Historiann makes the most interesting comment I’ve seen on Michelle Obama’s dreadful anti-fat “Let’s Move” campaign, pointing out parallels to 18th century cleanliness campaigns:
…nineteenth-century bourgeois reformers identified the clean body as a site of virtuous citizenship. But of course clean clothing and clean bodies, and the means and ability to achieve them, were above all a marker of one’s class status, since it was only the middle-class who could afford to do laundry weekly (and/or have a “hired girl” in to do it), and only the wealthy who had running water, bathtubs, and the means to travel to fashionable spas for soaking in and drinking up healing mineral waters. Brown also tracks the convergence in the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century between discourses on spiritual or moral cleanliness, and bodily and household cleanliness. Early in the nineteenth century particular attention was paid first to children’s bodies as an index of their mother’s moral worth, and then later in the century as the bodies of poor and/or immigrant children came into contact on a regular basis with the bodies of middle-class and even elite children in public schools.
If we replace the words “unclean” with “fat,” and “cleanliness” with “thinness,” we’ll come very close to the rhetoric and language of the “Let’s Move” campaign.
Reading that reminded me of this quote about the politics of disgust from Martha Nussbaum (last quoted on this blog in 2004):
Thus throughout history certain disgust properties — sliminess, bad smell, stickiness, decay, foulness — have repeatedly and monotonously been associated with, indeed projected onto, people by reference to whom privileged groups seek to define their superior human status. The stock image of the Jew, in anti-Semitic propaganda, was that of a being with a disgustingly soft and porous body, womanlike in its oozy sliminess, a foul parasite inside the clean German male self. Hitler described the Jew as a maggot in a festering abscess, hidden away inside the apparently clean and healthy body of the nation.
Similar disgusting properties are traditionally associated with women. In more or less all societies, women have been vehicles for the expression of male loathing of the physical and the potentially decaying. Taboos surrounding sex, birth, menstruation — all express the desire to ward off something that is too physical, that partakes too much of the secretions of the body.
(Thanks to Maia for pointing out the Historiann article on her google reader feed!)
For a more straightforward response to Michele Obama’s campaign, I’d recommend Kate Harding’s article on Salon, and Paul Campos’ article in the New Republic.
[TRIGGER WARNING: If you’re triggered by the thinly-veiled contempt of anti-fat bigots towards fat people and fat activism, my advice is that you skip reading Shaun’s comments.]
The hysteria conveyed by you and others on this issue is misplaced . . . no, make that idiotic.
The Obama administration, among other things, wants to improve the nutritional value of school meals, help children become more active, improve food-product labeling, and decrease the number areas where it’s difficult and expensive for people to buy fresh goods.
They have decided to focus on overweight kids, as opposed to overweight 60-year-olds or overweight lobbyists.
What’s wrong with that?
Long story short, fats can kill. Any nurse will tell you that our hospitals are filled with people who have obesity-related ailments. And they’re just the ones who have health insurance.
Shaun, with all due respect, of the two of us I don’t think I’m the one behaving inappropriately. I’m not hysterical, nor an idiot, and neither are the people I quoted and linked to.
That your very first sentence here is to insult people for disagreeing with you suggests that you’re not someone I want to have a discussion with; in general, people who open discussions the way you do are a waste of my time. If you don’t want to be banned from making further posts here, please try to address me and other folks here with respect, even if you disagree with them. (If you’re not willing to treat people you disagree with in a respectful manner, then just go away now.)
If you want to know what’s wrong with Michelle Obama’s program, try reading the two links at the bottom of my blog post. Here’s a quote from Campos:
Amp, you, Campos and Harding said it better than I could. Thanks. I really appreciate what Historiann and Nussbaum reveal to us about class and scapegoating, which lurks beneath all this.
It is too easy to blame individuals, or their parents, for societal shortcomings. Or nature’s–anybody remember the genetic factor?
Obama seems to have a good idea, but she needs to work on the language/imagery.
[TRIGGER WARNING: If you’re triggered by the thinly-veiled contempt of anti-fat bigots towards fat people and fat activism, my advice is that you skip reading Shaun’s comments.]
First of all, Amp, try tucking it in. Being thin skinned does not advance the discussion.
Second, I did read both links and found the underlying reasons for opposing trying to deal through modest means with an immense public-health issue, like your own reasons, to be . . . well, I stick by idiotic.
Do we now live in a society where being stigmatized is worse than the cause of your stigmatization, in this instance having attention called to you because you’re a 13-year-old female who stands 4-foot-11 and weighs 150 pounds and fills her face with sweets from the time she rises until the time she rolls into bed? Apparently so.
Please explain to me why trying to help this young teen through the various means proposed by the Obamas is socially unacceptable?
Please explain why community — schools and organizations and public-health groups such as they exist today — should not make an effort to intervene before this person becomes a 53-year-old female who stands 5-foot-4 and weighs 350 pounds and suffers from heart disease and diabetes? If not for her own good but for the rest of us who will have to pay for the immense costs of maintaining her?
Finally, and just so you don’t think I am anti-fat person or something, I am well aware that many people are predisposed genetically to obesity and the health issues than inevitably plague them. But many more are not. Let’s give them a little help, okay?
Way to miss the point, shaun.
shaun, the fact that you focus on the fat children’s possible nutritional and movement deficits, that you emphasis the fat child who rolls out of bed and eats sweets all day, shows you are more concerned with shaming than health. If you cared about health, you’d also be worried about children who diet themselves (or are forced by their parents to diet) into malnutrition and illness, children who are thin but still can’t run a lap, children who are thin even though they eat sugar all day. Thin kids have health issues too, but they are invisible to people focused on shaming fat people.
Way to miss the point, Kai Jones.
My blog, my rules. If you don’t like it, then there’s an internet full of other blogs that will cater to your preferences. Go to one of them.
Do you go to other people’s living rooms uninvited and say “I’m going to put my feet up on your coffee table and not use a coaster and smoke indoors, and if you say that’s not how you want to do things in your home, then you’re thin-skinned?” Because that’s what you’re doing here.
(I’ll respond to more substantive points as I have time — maybe in 12 or 14 hours, if I’m not too tired by then. Apologies for that. As blog regulars know — but of course, you have no way of knowing, Shaun — I’m currently working on a project with a deadline racing at me like a train, so I have to severely limit my blogging time.)
shaun – In two words, “Bite me.”
The NFL is doing the right thing in encouraging kids to get out and run around and play. This is independent of weight; a fat kid who runs around all day playing is healthier than a skinny or normal-weight kid who sits inside playing video games.
Thanks so much for your links and compliments, and great pickup on the Nussbaum quotation–I’ll have to look that up.
Just to be clear, the book I was reading last week that led me to make the connection between nineteenth-century reform directed at hygene and twenty-first century reform aimed at weight/diet was Kathleen Brown’s Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (2009). So, credit where credit is due: I haven’t done research into these problems myself, but rather was just struck by the similarities in the contemporary rhetoric on weight and diet to the nearly 200-year old rhetoric on domestic and personal cleanliness that Brown argues is central to the constuction of the modern body.
What your commenter Shaun doesn’t understand is that my post, and yours too, are more about class, authority, and power than they are about individual fatness or thinness. The less said about him the better–even if one feeds the trolls apples and oranges instead of twinkies, it’s still feeding the trolls.
(Disemvoweled by Amp.)
n mr try nd thn ’m gng t g kck th sknny ss f th frst s-thn-s-t-b-nrxc wmn tht rn nt, nd thr r slw f thm n th cllg cmps whr tl. Th pst bv, th lnks nd th dscssn nvtd by ths blg n hvng cmmnt ptn (s ppsd t sgn n th lvng rm dr tht sys N Ft n Th Cff Tbl s vrwght yng ppl. By my lghts, ths s mjr nd lrgly nddrssd hlth crss (jst n f mny nvlvng yng ppl, t b sr). Wht frs m s tht ppl r wllflly dstrtng tht crss nt dscssns rgrdng bdy mg, stgmtztn nd thr thr pt pltclly crrct css. shld nt xpctd nythng dffrnt frm blg tht rglrly ftrs mnd-nmbngly lng thmb sckrs n bdy mg, stgmtztn nd . . . wll, y gt th d. Vst frsts f bndwdth r dstryd whnng bt pt css nd thn lshng t t ppl lk myslf whn thy dr t chllng yr hlr-thn-th vwpnts. t s sd dy ndd n r frcts scty whn nttrng bt clss, thrty nd sch bcms mr mprtnt thn ddrssng hlth ss — nd s nplgtclly sd t psh bck t th ffrts f ths wh wld lk t ddrss tht ss hd n nd nt ss bckwrds.
Aaron, I love you man, but please don’t tell other comment-writers “bite me” on “Alas.” Especially on threads when I’m telling people to be respectful. :-)
Historiann, thanks! And thanks for the info.
Shaun, it’s obvious that you’re not willing to treat other people with respect — and your funny “joke” about kicking thin women’s asses isn’t funny, and is misogynistic. In short, you’re not going to have a reasonable discussion. For that reason, please leave this blog and don’t come back. Thanks.
I have a question that doesn’t address what Ms. Obama has said or why but does touch upon the overall issue.
As you know I’m active in Scouting. Almost every year, about this time of year, kids graduate from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts. Our Boy Scout Troop is fairly active. We go camping almost every month and the activities are … well, active. Hiking, rock climbing, sledding, etc., etc. We’re a lot more active than most of the phases of the kids’ lives. In this neighborhood most of the kids go from school to after-school activity to homework to X-box. They spend very little time in unstructured or self-structured play. Almost every year we have a kid join who is a) heavy and b) unfit. He has a hard time keeping up with the activities, and eventually drops out. I’m trying to figure out what I can do about this without changing the program to the point that the more fit kids get bored. Any suggestions?
Man, Amp, thanks for handling that commenter (I appreciate how you and your other mods run this blog so much) but I’m sitting here feeling punched in the gut because I was a 13-year-old who was 4’11 and 125 pounds, but was constantly watching my food/having it watched for me by my mother, eating fat-free yogurt and Healthy Choice snacks, doing crappy 80s workout videos, all in an effort to make my non-conforming body conform. And at the same time, unable to find a physical activity that I could really enjoy because I had been so shamed as being “fat” and “clumsy” growing up that I felt I was unfit to play soccer, take dance classes, do gymnastics, play volleyball, or any of the other things my slimmer peers did.
Now as a 5’1, 190-pound woman, I eat the healthiest spectrum of foods of any of my friends (I over-spent in the produce section at Berkeley Bowl last week and am desperately trying to stay ahead of the wave of vegetables before any of them go off), have overcome some of my self-image issues around dance, and yet it still hurts to know that people like Shaun figure I probably “roll out of bed and stuff my face with sweets all day.” I’m so sick of my body being up for public debate. And, I read that post at Historiann via a link from another website, and the issues the source material raises are dead on.
Provide options for the kid to be active until he starts to be in pain, and then for him to be able to stop without being embarrassed. Good luck figuring out how to do that, of course. But he’s not going to keep hiking if the hike is 20 minutes of fun, 30 minutes of hard work, and 1 hour of excruciating–and mentioning any of the problems (or having them pointed out) is too humiliating to bear.
This anti-fat campaign for children has bothered me ever since I hear that this would be Mrs. O’s “cause” (not unlike Mrs. Ray-gun’s “just say no” “cause”).
I’ve watched students target other students — and drive the child out of school or to kill herself/himself. The devote 0bama followers will take this as their cue to re-educate their peers.
When I was a kid children could be very mean to each other — but this generation goes way beyond anything that I’ve seen as a student or a counselor in high school or grade schools.
The poor children can’t wear the trendy clothes — and poor families can’t afford to send the kids lunches made from Mrs. 0 approved organic food.
Another blogger suggested that Mrs. 0’s target should be the high fructose corn syrup found in nearly everything. That would be a great place to start. How healthy can all that un-natural sweetener be for any body? This same blogger also suggested that breaks and recess time be used for athletic skill building — turn this into something positive.
We’ve already seen girls being driven to kill themselves because they sent a photo of their boobs to boyfriends — photos were shared and the girls were shamed and harassed to DEATH.
Mrs. 0’s self centered, narcissistic stunt will make fat children a target of their classmates. I don’t want to see more children hurt — merely for the ego of an political wife.
Give that kid a bike [and trail maps.] Tai chi class, maybe? Swimming? Gardening? Other physical activities? And same thing for the thin but “unfit” kid. Make sure that his intellectual or artistic skills are recognized. Maybe he [or she} can teach you how to build catapults and have junk-food-tossing contests. Now if we just had something like that for trolls, we’d be set…
Barry – I apologize, and realize that a banhammer is more powerful than me not being passive-aggressive.
To reiterate, the White House and the NFL are some of the few constructive players here – it’s shocking that kids need to be encouraged to get out and play. In *my* day, we were running around all day long until our parents told us to come home for dinner or when it was dark.
RonF,
My thought would be to work with the cub scout masters whose troops feed into your troops to design a pre-boy scout curriculum for anyone who wants to continue on into your troop but feels that they might need some strength and endurance training to help them get up to speed. Work with the cub scout masters to ensure that scouts who decide to get pre-boy scout training are not harassed by the other scouts (my short experience of scouts was that scout masters (at least in the late 80’s in NC) tolerated an obscene amount of scout to scout harassment).
This is similar to a recent movement in middle school and high school transitions, where teachers work to identify the students who are going to be most at risk of dropping out, and start working intensively with them before they start to fail.
RonF, is it possible to have one vigorous activity and one less so – some of the kids are rock climbing, some of them are doing a less-strenuous hike? I expect this would partly depend on how many adults are available to supervise.
What do you do to encourage physical activity between camping trips? Are inexpensive swimming lessons available in your area?
The Obamas want to promote health as a way to reduce weight.
You seem, as usual, to be more focused on preventing any theoretical stigmatizing of fat people than on making any significant inroads to health. So do some of the other writers on this. (This doesn’t entirely surprise me, as it’s called the “fat acceptance” movement and not the “let’s make everyone healthy” movement.)
But of course, promoting health isn’t that simple, either. in fact, the last thread I was in (on Feministe, not here) which talked about health quickly came to a conclusion that a whole lot of “health is good” stuff was then simply ableist or privileged, because some people can’t be healthy.
I’m trying, I’m really trying, to understand your position. But sometimes I feel incredibly frustrated at what seems to be a death spiral of PC, in which it seems impossible to actually DO anything for fear of somehow offending or damaging some subgroup of the general population.
(This doesn’t entirely surprise me, as it’s called the “fat acceptance” movement and not the “let’s make everyone healthy” movement.)
I thought it was called the “Health At Every Size” movement. That’s the disconnect, Sailorman. Access to fresh fruits and vegetables, lean meats and fish, and a general diet that is low in fat (especially animal fat) will improve the health and/or well being of most people, even those who cannot obtain a “healthy body” due to pre-existing conditions. Movement of one’s body to the extent that one can (think: “spoons analogy”) will improve the health of most people, even those who are never going to attain goals that would impress the local “boot camp” personal trainer. Meditation and stretching to the extent that one can will help improve physical and mental health. There are good points to Michelle Obama’s plan when it comes to improving school lunches and the like.
But the focus on size is a problem, because all those healthy goalposts don’t usually come with a change in size, or much of a change in size. I’m a relatively thin woman, and hearing the talk about Malia’s body bothered me, because it reminded me of when I was in the fifth grade—I entered it weighing 68 pounds, but entered puberty and was over 80 pounds when I left. I was constantly reminded by my family at that time how I’d be a “tub of lard” if I didn’t “watch it”. My “weight gain” was entirely about puberty, and not about overeating or lack of exercise. A lot of other women went through the same experience. Fat-shaming doesn’t just happen to fat people, and it’s all wrapped up with society’s anxiety about female bodies and female sexuality (see also: “Fat is a Feminist Issue”).
Sailorman,
I think the point is that you can DO the same things that Ms. O is proposing without making it about making kids thin. What these commentators are saying is – Ms. O’s program is (at least rhetorically) using FAT as a proxy for UNHEALTHY and THIN as a proxy for HEALTHY. Doing so is counterproductive because 1) they are not very good proxies and 2) even if they were good proxies, making it about fat/thin makes it harder for fat kids who are unhealthy to get healthy by focusing them on the wrong goal.
Sailorman – the extra effort involved in doing something that benefits people, really benefits them, and not in a way that shames or stigmatizes them while making it possible to eat well and get adequate exercise, takes time, effort, and considerable stamina.
Some suggestions on how this is done are up thread in response to RonF’s inquiry. I have sympathy for your impatience, but I wish you had more empathy for the people who are actually stigmatized, not theoretically stigmatized, by hasty fix the fat kids programs.
If the focus is on the size and shape of the children who are above the average size then it’s all about them and their difference. However, if the focus was on all the children, how good it feels to eat well, to break a sweat while exercising, to smile into the face of a fellow teammate on the field or in the classroom after accomplishing something together, well, that’s feels like something worth working towards.
Try focusing on that and maybe some of your PC heebie jeebies will go for a walk. Just a thought.
Charles S., working with the Pack that sends kids to us is not a bad idea. I’ll work on that. Of course, as I think about it, part of the problem there is that parents and Cubs work closely together and getting the kids involved in fitness activities (e.g., hikes) would require the parents to get involved in such. Many of the parents have fitness problems as well. But it’s still a very good suggestion and I’ll take it up with the Cubmaster and the Webelos Den Leader.
Ledasmom, that’s also a good idea. As it happens, and as you might expect, rock climbing demands a higher level of adult supervision than most activities. But your idea does have general applicability and I’ll see if we can do that in program planning.
Fitness between trips? Hm. Not a lot. I’ll have to think about that one. I’ve always advised the parents to not let their kids play video games and force them outside. When they ask me “how do you keep your son away from the video game console” I say “I never bought one”, which gets me an incredulous look from them. Based on that reaction and how the kids act at meetings and campouts it has become apparent that the parents in my neighborhood rarely use the word “no” to their kids. Ooohh, but that’s another rant and I’ll spare you.
Mandolin, this all ties in to “it’s not a fat issue, it’s a fitness issue” and how do you get kids fit without shaming them because they’re overweight. I happen to be involved in a program where kids and fitness are paramount and I deal with this question constantly. I see kids grossly out of shape. I see kids shamed by their peers because they’re overweight.
That Michelle Obama has the wrong end of the stick on this is no surprise. Childhood obesity has been in the media a lot and there’s been an emphasis on the fact that it’s prevalent in poor black populations. My guess is that she’s found a parade to jump in front of and so she’s working with the issue as it’s been defined in the media instead of thinking it through. I’ll bet that using her own kids is a marketing technique that tries to build a connection to parents by emphasizing that “I’m a mom just like you” instead of “I’m the First Lady and this is my cause.”
It’s important not to use “thin” to indicate fitness, and even more important not to use it as evidence of being able to do a particular activity with comfort, ease, or skill. A heavy kid who is out of shape, and can’t keep up, tends to stand out in memory, because we all see so many media images of fat=unfit. A thin kid who is unfit, or unskilled, or even invisibly disabled, can be a lot less noticeable and a lot less memorable.
The important thing for kids of all sizes is to focus on developing fitness and skills, not on weight loss. (By “fitness,” I mean strength, stamina, and flexibility. I need to specify, now that I occasionally see the word used for BMI.) For activities like hiking, where you’re going someplace, I’d suggest making the route short enough for weaker kids to handle…but have an extra loop for more advanced scouts. You can restrict it, the way you restrict deep water or boating to scouts who can pass a swim test. (It doesn’t matter much if you test speed when you really care about endurance. A kid who KNOWS he is badly out of shape won’t take the test.) Supervising 2 groups is usually manageable, and many of the less-fit kids will become more fit with practice.
For activities they do over and over without going out of sight, like rock climbing or sledding, being unfit would probably just mean the kid needs to rest more often. Why can’t each kid (or each buddy pair) decide for themselves when they need to rest, without affecting the others?
I’ve moved some of the comments about kids and parents these days to a new thread.
Part of what I like about the original post here is that, while exposure to dirt was once thought to endanger kids’ (and adults’) health, we now know that not only is that not the case, but that restricting contact with dirt harms the development of the immune system, and that regular dirt-exposure (especially to soil) even reduces the incidence of depression.
Likewise, one day society will realize that not only is being fat not harmful to children, it is part of an essential stage of growth for many kids, and that severely restricting dietary fat intake damages growing brains and nervous systems, and that childhood food-restriction messes up psychological health for the rest of one’s life.
(Of course, I fear we may have to find another target for our psychodynamic projection mechanisms in order for us to reach this stage. :-( )
Why can’t each kid (or each buddy pair) decide for themselves when they need to rest, without affecting the others?
Some will do that. Others will see their inability to keep up as “failure”. Unfortunately that cohort has been brought up to see “failure” as = “fault” and it’s something that their parents have done their very best to ensure that their children have avoided experiencing. So when they experience it with us it’s an unpleasant novelty. Their reaction is to want to avoid the entire activity or even the entire environment.
I’ve read through a few of the links, and the thing that strikes me the most isn’t even spoken on – how about giving kids more time to eat?
My mom commented on it every time we talked about school lunch that it was only 30 minutes long. She felt like it was hardly enough time to get through the line, let alone chew your food. As I get older, it’s funny to me when I see much of the literature pointing to hunger cues and eating slower to allow your body time to process the signals it’s receiving. Plus, it’s stress-relieving. Mom, looks like you were right (again.)
It still gripes me about the need to pin this on fat rather than healthy. Shouldn’t an America-wide program focus on something proven to work rather than shaming people about food?
but that restricting contact with dirt harms the development of the immune system
Or as my wife said (and as we applied to our children), “Every kid has to eat their pound of dirt by the time they’re four.”
and that severely restricting dietary fat intake damages growing brains and nervous systems
Fats are made up of glycerin and fatty acids (plus some other stuff, but those are the main components). It’s a little known fact that there are numerous kinds of fatty acids in human fats just as there are about 20 kinds of amino acids in human proteins, and that some of them are essential – in other words, a) you need them to build and maintain certain systems in your body, and b) you can’t synthesize them from scratch. Restricting fat intake without attention to this can permanently harm a growing body.
I think this is a really oversimplified view of the situation. At the time that the 19th century cleanliness campaigns were taking place, the germ theory of disease was just beginning to be accepted, and the vast majority of people did not have access to things we now consider basic necessities, like running water and flushing toilets. So yeah, some exposure to soil and not using antibacterial products all over your house are good things. Not washing your hands after you go to the bathroom and having one latrine for an entire tenement house are NOT good things, and yes, they really do spread disease. Similarly, some fat intake in important for healthy development and some people are healthy and fat, but the problem of kids being very sedentary and eating large amounts of processed foods is a real problem (and not just for the ones who get fat from it) and has real health consequences.
The failure was not in somehow failing to realize that some dirt exposure was a good thing. The problem was in making the solutions all about individual choice and individual morality, without looking at the larger structural issues that contribute to those individual choices. Diseases associated with hygiene stopped being a major public health problem in most of this country when indoor plumbing became the norm even in low-income housing (thank you, government regulation), not when mothers somehow became better people. Similarly, if you are concerned about kids not playing, kids eating crap, look to our educational policies, look to which crops get agricultural subsidies and which don’t, look to our city planning, instead of wagging a finger at fat kids.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t real problems out there, and that somehow this whole thing has just been fabricated for our moral satisfaction.
Chingona – I agree with most of what you say, but I’m still not quite sure if I would put underlying problem in the same way you do. Is there really a problem with sedentary kids? I’m sure I read something really recently showing how ridiculously framed an article about kids being sedantary was and how it actually showed the opposite (I thought it was on the fat nutritionist, but I can’t find it). Also I don’t think processed food is necessarily a problem – to say it’s the problem is to suggest that adding food to work for free improves it in some way – which gets back to the virtuousness hting. Surely the problem is not what people eat, but what they can’t eat? And calling some food crap, rather than saying ‘it’s a structural problem that people don’t have the resources to eat nutritious food they like’ is to get back to the individualised nature of hte problem.
RonF – I agree with the other suggestions people have made. In particular, do physical activity between hikes that people can modify to fit their own level. I can see your point that kids will see resting as a failure, but as the pack-leader surely you have an opportunity to change that framing. For example, you could say “hey one of the most important things when hiking is that you rest when you need to rest. If you don’t rest when you need to rest you might damage your body. So one of the things we want you to learn is to recognise your bodies cues and figure out when you need a break.” Then when someone takes a break say “good job for realising you needed a rest.”
I think a general
Maia: yes, on hikes for example we will have the leader schedule rest stops where we drink up, check feet for hot spots, etc. There’s also the “rest before you’re exhausted and drink before you get thirsty or you’ve waited too long” meme that we push.
Another thing is that when we go rock climbing not every kid climbs all the time. Do a couple of climbs or a couple of rappels, great. Then if you want to just climb around the rocks some that’s fine. Also, a “climb” basically means that you get off the ground. You don’t have to go all the way to the top to get credit for a successful climb. We stress that you are free to accept or reject any level of challenge you want, and any negative commentary from the other Scouts is quickly dealt with. It’s not just because it’s a violation of the Scout Law (A Scout is friendly, a Scout is courteous), it’s also an issue of safety. Having a kid over-extend himself to try to prove something is unsafe.
The big fitness problem with rock climbing is getting up the trail to the top of the rocks to start in the first place. You have to climb up 500 feet up rocks to the point that at some places you have to use your hands as well as your feet. There’s no other way up. Once we were climbing up the trail on a hot May day and there was a group of college geology students from the U of Wisc. going up. One young man who turned out to be an offensive lineman for them was quite heavy, was overheating badly and had no water. I gave him a liter of my water (I carry 3 liters up the hill and usually drink all 3), told him to sit down and rest and then caught up with the leader – who was oblivious – and frnaklyi gave him a piece of my mind for leading a bunch of kids up that trail without any consideration for their safety. He had no first aid kit, most of them had no or inadequate water, and he wasn’t paying any attention to how they were doing on the trail. I was pissed (for your Brits that means “angry”, not “drunk” in the U.S.).
Nit to pick: Cubmaster for Cub Scouts, Scoutmaster for Boy Scouts. Cub Scouts don’t do hiking too much – but maybe we should do some ….
Maia – I think some of this is that I was writing quickly and speaking somewhat colloquially, but that may have resulted in me not being clear. And on some of it, we may simply disagree, unless I’m misreading you now.
Also I don’t think processed food is necessarily a problem – to say it’s the problem is to suggest that adding food to work for free improves it in some way – which gets back to the virtuousness hting.
I’m assuming you mean adding work to food for free.
When I talk about processed food … obviously, all food that we consume is processed in some way, mostly through cooking. And believe me, I understand the labor-value in food. I know from very first-hand experience the time savings (and time is money and opportunity costs) that is represented in canned beans or a sack of corn meal bought at the store, instead of shucked and boiled and ground and sifted and ground and sifted again before you can even start cooking your actual food, the time savings of not having to raise your own animals and render their fat yourself or harvest your own olives and press the oil so you have something to cook your food in.
But yes, I do think that rice is better for you than a caramel-flavored puffed rice snack, and yes, I do think boiled corn on the cob flavored with lime juice and ground chile is better for you than a pack of Dorito’s. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but I’m wrong because of our inadequate understanding of nutrition, not because of any relation the question has to anyone’s virtuousness.
Surely the problem is not what people eat, but what they can’t eat?
I’m not sure I get the distinction you’re trying to make. I think it’s both/and, not either/or, and I’m not sure of the purpose of the “surely” in that sentence. If someone eats at McDonald’s two times a day, chances are it’s going to effect their health. There might be a whole host of structural reasons why they’re eating at McDonald’s twice a day, but at least in the United States, for some of those people those structural reasons don’t include not having money to buy other kinds of food or the ability to cook it. So I’m not sure how to say that they “can’t” eat other food, which is not to say that I am unsympathetic with the reasons they eat that food or why they find it hard to impossible to stop and it certainly isn’t to say they are bad people.
In the case of kids, which is the focus of this campaign, in the United States we have a lot of school districts that have sold franchise space in their school cafeterias to fast food restaurants (and maybe you know this – I’m not trying to be condescending – it just seems like a level of detail that might not make it into the larger world). So, technically, the kids have the “choice” to eat whatever healthy options are being served or to eat the fast food with the money their parents give them. It’s not that they “can’t” eat the better food. It’s that, well, in my own opinion, as a parent, that’s not a “choice” that should be put before an eight-year-old on a daily basis. And I also think the “choice” of letting in the fast food restaurants or cutting school programming is not a choice that our school boards should have been faced with.
And calling some food crap, rather than saying ‘it’s a structural problem that people don’t have the resources to eat nutritious food they like’ is to get back to the individualised nature of hte problem.
I don’t think that calling some food crap is reinforcing the individualized nature of the problem. Not all food is created equal in its nutritional value. To go back to our 19th century example, just because there were a whole host of structural issues that made it really damn hard to keep fecal matter out of the water supply, doesn’t mean that keeping fecal matter out of the water supply didn’t have a relation to people’s health.
Obviously, the connection between diet and obesity and obesity and health and diet and health is significantly more complicated and less well understood than the dynamics of a cholera outbreak, but whatever the impact of what we eat and how we eat on our health, it doesn’t somehow stop functioning because people face huge structural challenges in improving their diets. I can list 10 structural reasons why someone might eat food that isn’t very good for their health. None of them transform that food into nutritious, healthy sustenance.
Similarly, if you are concerned about kids not playing, kids eating crap, look to our educational policies, look to which crops get agricultural subsidies and which don’t, look to our city planning, instead of wagging a finger at fat kids.
This is the aspect that most annoys me about all this, campaigning against obesity is a way of not dealing directly with consequences, real or imagined of societies drift towards prioritizing certain things at the expense of others.
I personally share many of Maia’s doubts, but even if I didn’t, this endless using of fat children/ people to stand for things that are a little too difficult or unpleasant to face directly deserves criticism.
Not about kids in general, but in the “thin” vs. “fit” paradigm in general – have you had a look at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue this year? Most of the models look like they usually do. Not emaciated, but thin. Except for one, who’s got pretty heavy hips and legs compared to the rest. Somehow, though, I figure she – Lindsay Vonn, who as of yesterday holds the Olympic Gold Medal in the Women’s Downhill – is likely the fittest swimsuit model in that magazine by far.
And over to the last open thread to respond to RonF I go.
Many diseases caused by squalor killed easily (and brutally) in the Victorian times, back then there actually was a point to keeping things and bodies clean[1], it really saved lives — and it still does. MRSA for example is rampant now in the UK, and the reason it exists is insufficient hygiene, personal and procedural.
The difference is, that almost anyone can keep themselves reasonably clean, but almost no-one manages to lose weight. So, I have to defend the Victorians here, true, they asked a lot, but at least it was achievable and affordable to comply (and good for you).
In another post this week, you claim that the US begrudges people health care — I live in a place where health care is is ‘free’, but when you’re overweight, you are not eligible for many treatments, operations and medications — but the whopping monthly tax for the ‘free health care’ is still deducted from your pay.
Michelle’s obesity harassment campaign is only the beginning — once Obama’s health care is in in place, fat people will get blackmailed by their surgeons and doctors with impossible requests to lose weight, which inevitable they’ll fail, and conveniently, this is seen as ‘refusing treatment’, thus, their it’s their own fault and it’s only right that precious resources are not wasted on the undeserving and unproductive, at least so goes the popular sentiment here.
So, you’re very right to be weary of the entire dog and pony show!
—
[1] And is was really dirty at times, people shared their hovels with livestock, wore the same clothes(aka vectors) until they fell apart and touched things they ate and their wounds with filthy hands. Many people were in the same state that you see alcoholic homeless in nowadays, that was normal back then, not to mention the filth (horse and human poo) on the streets which exacerbated the grim problems.
I live in a place where health care is is ‘free’, but when you’re overweight, you are not eligible for many treatments, operations and medications — but the whopping monthly tax for the ‘free health care’ is still deducted from your pay
Like Heinlein said, TANSTAAFL.
There is a difference between losing and not gaining (weight, fat, unfitness, etc.), just like there is a difference between quitting smoking and never starting to smoke in the first place.
One is curative. The other is preventative.
There may be decent arguments against “curing” obesity, even if you think it is a problem. The arguments, whether or not they’re true, basically boil down to the concept that the cure is worse than the disease.
But, of course, prevention is different. It’s easier, for one thing. And cheaper. And safer.
Frankly I’d be willing to completely ignore everyone who was already unhealthy (if they wanted to be ignored) and just concentrate on preventing everyone else from BECOMING unhealthy.
But that is where we run into problems. While in my mind, extra body fat occupies a slot which can at best be described as “you can compensate for it,” it still falls into the category of “things which you’re better off not having, if you can avoid it.”
I’ve never seen a lot of clarity on this issue from FA or HAAS folks.
Amp, perhaps you can clarify: Do you think having a high %age of body fat is beneficial? Do you think it’s neutral, by which I mean that the health consequences are completely irrelevant without any other need to compensate for it by, say, exercising more? Or do you think it’s negative?
I’ve never seen a lot of clarity on this issue from FA or HAAS folks.
I started being concerned with my weight-actually it was how I was eating- before I was fat aged 7 years (yes children think too). I still became plump, fat and then fatter.
Many others were taken to weight watchers as children by their parents etc.
Do you see what I’m saying? A lot of us, possibly even most are the product of childhood fat prevention. It is genuinely difficult for me to say that I would have been any fatter if I hadn’t bothered, but I certainly would have been a better more productive person that’s for sure.
So I’m afraid your spilitting of prevention/ after the fact is yet another of your romantic notions.
This may sound quaint, Sailorman, but if you could just believe that I and others in FA actually value our lives and health as much as you-for myself, my gratitude for my good fortune in health thusfar is boundless- maybe you wouldn’t fall into so many traps.
Now I’d like to as you a question, when are people like you going to ask yourself why you need to believe things that are so meanspirited in order to shore up your position?
From what I can tell of you, personally, it seems to go against your grain, as far as I can tell. What is it about this that makes you betray the spirit of yourself so readily?
Sailorman – there at least two approaches to that questions. One is “when it comes to fat politics it doesn’t matter”. Fat acceptance (not how I’d describe my politics ) is not predicated on the health status of fat. It is predicated on the notion that fat people are people.
But there’s another sort of answer which is to say we are even more ignorant on the effect of a steady weight vs. weight gain than we are on other matters of health and body size. Just like we don’t know how to make a fat person a thin person, we don’t know how to stop a thin person from becoming a fat one, or a fat person from becoming a fatter one. One day we may have answers to those questions, at least for some people. They questions of fact, not questions of politics. But at the moment there are no scientific answers to them, and therefore it’s not something that can be argued on the level of fact.
Chingona – I don’t know whether we have substantive disagreements. But I definitely think we disagree on how important it is to be specific about what you mean when talking about food. I do think the language around this really matters. I was serious when I say that I think that reflexive tut-tutting about processed food is about the idea that unpaid labour needs to be added to food to . And if that’s not what you have a problem with – then why reinforce that idea? Because to use the example of fecal matter in the water, if that’s the problem then talking about whether working-class women are washing enough isn’t helping.
But I’ll try and articulate my view a little more so we can see if it’s actual disagreement.
My understanding of the processing involved in the examples you give is that they add extra, calories without adding much in the way of other nutrients (and in the case of corn in the cob vs. doritos probably remove nutrients from the food, although that’s less likely to be the case with white rice vs. puffed rice). I’m guessing that’s intentional and that’s the kind of processing you’re objecting to. Is that a problem? Not if your main nutritional priority is enough calories (and that’s an important first step). For other nutritional needs – eating these foods does not stop you from eating other foods which meet the rest of your nutritional needs. If you’re putting the dorritos in guacamole, salsa, and bean dip, then you’re probably getting quite a good array of nutrients, for a single meal. So while I’ll give you that the corn you described will provide a greater array of nutrients than the doritos – whether that’s a problem depends entirely on the rest of your diet.
Which gets to my big point about food, which is that individual foods get assigned virtue, or lack of virtue, in the abstract. All food (except maybe diet sodas) have some nutritional value. It is not intrisically healthy or intrinsically crap – it is only useful to talk about food in relationship to a particular bodies needs at a particular time. Which means taking into account the rest of the diet, and also your body’s physical state, your social/emotional/etc feeling about food, and so on (I wrote about this probably more coherently a few years ago).
To be more concise than I’m usually able to be – I think it’s in the interests of those who want to blame individuals for their health to talk about the problems of what people eat. I think it is more accurate, and more in line with my politics – to talk about what people don’t eat because they don’t have the resources. That’s why I think it matters – that’s why I think the rhetoric of crap food – rather than – in the example of chain restaurants in schools ‘food that is made for profit rather than nutrtional value’ or ‘limited array of food’ is a problem