Comments on: And Now We’re a Threat to National Security http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/ 2007-2010 Thu, 15 Jul 2010 02:13:02 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: poor people totally matter, except when they eat shit we don’t like « Pocochina’s Weblog http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-89591 Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:03:11 +0000 http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-89591 [...] However, even when we do move up to large-scale policy changes, we still can’t stay away from condescending judgment about the food choices of the poor.  Plotkin’s post, about the expansion in New York and Delaware of the WIC program to include fruits and vegetables, is right on in some instances, and painfully condescending in others.  He talks equally approvingly about “adding fruit and vegetables” and “limiting access to high-calorie, high-fat foods such as processed fruit juice and cheese,” and there he loses me.  If you’re stretching food stamps to feed an entire family, “high calorie” is not necessarily a bad thing.  Again, if this is your only way to get several thousand calories a day on the tightest budget possible, you’re still going to not just want, but need, the option of calorie-dense foods.  Aside from his goofy contention that juice is “high fat” (I realize I’ve spent more time than most people ever will searching for meaning in nutritional labels, but really, not a mistake to make if you want to make while establishing your Superior Nutritional Decisionmaker cred), he ignores some basic realities – if a box of macaroni and cheese feeds your kids for 50 cents, it’s still not an unreasonable choice in the face of the Librul Dood Sanctioned apple (a delicious and healthy snack, but no substitute for an actual dinner).  Juice, even if undesirably HFCS-y, might be a cheap source of vitamins.  Sugar can calm down kids with ADHD – valuable enough for any parent with a child who experiences ADHD, but maybe the only relief for a kid whose family Then, as in the previous article and comments, there’s some very concerned lecturing about how the poor folks need a nice white dude to teach them how to eat properly.  The fact is, until a substantive amount of nutritious food is genuinely affordable, these musings about what the poor should and shouldn’t eat aren’t going to amount to more than privileged moralizing.  He also buys into the panic-mongering about weight.  For the hundred thousandth fucking time, weight and health are not synonymous. Even if they were, the article buys into the idea that poor kids’ weight and health is due just to the damn cheese and juice is simplistic and self-serving.  Quoth Kate: [...]

]]> By: Proselytizing* « riddlebiddle http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-21273 Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:10:15 +0000 http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-21273 [...] And Now We’re a Threat to National Security [...]

]]> By: Meowser http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-21065 Thu, 08 Nov 2007 02:08:27 +0000 http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-21065 I read once, I think it was in Dr. Dean Edell’s book Eat, Drink and Be Merry, that some canned veggies actually had more nutrients than their fresh counterparts. Canned pumpkin was one of those, in case you’re interested. It probably varies a lot depending on the source of each and the nature of each item being canned.

Anyway, I’m more interesting in whether the canning process makes the veggies taste like ass than anything else. I won’t touch canned peas or carrots for that reason, but I won’t turn my nosey up at frozen ones.

]]> By: sprinklemouse http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-21064 Thu, 08 Nov 2007 01:50:13 +0000 http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-21064 In my highschool, we had a seperate cafeteria for seniors, full of more expensive, less nutritious items, like buffalo wings and other dripping with sauce pseudo-meats. It drove me nuts that all the teachers prowling around the lunchroom would put the smackdown on any loud talking, or offensive language, but didn’t care if a student wasn’t eating lunch, or was having three chocolate chip cookies and a soda. I’m not saying they should have enforced anything- but you know, a gentle reprimand would at least give an illusion of nutritional-anything being monitored.

]]> By: Rachel http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-21058 Thu, 08 Nov 2007 01:33:18 +0000 http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-21058 Oh gosh, Meowser…at my infant through primary school (that’s like first to ninth grade) we HAD to eat everything on our plates.

In the second grade I was hospitalized for a week with strep throat and scarlet fever. After I was released, I was told not to eat dairy foods for a while, because of the medication I was on. I had a teacher who MADE me eat the school lunch of pizza (it was a Friday and there were no other options). I ate it, and attended a church sleep-over event that evening and got so sick and nauseous my parents had to come get me.

As we got older though, no one at the school cared what we ate. In high school, my lunch was often an order of fries and mayonnaise.

]]> By: kateharding http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-21053 Thu, 08 Nov 2007 01:18:29 +0000 http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-21053 Littlem, I’d have to go back to The Gospel of Food to be sure about this one, but my understanding is that canned and frozen vegetables can sometimes contain more nutrients, because fresh stuff is losing nutrients every minute it’s off the tree/vine/whatev. Your fresh green beans might have spent a couple days in transit to the grocery store, then a couple days in your fridge before you use them, whereas the frozen/canned veggies were processed, and the nutrients preserved, when they were much fresher than that.

I think that when you break it down according to particular vitamins, fresh comes out ahead in some cases, frozen or canned in others. But it kinda all evens out. (When comparing supermarket produce to processed stuff, anyway. If you can grow fresh stuff yourself or get to a local farm where it was picked that day, that’s still your best option, nutritionally. But not practical for many.) The bottom line is, if you can’t afford fresh produce, you can certainly get the same basic nutrition from frozen or canned.

I’m no fan of big food companies, but I honestly think people get a little hysterical about the nutritional superiority of fresh produce — and I suspect there’s a weird combination of anti-corporate values (yay) and a vaguely classist ick factor (boo) behind it.

]]> By: littlem http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-21051 Thu, 08 Nov 2007 01:05:11 +0000 http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-21051 Hey Kate (or anyone else who knows, please jump in) — doesn’t the canning process leach some of the vites out of the veggies or something?

Although I buy canned bamboo and watercress on the regular, I’ve always struggled with the canned thing for green vegetables b/c I could never get a straight answer from a nutritionist about it.

]]> By: littlem http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-21050 Thu, 08 Nov 2007 01:04:48 +0000 http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-21050 Hey Kate (or anyone else who knows, please jump in) — doesn’t the canning process leach some of the vites out of the veggies or something?

Although I buy canned bamboo and watercress on the regular, I’ve always struggled with the canned thing b/c I could never get a straight answer from a nutritionist about it.

]]> By: Emerald http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-20975 Wed, 07 Nov 2007 19:44:11 +0000 http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-20975 “OK, who wants to bet that the next thing on the agenda of Childhood Obesity Hysterics is forcing kids to eat their fruits and veggies and drink their milk, every last bite, every last swallow, before being allowed to leave the cafeteria? I mean, they really haven’t gone far enough yet to ensure that kids won’t touch the stuff ever again the minute they turn 18.”

Oh gosh, Meowser…at my infant through primary school (that’s like first to ninth grade) we HAD to eat everything on our plates. Depending on how mean the dinner monitors were feeling, you might get made to sit in the hall all afternoon with that plate of cold, congealed stew until you did eat it. The salads at our school were particularly vile, and they were slathered in non-optional salad cream, which literally made me gag. The result was that I really did become that awful slang term for a fat person this side of the pond, a ‘salad-dodger’, for years. The irony is I love salad now that I can choose what to put in it. (I am left with a lifelong loathing of beetroot, though.)

And BTW, as a result of this policy I also barely ate lunch at all from the ages of roughly 4 to 7. When someone brought this to my mother’s attention, I started on packed lunches, and that was when I started being the fat kid. If it takes skipping lunch every day of my life to make me a ‘normal’ size, they know where they can stick it.

]]> By: None Given http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-20942 Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:45:50 +0000 http://kateharding.net/2007/11/05/and-now-were-a-threat-to-national-security/#comment-20942 “That doesn’t mean there’s an increase in the number of children who have it — especially with something like Type 2 diabetes, which we know often goes undiagnosed for years. It just means you’ve noticed something you never noticed before. Since we don’t have any fucking long-term data on the actual incidence of Type 2 in children, because nobody used to test children for it, it is impossible to say whether there’s been an increase, a decrease, or no change.”

Some of them are being misdiagnosed, this study excluded anyone needing insulin within the first six months after diagnosis and still found cases of other types. (There are more than 2 types)
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/full/26/7/2088

]]>