actually making food about food. I know that's an uphill battle. I know the vast majority of women students are nowhere near there. But I don't think having one day a year where you're 'allowed' to eat chocolate is a step in that direction.

In the end kicking those grelins to death is an uphill battle. Whatever the state your personal set are in I don't think it makes any difference whether you eat dessert or don't eat dessert on a particular day. And I think the suggestion that you should or shouldn't deal in any particular way actually makes it harder.

What is ultimately frustrating is that my experience of dessert evenings is that after a certain point people will start talking about how gross they feel and how someone should take the food away so they'll stop eating it - it's not an anti-diet dessert evening without people completely reinforcing ideas about food and control and food and power.

If I had a time machine, and could go back in time to when International No Diet Day was invented (my mind says 1989, but I'm too lazy to look it up on Wikipedia), I would make a suggestion that rather than make it 'no diet day' - how about 'no diet-talk day?" I don't know if it would actually help (and not being so easily commodified it would be less popular). But at least it presents the response to eating disorder culture and body hatred as something that involves many steps, rather than something you can just turn off.

Guest Post: Where no food is a sin - I'm lovin' it

Many thanks to Gina for this guest post, sorry it didn't go up yesterday, that was my fault.

In the UK Weightwatchers advertises under the slogan “Where no food is a sin” and apparently ladies and gentlemen that includes Macca’s.

I don’t know about you guys but when I go into Macca’s I'm not looking to make healthy choices. Macca’s is my comfort food. When I go there I order a Big Mac Combo, a 6 pack of nuggets with sweet and sour sauce and a chocolate sundae. And I bet Macca’s are counting on weightwatchers customers to come in... and be led by temptation. If I was actually on a weight management programme walking into Macca’s would be like an alcoholic going into a liquor store to buy a diet coke.

And vice versa- walking into Macca’s is not going to make me sign up to a weight loss programme. My conclusion: This is one bum marketing ploy.

Here’s the link for the coverage on this one.

What do you think?

The Vita Quench Water Police - Dislike

Facebook ad spotted this evening:

Sorry if you can't read it, here's the text "Know a girlfriend at work who drinks too many sugary beverages? Become a fan and report her to the Water Police and win great prizes!" Fans are encouraged to take photos of workmates who breach the "Laws of Water" and shame them publicly on Facebook. The VQPD will pick favourites and then conduct "Office Raids" at which "your colleague will be reprimanded, taped off, photographed and given great Vita Quench prizes..." The dobber-inner gets something called a "hydration pack" too. No doubt this involves lots of the powdery mix thingies, sorry "vitamin enhanced hydration in a simple sachet" that Vita Quench sell.

I'm going to pre-empt the "you feminists have no sense of humour" bingo square by stating clearly that I do get that this is supposed to be a joke. But it does form part of a larger body of diet policing, particularly towards women, and it should be seen as part of that context. Dislike. Intensely.

Please workplace tell me how I should eat

The Victoria University staff club is strange in many ways. It is tucked away in the library, undergrads aren't supposed to go there, and know very little about it. But, despite the secrecy, it is very unexciting - except the alcohol is quite cheap, and sometimes the food is nicer and less over-priced than the rest of the university.

The staff club also has a mission, and that mission is to tell the people who eat there how to eat. As you go down the corridor every side is telling you to eat Blueberries! Low fat! Omega-3 Oil! and so on. Then they usually have little plastic triangle display things on every table - the sort that some restaurants put wine or specials on, but the staff club puts advice on how not to eat too much. Including one that said: "Eat like an Eskimo" followed by lots of praise of fish. Where do you even start?

1. Eskimo? For reals? After that shall we play Cowboys and Indians with any natives we can find on campus?

2. Advice about food is so fucking ridiculous. Why on earth should we eat like we lived somewhere where almost nothing grows? The fact that human beings have been able to subsist on large parts of the planet shows how resilient we are, and what a wide range of foods (as a species) we can survive on. The fact that historically people living in some areas have eaten predominantly fish, while people living in other areas have had very limited access to fish, is a reason to shut up about the one true way of eating.

3. These are workers at the university and post-graduate students. Are we somehow expected not to be able to feed ourselves? Are we in imminent danger of death from a blueberry deficiency? Is there a special section on the health deprivation index about how badly off staff and post-graduate students at the university are?

The Fat Nutritionist has a great post about how the vast majority people on weight-watchers are based on their socio-economic-gender-ethnicity profile are already going to live FOR-EVER. The same is true for the majority of people who work at university or those with post-graduate degrees.*

I'm not suggesting that this information would be anymore productive in, say, a meatworks tea-room. But given that you can't get more urban-liberal-middle-class than the staff club at a university, and the behaviours that are described as 'healthy eating' are the behaviours of urban-liberal-middle-class women more than any other socio-economic group. What is the purpose of bombarding those most likely to be already aware, and following, the behaviours that have been designated 'healthy' with?

I would suggest that the purpose is self-satisfaction - the purpose is rewarding the virtuousness, as much as it's about compelling compliance in those who eat there (they are after all only posters - the staff club doesn't even sell that much fish). I want to explore this some more, and look at the impact that a moral model of food has on those who do not follow it. But I don't think it's a coincidence that eating-places are most likely to push these messages among those who are presumed to be already following htem.

* And this in itself is telling. As PhD Comics can tell us post-grad students subsist on instant noodles and free food that can be scavenged around campus. While this stereotype isn't entirely true, it does have a basis in reality, as post-grad students are lacking in both money and time - which makes acquiring nutritious food you want to eat tricky. And yet, post-grad students generally survive the experience, and go on to live to ages that befit their socio-economic position.

Feeding your f**king family - still women's work?

The Suit loves to listen to newstalk ZB during his morning commute. I'm sure part of the reason is to watch my blood pressure steadily rise as I seethe at the stupidity of the rest of the human race.

Today I had to listen to Mike Hosking repeatedly tut-tutting a Reuters article which claimed the average British mother relies on just nine different meals to feed her family.

The study in question comes from a gourmet food company who presumably is using mother-blaming as a new marketing strategy.

But my question is where the hell are the fathers in all of this?

In our house I'm am supposedly 'lucky' because the Suit cooks decent food on a regular basis (cleaning up is another matter). But surely this shouldn't be a matter of luck?

Shouldn't the logical extension of women being able to hold to careers to support their families is that the men might be able to hold a saucepan and cook a meal for their families?

Apparently not.

In the mean time I leave you with Sarah Haskins.

Waste not, want not

The Guardian, in an article about food wastage, writes:

There are nearly a billion malnourished people in the world, but all of them could be lifted out of hunger with less than a quarter of the food wasted in Europe and North America. In a globalised food system, where ...we are all buying food in the same international market place, that means we're taking food out of the mouths of the poor.

I'm a food-wasting culprit - or at least I have been in the past. When we were a two income family, the culinary week would run the same way every time...

Weekend: go grocery shopping, full of wholesome cooking ideas for the week.
Monday: cook something semi-decent.
Tuesday-Thursday: come home from work exhausted, and veer between half-arsed cooking and possibly takeaways.
Friday: abandon our family shamelessly to takeaways, as a reward for cooking (?) during the week.

The waste was staggering. Rotting veges that I couldn't find time or energy to cook would reproach me from the smelly interior of my fridge. I'm one of those who likes sharing mealtimes with the family - and collapsing exhausted with takeaways just isn't the same as sitting down for a home-cooked dinner together. My dad was, I think, rather disturbed by my wasteful ways. It's a generational thing: growing up in postwar Scotland, he is programmed to use up every last speck of leftovers, switch off every unusued light, and generally use resources to their utmost.

I'm sure that busy lifestyles aren't the only cause of waste. A university study found that school kids throw out huge quantities of untouched food from their lunches everyday, starting with fruit, yoghurt and other health foods. It's hard to say why - maybe kids have such a wide range of food choices to them that healthy food just isn't attractive.

We dealt with the food-wastage problem when we dropped down to one income. Less money and more time lead to better domestic economy, plus health and welfare benefits for our family. How do other THMers prevent themselves and their kids from wasting food?