Hunt

I know I've been blogging about public school lunch a lot lately, but I think it's a great example of everything that is wrong with the food system in America and what will happen if we allow the government to be in charge of more and more of the food system.

A few months ago I noticed that the USDA school lunch standards were restricting starchy vegetables (like potatoes), corn, and legumes. I neglected to blog about it, I suppose because I was so busy. Had the USDA read Gary Taubes?

Nope. Apparently, it was based on a report by the Institute of Medicine that recommended restricting them not for any problems with the foods themselves, but in order to encourage schools to try other vegetables. 

That seems a little sanctimonious to me, like something a moralistic grandmother would do. In the meantime, I don't see any USDA restrictions on fried food or chocolate milk. 

If you read the IOM recs, it's clear they are unable to think about food holistically. They are not seeing that it's not the potatoes or the chicken that's the problem, it's the fact that they are often breaded and/or fried. If only our problem was overeating potatoes and lima beans! And we could solve that be eating them less and making sure we get our chalk-colored fortified water, I mean 1% milk. It's laughable once you think about it. 

But never fear, don't forget the government guidelines are often a combination of paternalism and lobbying interests. This time, I guess they canceled each other out and the USDA abandoned the plan.

 Some people have occasionally asked me to comment on the Danish fat tax. I do have a background in economics, but I didn't comment at first because I don't live in Denmark and they won't let me live there even if I wanted to. Oh, and based on my time in Denmark, it seems like they are used to paying more for everything anyway and their consumption won't change much, except canola oil will be used in most commercial/institutional food, but that was already happening. Scandinavia taxes alcohol through the roof and makes it difficult to buy. When I studied abroad in Sweden I got an email from the UI Study Abroad office telling us that some American students in Italy were giving us a bad name by binge drinking. I laughed. There was no way I could out binge drink the Swedes. And alcohol there cost a pretty penny. 

But I was naive. Of course people are going to look at the fat tax in Denmark and consider whether or not such a tax would have an effect here. Marion Nestle has a letter in New Scientist:  "let us congratulate Denmark on what could be viewed as a revolutionary experiment. I can't wait to see the results."

Unfortunately it's not going to be a very enlightening experiment in regards to the fat tax because while the fat tax is getting a lot of press, it is part of a general tax reform program that is levying "sin taxes" on all sorts of things from sweets to tobacco.

I don't object to these taxes, sometimes portrayed as "sin taxes" or "pigouvian taxes", but I think they are usually quite disingenuous and do not do what they are supposed to do. As noted in Marion's letter, the powerful lobbies in Denmark (which have very little power compared to similar lobbies in the US) got their products exempted and it just so happens that these taxes encourage the consumption of canola, a crop that the government there has been promoting for years. 

And it prevents us from talking about the fact that it's not sugar or fat per se that's the issue, it's foods that people overeat and those are almost all processed foods. And the government has put together an institutional and regulatory structure that is an effective (and sometimes outright) subsidy on processed foods. From school purchasing to regulations requiring expensive high-capital equipment and facilities in order to sell food to the public, the whole system is rigged. And here is where I'm quite unlibertarian (or at least traditionally)- most of these industrial farms and processing facilities are allowed to destroy things they don't even own. If you don't own a river, you shouldn't have any right to destroy it. The EPA has some regulations that sort of say you can only dump so much toxic crap into various bodies of water, but they are anemic and poorly enforced. 

If you tax saturated fat, companies with large food-science departments aren't going to suffer. They are going to figure out how to get saturated fat low in their cookies while keeping other palatability markers high and people are going to continue to overeat them. Anyone ever try to eat the recommended serving size for Snackwells cookies or Skinny Cow popsicles? I certainly never could. 

I usually despise the use of the word privilege, since it's often used as a way to tell certain people their opinions aren't valid, but I think it's very much true that the companies that make industrial processed food are operating from a position of privilege. The regulatory structure is made for (and often by) them, they control political discourse through lobbyists, and they have contracts with the government to provide food to our schoolchildren and military, our jobs and lifestyles are often based around the assumption we will rely on processed foods. 

This fantastic post by Michael Ruhlman about Michael Pollan shows that Pollan is seeing this for what it is:

“They’ve drawn Michelle Obama into negotiations on improving the nutritional quality of processed foods,” he explained, “which is better than nothing, but her original, and to my mind, much more effective focus was simply on real food—fresh produce, cooking for your family etc. There is reason to doubt that ‘better for you’ processed foods will do us any good. Think about Snackwell’s—the same idea, during the low-fat campaign. It was ‘better for you’ yet we binged on better for you products and got fat on low-fat. The same thing could happen again.”
 

We can't fall into their trap, which is to reduce debate about food to "fat," "fructose," and other properties of food rather than to actually talk about the food itself. Food itself is more complicated and its constituents can act in unpredictable synergistic ways (like the economy).

I think we should recognize the immense privilege processed foods have in our society and acknowledge their negative impact, and consider how that can be dismantled, rather than taxing isolated properties of food. We should also end subsidies on processed foods, from agricultural subsidies to school food buying programs. I'm not hopeful about this being done on a national level myself though. I know it can be hard for people to let go of the idea that there is one right way to do something and we have to force everyone in the whole country to do it that way, but I think it would be better of more food policy issues were decided locally rather than federally. 

I'm going to call the paleo diet portrayed in the media the PaleoStrawman diet. It contains only lean meat and non-starchy vegetables. The meat comes from factory farms. The latest place it has showed up on is NPR, where anthropologist Barbara King contends that it is not the way to a healthy future for the world. She says she has interacted with paleo dieters online and has read Paleo magazine, but it doesn't show at all.

She says:

• Paleo means more factory farmed animals
• Paleo means more grains diverted from feeding the hungry to feeding livestock
• Paleo has a dearth of carbohydrates
• Paleo is a monolith
• Paleo is bad for a crowded planet

I think there are only a few holdouts in the lean meat camp. The no-starch camp is in its death throes as we speak, embracing a doctor who believes anyone who eats carbohydrates has diabetes and drfiting further into denialism territory. There is not a single paleo book on the market that I can think of that advocates eating grain-fed meat. PaleoStrawman has gotten considerable criticism from within the ancestral health community.

But in the end, it doesn't matter, because even if the paleo diet involved chomping down on grain-fed steaks all day, it would have nothing to do with our ability to feed the world. 

We all want to believe our diet has the power to change the world, but it does not. If every person in NYC chose to stop eating grain-fed meat today, it would not help people in Africa. When grain doesn't go to the feedlot, it doesn't get sent to Africa either. Farmers would chose to grow less grain or grow it for biofuels. We already produce enough food to feed the entire population of the world. What is hurting poor countries is political corruption and poor infrastructure. What poor countries need is good leaders and investment in infrastructure and education. 

As for vegetarianism and factory farming, sadly, the worst offenders in factory farming are vegetarian products such as dairy and eggs. Vegetarianism is more efficient compared to grain-fed meat partially because the industrialization of eggs and dairy has made these industries very productive. However, they are the most cruel and environmentally destructive animal industries besides the industrial hog farm industry. Jonathan Safran Foer, certainly no paleo dieter, recommends in Eating Animals that if you care about animals, conventional eggs and dairy are the first foods you eliminate.

As for the anthropology, it makes little sense to worry about australopithecines being vegetarian, a hominid with significantly different morphology. Or to worry about the local context very much. Of course people ate diverse diets then. You can eat a diverse locally-based paleo diet now. And for those of us in the North, it makes absolute sense to eat meat rather than trucked-in grain products. Solutions for world hunger do not have to involve the same diet for everyone. Sustainable solutions will be local solutions.

There was an excellent and rather balanced article by anthropologists on the paleo diet in Good magazine that I do recommend.

 A few years back when I was researching the ancient MacEwan clan of Scotland, I came across an interesting anecdote. Apparently a MacEwan, Elspeth McEwan was the last witch to be executed in Scotland:

The lonesome lady lived in a house, Bogha, on the farm at Cubbox. She was not just some simpleton peasant either. It is said by her contemporaries that she was possessed of a ‘superior education’. I have not found what it was that started off the campaign against her but it seems that she became a local target to blame for all that went wrong. When eggs were hard to come by and the hens were not laying it is said that she could coax them into producing tremendous quantities for market. Perhaps she just had a way with chickens, as some can tame wild animals, but whatever benefit this had at one time it held darker power aswell. For when the hens did not do so well in the future, it was of course attributed to Elspeth’s will. It was now her fault when the area was deprived of eggs. The birds were not the only livestock she affected. If cattle fell ill or didn’t milk well this must surely be her doing as well. Not only did she cast spells on her neighbours cattle, she stole from them too! For she had in her home a peg dowelled into the kipplefoot – or part of the roof beam – which drew milk from the cows on demand!

For her crimes of being agriculturally innovative, she was strangled and burned. 

What is quite facinating is that belief in witchcraft and fear of witches in incredible common across a diverse range of cultures. We are tremendouly lucky to live in an place and time where accusing people of being witches is not an acceptable way of dealing scapegoating people (though we've found new, but at least less deadly, ways). 

Colin Turnbull, who wrote about the Mbuti, who are quite peaceful otherwise, left out this rather unpleasant story from his book The Forest People, but it is in his field notes and talked about on this interesting website. Apparently Sau is an older woman who some people believe is responsible for killing a child with the "evil eye" (another common superstition across many many cultures). Because of this she is harassed, beaten, and finally banished. A better fate than Elspeth's, but still quite horrible.

Sick Societies mentions several societies that are quite dysfunctional because of witch fears, such as the Gebusi:

The Gebusi of Papua New Guinea are one of many small-scale societies whose fear of witches has been maladaptive. A very small society of about 450 people in a lowland rain forest area of southcentral New Guinea, the Gebusi were still beyond the influence of missions or government officials when Bruce Knauft studied them between 1980 and 1982.They were a remarkably noncompetitive, self-effacing, mutually deferential people who actively encouraged nonviolence. Yet they believed that all illness was caused by witchcraft, and their resulting attacks against presumed witches were so violent that their homicide rate was one of the highest ever recorded. Nearly one-third of all deaths among them were homicides, and almost all of the victims were suspected witches. Keith Otterbein has suggested that their practice of executing people thought to be witches was an adaptive “group survival” strategy because it controlled the malevolence of witches; but Knauft points out that their killing can hardly be considered adaptive because the population, small to begin with, was “dying out at an exceedingly rapid rate,” and their extremely high homicide rate continues to be an important cause of their population decline.

Anthropologists have argued about whether or not witchcraft might be adaptive or whether is it a pathology: 

Nevertheless, a few anthropologists have rejected this position. In the early 1960s Edward Norbeck rejected the received view of witchcraft as a benign and natural belief system with numerous socially positive functions; instead, he made much of witchcraft’s socially harmful consequences. Similarly, Melford Spiro interpreted the Burmese belief in witches as a form of psychological projection that led to cognitive distortion, and in 1974 Theodore Schwartz pointed out the dysfunctional effects of what he called the “paranoid ethos.” Schwartz speculated that a paranoid belief system was “… the bedrock psychopathology of mankind” that has persisted “over the span of human history as a substratum of potential pathology in all societies.” Schwartz believed that in Melanesian societies, especially Dobu, paranoid ideation with its extreme suspiciousness and hostility was so deeply entrenched that “… existence is at least uncomfortable, possibly highly stressful, and undoubtedly anxious.”

It is an interesting question to consider. I think that despite the fact that most of us do not believe in witches literally, that elements of it are persistant in our culture and could account for some antisocial behaviors today.