Love

 Some people have told me I should read the latest diet book craze, particularly since I am skeptical, but having read dozens of diet books for the purpose of reviewing them, I rarely derive any pleasure from them. It's also rare that I actually learn anything new from them and in fact they often infuriate me with their emphasis on weight loss and tendency to play fast and loose with science. I think that all you need to know about eating healthy can be found on the internet and reading should be something more intellectually illuminating. 

One book I've been absolutely enamored with is 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. I knew about some of the ideas in this book already from courses I had taken in archeology and environmental science, but Charles C. Mann does a fantastic job using them to tantalize and shift pre-conceived notions about what the Americans were like in the past. It also touches on two of my favorite subjects: agricultural regression and agroforestry. Much like The Art of Not Being Governed, it challenges linear models of development, as well as Romantic ideals of the "noble savage" and "wilderness." I hope to do a full review of this. 

I've also been re-reading Heart and Blood, one of my favorites, because I'd like to give it a full review as a more scientific and humanistic alternative to The Vegetarian Myth. I also have some pipe dreams about joining the hunting season, but they are pipe dreams since I haven't had much time for target practice and by the time I'm in the Midwest it will be rather late in the season. I've picked up a copy of my old hunting teacher Jackson Lander's Deer Hunting For Food. 

I've also been reading The Lights in The Tunnel, which imagines a future in which most jobs are automated. It's available for free as a PDF.  And The Last Child in the Woods, which is about the human need for nature and why our children's growing alienation from it is a huge problem. And The Tribal Imagination by Robin Fox. I'm probably also reading five million other books, but such is the burden of ADD. I just finished the complete stories of HP Lovecraft and most of Flannery O' Connor's short stories, which makes me sad, but I will find new short story collections to read. 

 When watching the show about the men of Vanuatu, I became curious about the state of women on Tanna. In the show, there are no interviews of any Tannan women. In fact, the women aren't mentioned much at all, except when the Tannans are commenting on the housework practices of the Western families. The Tannan men say that in their culture, such housework (cooking, cleaning) is something only women do. 

So I started reading more about the women of Vanuatu. The situation is complex because, as usual, most of the earliest accounts are written by Westerners, but luckily we have the accounts of both missionaries AND anti-missionary tradespeople. They are remarkably consistent in some ways, so it seems that the people once practiced widow strangulation after the husband's death, something similar to the Indian Sati widow immolation. Colonialist efforts to stop the practice were mostly successful, though it persisted in some areas for a long time. There are also accounts of women being beaten by their husbands. 

Vanuatu now seems to be in a situation where some of the tribes were Christianized by missionaries and others are part of a traditionialist reactionary movement called "Kastom." Based on the practices portrayed on the show and their religion, it seems that these men are part of "Kastom" tribes. There is good evidence that Kastom has had some harmful effects on women as people have become more strict about taboos. A huge burden of the taboo system lies on women since many taboos are about childbirth and menstruation. If a woman does something improperly, like gardening during menstruation (they are supposed to seclude themselves in menstrual huts), she may be blamed for misfortunes that befall the village, particularly if she does not sacrifice pigs to repair the violation. 

Vanuatu is not completely isolated and their are women's movements in islands across the Pacific (which I'm aware is a very diverse place). This interesting article gives a voice to some of their concerns.

I am not a bra-burning person; I never wore a bra, so, I do not know why bra-burning is so important to the feminist. —Participant in “Women, Development and Empowerment” workshop, Naboutini, Fiji, 1987

It's clear that many women in these places feel that Western feminism is concerned with very trivial things. I would confess that I agree, having most recently been in an argument with a feminist tech writer over whether or not the face that we give little girls "gendered" toys leads them to not chose careers in tech and science (I don't agree.)

Many women's writers in the Pacific, such as Tongan writer Konai Helu Thaman, in fact reject the feminist label. This phenomenon is not just Pacific, a growing number of young women in the West, even those that hold classical feminist ideas, also reject this label.

Interviewing 82 people in Guam in order to gauge their thoughts on feminism, Laura made the same mistake that I had made in my interview with Thaman.14 We had both used the term feminism without first defining it. Laura recalls asking “Are you a feminist?” “What do you think of feminism?” “Without exception,” she states, “they said: Please don’t call me a feminist”

Like many Western women who are further quizzed on their rejection of feminism, Thaman later qualifies her statement  “when people ask, are you a feminist, if feminism is about equality, equal worth, then, yes, I am a feminist”

I think it's quite interesting that Western social conservatives often lament the decline of the nuclear family, often pointing out that children that grow up without a father are worse off. Many Western feminists spend a large amount of time critiquing the nuclear family as being oppressive to women. But the nuclear family is a modern invention. As Folese, a Samoan writer, says:

The origins of western feminism arose out of suburbia [sic] depression and the need women felt to “get out of the house,” leave the kids behind, burn bras, overcome depression and addiction to things like valium etceteras. In life in a Samoan village, the extended family acts as a support system for mothers. The trap of the nuclear family simply doesn’t exist in the village situation.12
 

To me, the Western nuclear family has many parallels to Western agro-monocultures, in that it represents a less robust and rich caricature of the natural human family structure. Furthermore, the Western nuclear structure often is packaged with a belief that it is bad for women to work outside the home. Pacific women have always worked, tending their crops and animals. 

In the Pacific, feminism is perceived as being hostile to the communal and family values. As a women in the Guam workshop put it: 

… “feminists” do not want babies and yet women’s lives are defined in terms of their children. Some respondents did not want to have anything to do with women who wanted to live only with other women, or who rejected the family. In their view, the base of women’s lives was the family. (Griffen with Yee, 1989, p. 8)

Furthermore, traditions that the women do not view as oppressive, which involve separate complementary spheres for men and women, are often labeled as oppressive by Western feminists. As Tupu, a Western Samoan women says: “We don’t seek a social structure of total “equality”—we don’t want to do the same things as men. We have a social structure that has reciprocal power relations in different forms."

The women often do not want to do away with traditions like menstrual seclusion (something not alien to the West certainly. Less than a mile away from me in Williamsburg there are Hasidic Jewish women who do the same thing). Among Maori feminists, there is currently an argument about whether or not the traditional Maori culture was oppressive to women. Some Maori women believe that women were powerful in their own way in the traditional culture and their goal is to reclaim this from Westernization. It seems that in some ways traditional cultures were better, such as in Tonga where women had access to land which was prohibited by colonial governments. In other ways they seem worse, such as the widow strangulation in Vanuatu. 

Having grown up in the South with some of my family being very traditionalist, the skepticism of the Pacific women towards feminism is very familiar to me. However, I find that such skeptical traditionalist women in America are often belittled, whereas feminists are willing to listen to non-Western women, though their voices are often conspiciously absent, perhaps because they do not toe the party line. 

 I read this story today about a man with type one diabetes who has controlled it for 85 years with a low-carb diet. 

However, despite treatment, many Type 1 diabetics die prematurely, often having suffered adverse effects from their diabetes, including blindness, nerve damage, kidney disease, skin ulcers, and amputations. Bob Krause, on the other hand, appears to be in great shape (especially bearing in mind his advanced years). What is clear is that Bob has managed his diabetes with meticulous care. What is especially noteworthy is that his eating regime contrasts sharply with the standard advice given to diabetics: Eat three meals a day and include starchy carbohydrates with every meal.

What is noteworthy here besides his success is his low-carb diet, which really honestly doesn't look what more low-carb bloggers eat:

Actually Bob normally eats twice a day. His breakfast is usually made up of nuts with some prunes. His dinner is protein plus salad. He doesn’t eat much. And critically, he doesn’t eat much carbohydrate.

It sounds like CRON (calorie restriction with optimal nutrition) to me. 

When reading this I remembered Michelle, a young blogger I had read about in Loren Cordain's newsletter who was having success using the paleo diet. I wonder if many people noticed that she quit the paleo diet?

My sugars started increasing to the 140s-150s in March and I went back on insulin. The diet really wasn't helping. However, I stayed on the paleo diet for a few days but I couldn't take it anymore and started having dairy, grains, and legumes again.

My opinion is that the diet is too restrictive and is very difficult to follow (100%). You almost have to be obsessed with the food that goes in your mouth. I am very happy to have the freedom of my food choices.
 

Interestingly, Bob Krause's son, who also is type 1, couldn't follow his father's footsteps:

And though Tom Krause inherited his father's diabetes, he doesn't share his father's regimented control of the illness.
"My dad, he is just a machine in how well he cares and manages his diabetes, with his willpower and how long he's been doing it," Tom Krause said.

I get the sense that Bob is a person with unusual willpower and obsessiveness. It makes sense that he was an engineer. I understand why Tom and Michelle had trouble. I did CRON strict paleo for awhile and thought it was hell. Anyone who is even slightly disorganized or who actually likes food is going to have trouble on such a diet. 

But here is a story from Robb Wolf's blog about a young man who did a strict paleo diet and eventually was able to eat more carbs. But the article notes that even Robb Wolf says that only 5% of his type 1D patients have that kind of recovery. 

What do you think? Do you think you could follow an extremely strict diet where cheating means serious illness if it meant better long term health? 

 When I was a freelancer and I worked from home it wasn't so obvious to me why Americans are so unhealthy. Now it's tottally obvious. Cooking and the housekeeping the accompanies it takes time and when every adult member of the household works 40 hours a week, that becomes very difficult. It's even worse because most people don't particularly enjoy their jobs and would like to come home and do something they enjoy. Wouldn't it be great if everyone loved cooking? But it just doesn't work that way. 

I don't have children and I struggle to cook every day. What's the point of all the productivity gains we've made if we all have to work the same amount of hours? When I first started working I once tallied up the percentage of my life that would be spent at work or commuting at the current rate and it was too depressing a calculation to repeat. 

Housekeeping is very difficult when there is no one keeping house, when it's an afterthought in an exhausting day. Me? I'd love to work fewer hours and while I'd have to cut back on some things, I feel my quality of life would be higher. But there aren't many jobs available for 15 or even 30 hours a week and almost none provide any kind of benefits. 

Perhaps we should just give up and acknowledge that the price of the American workforce is that few people have time to cook healthy meals. Then we need to focus on having better restaurants. Right now if you are eating out a lot, you are probably getting tons of vegetable oil. Even Thomas Keller, Michelin-Starred Chef, uses canola oil at his enourmously expensive restaurants. 

Workplaces could also pick up some slack, but in an era of budget cuts, few will. You are lucky if your workplace has a microwave and even luckier if it has a fridge. I know a few highly-skilled technology workers at very succesfull companies where they have excellent food, but that's an exception. 

The idea that career is a form of fulfillment is a fantasy for all but a lucky few. In reality, this idea is just a way to make people feel better about having to give their lives away for trivial things. By the time they retire, their health is so battered that they spend the remaining years shoveling pills into their mouths in a nursing home. It's time to put work back in its place- it's a way to make a living for most of us and a lot of us would be willing to trade off some income for more time. More time to acquire healthy food, cook it, keep house, spend time with our own children, enjoy life...

This article in the NYtimes just bolsters the fact that our lifestyles are untenable: sitting is deadly. Um, that's a problem since most jobs involve sitting. i'm not sure that standing in one place at a standing desk is really that much better, though it's a start.