Once upon a time, consumption meant you were thin and sick
April 4, 2012 7:17 AM   Subscribe

How America Is Making the Whole World Fat and Unhealthy It is hardly news that the United States faces epidemic health problems linked to poor diets. Nearly two out of every five Americans are obese. But according to a press release from the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, "The West is now exporting diabetes and heart disease to developing countries, along with the processed foods that line the shelves of global supermarkets. By 2030, more than 5 million people will die each year before the age of 60 from non-communicable diseases linked to diets." [...] De Schutter, whose work usually focuses on ending hunger, just published a new report saying, "The right to food cannot be reduced to a right not to starve. It is an inclusive right to an adequate diet providing all the nutritional elements an individual requires to live a healthy and active life, and the means to access them."
posted by infini (59 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
"The right to food cannot be reduced to a right not to starve. It is an inclusive right to an adequate diet providing all the nutritional elements an individual requires to live a healthy and active life, and the means to access them."

Why, that's communism, plain and simple!

They'll take my pink slime when they pry it from my cold obese fingers.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 7:18 AM on April 4, 2012 [4 favorites]


Thanks for this. Related: How did Japan come to prefer wheat over rice?
posted by beisny at 7:29 AM on April 4, 2012


Most quinoa comes from the Bolivian Andes where indigenous peasants traditionally grew quinoa and raised llamas and alpaca for meat and fiber, respectively. With the demand in Europe and the United States for healthy, gluten-free grains, quinoa -- which is very high in protein -- became popular. Today, Bolivians cannot afford to buy quinoa, and the quinoa-growing region of the country is also the most malnourished as those who grow quinoa for export now purchase refined grains to eat. The region also faces decreased soil fertility, as farmers mine their soil to grow quinoa year after year instead of rotating crops with llama pasture to restore fertility.

This makes me so sad. I love quinoa and eat it probably a couple of times a week -- guess I need to look for ethically produced quinoa now?
posted by fiercecupcake at 7:34 AM on April 4, 2012 [11 favorites]


They'll take my pink slime when they pry it from my cold obese fingers.

AFA Beef filed for bankruptcy this morning.
posted by spicynuts at 7:34 AM on April 4, 2012


cite
posted by spicynuts at 7:36 AM on April 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


America is awful when it doesn't help people; America is awful when it does help people. Got it.
posted by Renoroc at 7:39 AM on April 4, 2012 [12 favorites]


I'd comment about the article, but I gotta get down to the docks and help load a ship containers of diabetes and heart disease.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:40 AM on April 4, 2012 [6 favorites]


(healthy) food, not bombs!
posted by orme at 7:43 AM on April 4, 2012


Good to hear you're to blame for me being fat - I was mainly blaming the Indians with their damned tikka masala.
posted by Segundus at 7:45 AM on April 4, 2012 [4 favorites]


Gotta have the lolfatpeople.
posted by edheil at 7:53 AM on April 4, 2012


He begins by endorsing taxing junk food, particularly soda, an idea that has been controversial in the United States but is already practiced in France, Denmark, Finland, and Hungary. To prevent a junk food tax from disproportionately harming the poor, De Schutter recommends using the tax revenues to make healthy foods less expensive.

First of all, those countries have poverty levels well under the United States', as well as considerably better developed/funded social infrastructure and smaller populations to tend to. Second, using a junk food tax -- that is, a tax on the sort of food the poor are generally stuck with relying on almost exclusively due to the established practices of grocery stores in impoverished areas -- in order to make the sort of food they neither have access to nor a habit of eating less expensive is ridiculous. Stores which don't stock healthy food right now aren't going to be lining their shelves with fresh fruit and vegetables because of some byzantine system of tax breaks or god-knows-what-else has made a product no one currently buys somewhat less expensive to stock. Meanwhile, people living on food stamps have even less money to go around.

I'm not saying there aren't useful ways to tax junk food (although even the useful ideas are rarely workable.) I am saying that you can't just throw money at generations upon generations of poor eating habits in the hope of reviving some sort of assumed predilection toward 'healthy' food.
posted by griphus at 7:54 AM on April 4, 2012 [7 favorites]


Can we do an I'm rubber you're glue on Bolivia and blame them for making us a bunch of coke-addled tweakers?
posted by spicynuts at 7:55 AM on April 4, 2012 [2 favorites]


Also: One piece of chicken costs a little more than US$2, more than the cost of an entire meal of kale, mung beans, and corn porridge elsewhere in the city.

I'm not sure what the point here is. I can't imagine that it's some sort of shocking fact that a person subsisting on a diet of kale, mung beans and corn porridge would pay an arm and a leg to have even a bit of fried chicken and a Coca Cola.
posted by griphus at 7:57 AM on April 4, 2012 [4 favorites]


to have even a bit of fried chicken and a Coca Cola.

Regular restaurants offer the same for around 30 or 50 cents plus another 10 cents for the Coke.
posted by infini at 8:01 AM on April 4, 2012


The West is now exporting diabetes and heart disease to developing countries, along with the processed foods that line the shelves of global supermarkets.

And developing countries have every right not to import it. There is responsibility on both sides of the issue.
posted by lampshade at 8:08 AM on April 4, 2012 [3 favorites]


It's all your fault, American people!

Actually Americans do bear some responsibility disproportionate to their numbers for anthropomorphic climate change
posted by KokuRyu at 8:13 AM on April 4, 2012


See also Dr Lustig at UCSF about metabolism of HFCS and sugar in general: Sugar - The Bitter Truth(YouTube). He too mentions FDA complicity in exporting diabetes.
posted by anadem at 8:23 AM on April 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


And developing countries have every right not to import it.

"Free trade or protectionism"
or, The WTO has failed developing nations

7. Protectionist economic policies: one of the WTO's five core functions agreed at its inception in 1995 was to achieve more coherence in global economic policy-making. Yet the WTO failed to curb the speedy increase in the number of protectionist measures applied by G20 countries in response to the global economic crisis over the past two years – despite G20 leaders' repeated affirmations of their "unwavering" commitment to resist all forms of protectionist measures.

posted by infini at 8:23 AM on April 4, 2012 [4 favorites]


The invisible hand holds your insulin injector.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:26 AM on April 4, 2012 [5 favorites]


Well, we have to export something.
posted by dephlogisticated at 8:26 AM on April 4, 2012 [7 favorites]


wow, obesity in India "has reached epidemic proportions in India in the 21st century"

please, stop with the all american food for the love of shiva.
posted by clavdivs at 8:28 AM on April 4, 2012


Part of the problem is that our biological incentive system evolved in an environment without Twinkies, or, my favorite junk food: salt and vinegar potato chips.

I fly towards those bags like a moth toward a flame. The domestic potato, combined with three other food products of civilization - salt, vinegar, and vegetable oil - is the most amazing food our ancestral environment never contained. It basically concentrates everything we seek out in our natural environment into a single food item, and then puts it in a bag for your easy consumption.

I'm going to have to start tying the bags to my cat to approximate hunting behavior. She should get used to it eventually, and I can lie in wait under the couch cushions and wait for her to take her favored seat on top of the couch, only to spring out and induce a feline game jump, then hold her down and extract my chips while avoiding her fearsome claws.

Paleo diet!
posted by edguardo at 8:29 AM on April 4, 2012 [25 favorites]


inifini beat me to it.

IIRC, the Sandinista's tried to hold onto their agricultural products and we know what happened there.
posted by symbioid at 8:29 AM on April 4, 2012


(well the Sandinista thing is a bit more complex than I remembered so... never mind).
posted by symbioid at 8:31 AM on April 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


less chiles, i know.
posted by clavdivs at 8:31 AM on April 4, 2012


Can someone explain this one to me? Whenever anyone talks about doing business in Tajikistan, anything that would involve physical exports is quickly dismissed. Transport costs to the back end of the middle of nowhere, overland - crazy expensive, no way to do anything profitably.

But go into any random supermarket or larger food store in Dushanbe, and look in the freezer. Plastic wrapped frozen American chicken! How the fuck did it get here? And it is cheaper than the local stuff, probably cheaper than it would cost in the States!

How does this work? I honestly don't understand.
posted by Meatbomb at 8:43 AM on April 4, 2012 [3 favorites]


But seriously, this is a real problem and it freaks me out to think about it. Why do I take vitamin pills? What's wrong with my food that I am afraid that eating it will mean malnourishment?

I figure it's because of a race to the bottom in the food industry: how do we make the tastiest, cheapest, most storable calorie?

Nutrition doesn't have to be a consideration, just non-toxicity (according to current government standards thereof).

I am consistently amazed I can still buy whole fruits and vegetables, and that nobody has figured out a way to make an even cheaper carrot substitute out of corn sugar and artificial flavors.
posted by edguardo at 8:48 AM on April 4, 2012 [2 favorites]


Did you look at the expiry date?
posted by adamvasco at 8:49 AM on April 4, 2012


But go into any random supermarket or larger food store in Dushanbe, and look in the freezer. Plastic wrapped frozen American chicken! How the fuck did it get here? And it is cheaper than the local stuff, probably cheaper than it would cost in the States!

How does this work? I honestly don't understand.


You have to understand that chicken production in the US is an industrial-scale enterprise, and is more akin to mass-producing cheap iPod knock-offs in China.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:50 AM on April 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


There's so many people. SO many people. Without this "pink slime" a lot of people don't actually get much to eat. Hot dogs, bologna, cheap lunch meats - hell, skillet mix. I just had to buy some of that the other day. I guarantee most of it consists of ammoniated meat.

You get damn tired of rice and beans after a while. Honestly it doesn't hurt you. I don't know what the squick factor is. People eat far worse things. This is just the latest hysteria of the masses.
posted by Malice at 8:53 AM on April 4, 2012 [6 favorites]


Why do I take vitamin pills?

Why indeed?
posted by yoink at 9:24 AM on April 4, 2012


"pink slime"...Honestly it doesn't hurt you

I'd probably agree with you. The same with high fructose corn syrup (in small doses). The problem that I see is that the food that might be problematic are damn near everywhere. In things that common sense assures you would not have them. Due to elimination diet to figure out allergy issues, I was looking for food that did not contain soy the other day. Out of 10 different brands of a product, only ONE had no soy. And I was at Trader Joe's, not your regular Safeway. If you have a soy allergy, and because frankly who reads the label for every single product they eat, the food you consume will be wreaking havoc on your body eventhough you think they are safe.
A side note: when you hear people say that you should consume more soy instead of XYZ because it's healthy, keep in mind that soy is in great many things that you consume. Perhaps far more than what is good for you.

The same thing with high fructose corn syrup. Or pink slime. Before the uproar, it was in fairly high percentage of ground meat sold in supermarkets. Most people were not aware of it.
posted by 7life at 9:28 AM on April 4, 2012 [2 favorites]


Related scarefographic, from ... John Salley (?!):

Red Meat is Killing US
posted by mrgrimm at 9:34 AM on April 4, 2012


"The right to food cannot be reduced to a right not to starve.

Are there "rights to food" in any country's founding or establishing documents? The word "rights" is thrown around so carelessly.....

"It is an inclusive right to an adequate diet providing all the nutritional elements an individual requires to live a healthy and active life, and the means to access them.""

Shouldn't this be the decision of the hungry person, and not the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food?
posted by lstanley at 9:35 AM on April 4, 2012 [2 favorites]


A side note: when you hear people say that you should consume more soy instead of XYZ because it's healthy, keep in mind that soy is in great many things that you consume. Perhaps far more than what is good for you.

Vis-a-vis soy: IIRC, unless you look at the form the soy takes, you get some contradictory health results. Ie, it appears based on population studies from Asia that tofu, steamed soybeans, soymilk* and so on are great for health - good for cancer rates, etc. But if you look at soy consumption in the US, where it's overwhelmingly heavily-processed and added to things, soy appears to be terrible for you. Then people turn around and start shouting about how tofu is dangerous, when really it's, like, powdered soy-protein nastiness that's the problem.

*Soymilk as practiced in the US isn't very tasty, as far as I'm concerned. But if you have a chance to get fresh soymilk, or that salty-soymilk-soup stuff, you should totally jump at it. Nothing at all like the boxed stuff from the co-op.
posted by Frowner at 9:45 AM on April 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


Are there "rights to food" in any country's founding or establishing documents?

There is a right to life in the United States constitution, at least.

If you think about that one long enough, well...
posted by edguardo at 9:47 AM on April 4, 2012


It seems there are at least 22 states with a "right to food" in their constitution, and a fair number of others that could be possibly interpretated as having some sort of right to food.
posted by lstanley at 9:49 AM on April 4, 2012


or that salty-soymilk-soup stuff

Fuck yeah, xian doujiang!! So good.
posted by en forme de poire at 10:04 AM on April 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


One solution we use, and I understand everyone can't do this, is to buy as low on the processed food chain as possible. That way we control what goes into dinner instead of dinner controlling what goes into us. It means we lose some time that we could instead spend doing other things once we get home in the evening but it means we get exactly the meal we want with pretty much the exact ingredients we're ok with eating. We actually pay less in food costs (but not as much as you'd think since we buy wholesome things, not velveta 'cheese') but we spend much more time prepping/cleaning up in the kitchen.

Let's just say that the burgers I made from a chuck roast that I ground with a kitchenaid grinder attachment were amazing. Zero slime in there, but cleanup is indeed a pain.

Could a tax/fee on each processing step a food goes through work? I guess this is already inherently in place a bit but I can see corn subsides and the like canceling it out pretty effectively.
posted by RolandOfEld at 10:08 AM on April 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


There is a right to life in the United States constitution, at least.

Not a right to a long life, or a healthy life, because we are the nation state equivalent of the kid who could pull straight A's but aims for barely passing because honestly it's easier to just coast and act like the effort's beneath you.
posted by jason_steakums at 10:10 AM on April 4, 2012 [2 favorites]




From the article: "This, combined with urbanization and higher employment rates for women, precipitated the rapid expansion for processed foods, both domestically and through exports dumped on foreign markets," writes De Schutter."

As a working mom and the daughter of a working mom who grew up eating a lot of Hamburger Helper, I think this point deserves some more attention. Sure, in the past, people ate a lot less processed food, but that came at a cost in time and labor, disproportionately borne by women. Personally I hate cooking, and I love my job, and would hate to have to give up the latter for the former.

I wish I could redirect some of these calls for "less processed food" to call for "healthier processed food" instead. With modern refrigeration techniques, I don't see that being an oxymoron.
posted by OnceUponATime at 10:24 AM on April 4, 2012 [9 favorites]


Actually Americans do bear some responsibility disproportionate to their numbers for anthropomorphic climate change
I have no idea what this means.
posted by deathpanels at 10:55 AM on April 4, 2012 [3 favorites]


Actually Americans do bear some responsibility disproportionate to their numbers for anthropomorphic climate change

I have no idea what this means.


I think it means that global warming is caused by the Earth being mad at Americans?
posted by jason_steakums at 11:03 AM on April 4, 2012 [4 favorites]


Actually Americans do bear some responsibility disproportionate to their numbers for anthropomorphic climate change

I have no idea what this means.

I think it means that global warming is caused by the Earth being mad at Americans?
Anthropomorphic climate change? Like, the climate is changing in such a way that it resembles a human being?
posted by deathpanels at 11:10 AM on April 4, 2012


If Big Tobacco was ultimately held a liable for billions in health care costs caused by its volitional products, then how is food (a necessity) optimized for cost at the expense of nutritive value going to escape the same ultimate liability?
posted by Fupped Duck at 11:29 AM on April 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


I was mainly blaming the Indians with their damned tikka masala.

Having had waaaaay more Chicken Tikka Masala in Britain and way less Butter Chicken (or "Murgh Makhni", as some Indian restaurants have begun engagingly calling the dish), I've begun to say that Chicken Tikka Masala is as British as Mulligatawny Soup or Scotch Egg. :)
posted by the cydonian at 11:35 AM on April 4, 2012


stop. fucking. calling. it. a. fucking. epidemic.

cheers.
posted by herbplarfegan at 12:23 PM on April 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


There's so many people. SO many people. Without this "pink slime" a lot of people don't actually get much to eat. Hot dogs, bologna, cheap lunch meats

Frankly, this is bullshit. It's interesting how you define food though: meat, meat, meat. Yes, it's true, there isn't enough meat to feed everyone on the planet the amount Americans currently eat. The problem is that the current food system is trying to do exactly that, because there is more money in feeding cows than there is in feeding starving people. Of course, historically this is absurd: we're trying to bring the world in line with 1950s American meat culture, which is an anomaly, not the norm. It is mostly a result of mass media, and little to do with "rational" markets.

Currently two thirds of global cereal production goes to non-human consumption: livestock, biofuels, waste. A small fraction of that would feed every starving person in the world, but you'd pay more for steak. Pretty much all (pdf) of the USA's increases in grain production in the last 15 years (157 million tonnes) have been exported directly to China to support their demand for livestock feed: over the last decade, per capita meat consumption in China has increased 12% per person per year. Even biofuels are a sideshow compared to that.
posted by mek at 12:39 PM on April 4, 2012 [3 favorites]


Without this "pink slime" a lot of people don't actually get much to eat.

Bullshit. For the amount of work and natural resources to even create that waste-meat-optimized pink slime, you could (generally) create a bounty of fruits and vegetables.

Shouldn't this be the decision of the hungry person, and not the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food?

The problem there is that hungry people and markets in general can make awful decisions.

One thing I've been delighted to see in recent years is the (slow) removal of artificial food coloring from products.

If it were up to consumers or producers, there would have been no change there, imo.

On preview, mek nails it concisely.
posted by mrgrimm at 12:46 PM on April 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


This whole pink slime thing makes for a weird atmosphere living in the South Sioux City NE/Sioux City IA area, home of BPI. All of a sudden the place is plastered with "WE SUPPORT BPI" billboards to give the impression that "we" means "everyone" so anyone with a different opinion on BPI is Othered. No room for anything but 100% support! No need to disclose who paid for the billboards, but gee it sure is nice that whoever had the money for a big billboard buy also had all these BPI art department elements just lying around for signage that goes up to coincide with the big "Oh, poor BPI!" press conference.

Also? Not even gonna pretend not to get a kick out of the schadenfreude from that presser, where Republican governors got all bent out of shape when free market consumers decided they didn't want to buy something.
posted by jason_steakums at 1:10 PM on April 4, 2012 [4 favorites]


Bullshit. For the amount of work and natural resources to even create that waste-meat-optimized pink slime, you could (generally) create a bounty of fruits and vegetables.


This makes no sense what so ever. The two are entirely unrelated. The meat is there, it's ammoniated to make it safe to eat. Without that process (which is generally soaking it in a solution and reforming it into something that resembles non-ammoniated meat, and is no more of a process than making, say, non-ammoniated bologna or chicken nuggets) all of that meat becomes inedible to human beings and is essentially a waste. The fact that this type of food exists and is used again, is completely unrelated to growing a "boundy of fruits and vegetables", which require time, money, land and an entirely different process/company. They also land in a different pricing scheme and usually must be coupled with an assortment of other things to make a meal.

It's interesting how you define food though: meat, meat, meat.

If you'll read my post, I said rice and beans gets tiring. Think about the availability of non-meat edibles to people in the United States, particularly in small towns. There's several towns here in Texas, probably in the double digits amount of towns, that do not even have a grocery store. They get all of their food from gas stations. In these gas stations, beans and rice aren't even sold. Bologna is.

Sometimes it's shocking to see how sheltered a lot of people are that they think that everyone can just go out and pick up some Couscous, fresh vegetables and other non-meat foods, not to mention feed their families on only that. If you don't like ammoniated meat, don't eat it. I don't like a lot of foods, I don't eat them. You know what? Take it out of schools too. That's fine. Kids can't make that choice in school that their parents might want them to make.

Put a big fat label on whatever contains the stuff.

But banning it is pretty puritan.
posted by Malice at 2:47 PM on April 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


deathpanels: "
Actually Americans do bear some responsibility disproportionate to their numbers for anthropomorphic climate change
I have no idea what this means.
"

It means the ozone hole is humanoid in shape.
posted by symbioid at 3:04 PM on April 4, 2012


Anthropomorphic climate change? Like, the climate is changing in such a way that it resembles a human being?

It is clear that the poster meant Anthropogenic Climate Change, i.e. 'Climate Change caused by human activity'. The statement then means that the total volume of energy that mankind as a whole has put into altering the environment has disproportionately come from the North Americas when broken down by population.

This concludes the regularly scheduled thread derail.
posted by FatherDagon at 3:05 PM on April 4, 2012 [3 favorites]


Anthropomorphic climate change? Like, the climate is changing in such a way that it resembles a human being?

Al Gore?
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 4:24 PM on April 4, 2012



It means the ozone hole is humanoid in shape.

A big, round, fat one.
posted by codswallop at 7:09 PM on April 4, 2012


If you'll read my post, I said rice and beans gets tiring.

Sure. My three-year-old wants crackers, cookies, ice cream, and juice (i.e. concentrated salt, fat, and/or sugar) for every meal too.

Think about the availability of non-meat edibles to people in the United States, particularly in small towns.

Small towns have much more free space to grow food that cities do.

banning it is pretty puritan

No, the FDA bans stuff all the time, if they consider it dangerous. You can't sell flavored tobacco and you can't ship raw milk over state lines, etc.

If "pink slime" truly contains something dangerous (e.g. if irradiation is shown to increase benzene to unsafe levels), they they should ban it.

I would prefer to ban meat-eating by law, so I generally support any sort of bans on any sort of meat, regardless of it's "dangerous" or not. My2c.
posted by mrgrimm at 10:56 AM on April 5, 2012


The United Nations is declaring 2013 the International Year of Quinoa (relevant part starts on page 8).
posted by fiercecupcake at 9:11 PM on April 5, 2012


So wait, with this quinoa business - as I understood it, first world demand for quinoa was making it unaffordable to the Bolivian peasants who actually depend on the stuff and thus helping to shift them onto a crappy grainy diet. Won't declaring a "year of quinoa" just make things worse for everyone by raising prices more? I've actually just recently decided to give up quinoa because when I buy it I'm taking it out of the mouths of indigenous people in Bolivia, and that means that I no longer enjoy eating it. (There really isn't any non-imported/non-dodgy-sourcing quinoa at this point, although I imagine you could have some quinoa collectives doing something like the Zapatista Coffee projects)

I feel like this poor-folks-vegetarianism-and-cooking thing gets misstated a lot in the interests of oversimplification, either to blame or to exonerate.

1. From a technical standpoint, you can be vegetarian or vegan fairly easily and fairly affordably even in places with comparatively lousy grocery stores - especially vegetarian. Once you've got eggs and cheese in the picture for protein along with milk and sour cream for flavor, you can easily cook tasty and nutritious vegetarian things. Even lousy inner city grocery stores have frozen spinach and canned tomatoes; vegetables aren't impossible either. (I say this as someone who lives in a food desert neighborhood and who has constructed many a meal from a random bodega.) Many of these things are one- or two-pot dishes.

You could also conceivably eat a low-meat diet under these circumstances (this is very similar to how I grew up). You'd use meat for flavoring most of the time rather than as the dominant source of protein.

I believe that it is technically possible to eat a healthy diet in many of the bad places of America.

2. The problem of "why don't people do this?" is much larger than mere food access, and I think that the left does itself a disservice in our framing. (Although food access is super important). My belief based on experience is that people eat badly less because of lack of food access than because of lack of time, lack of energy and the desperate need for a little self-medication via food. Eating well in lousy circumstances requires huge discipline on top of the huge discipline needed to get through a day of lousy miserable work and worry over money and long commutes via crowded buses and dirty or even dangerous housing*. If you're working class, you may very well also have untreated chronic pain or an untreated chronic illness, or be responsible for someone who does. That's a giant stressor too. Some cookies probably taste pretty damn good under those circumstances, and frozen pizza for dinner means that you have some time to sit down for a while.

I think, based on what I have seen and lived, that being poor in America is so terrifying and stressful that many people constantly have to blank their fears and miseries via food, alcohol, television and anything else they can get.

Most people most of the time will not be able to eat well until they are no longer trapped in a spider web of misery and exploitation.

*Many people imagine that they would have a LOT of willpower under those circumstances. As a middle class person who has class-sunk, let me tell you that you almost certainly will not.

3. For people who are self-organizing, who are treating this as a revolutionary matter rather than a question of reform, it may be useful to frame self-care as a revolutionary act. There's a local indigenous project here which talks very plainly about how the first world diet is a political problem and how finding the will and discipline to eat properly is actually an act of resistance by native people.
posted by Frowner at 7:31 AM on April 6, 2012 [5 favorites]


« Older Rain delays bring out the best in all of us   |   They Shoot Pigs, Don't They? Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments