Food Policy and Death
In response to my post about high infant mortality in the South, Anonymous wrote: "It's one thing to be poor and starving; poor and obese sounds more like a self-inflicted malady."
I once held the same view, but I don't think it actually holds up to much scrutiny. Coincidentally, there's a Michael Pollan piece in the NYTimes Magazine that deals with this very question. Here's a quotation: "Drewnowski [an obesity researcher] concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly — and get fat."
Now, it's probably better to be overweight than to be malnourished. Still, I think it's a little silly to view nutrition as one-dimensional. By that logic, 18th-century sailors with scurvy deserved no pity, so long as they had plenty of caloric intake. A reasonable view of nutrition takes into account not just calories, but also the other elements of a healthy diet: protein, vitamins, fiber, healthy fats, etc.
For some reason, many poor people in this country don't have good diets. Partly this may be ignorance or lack of self-discipline. As Pollan explains in the NYTimes piece, though, a lot of people are simply behaving rationally given limited income and massive subsidies to unhealthy food. This is therefore a legitimate question of public policy, and not merely a "self-inflicted malady."
As a final note, I think it's fairly callous to brush aside infant death simply because you think the parents made bad health choices. I believe in personal responsibility, but I don't think the concept applies particularly well to month-old babies. This mis-application of an otherwise sound principle is a staple of a certain brand of resentment that I find particularly toxic. Those poor people ought to know better! It's not our fault if they die so young! But of course it is our fault, in the sense that the deaths stem fairly directly from the choices we make about farm subsidies, WIC, etc.
I once held the same view, but I don't think it actually holds up to much scrutiny. Coincidentally, there's a Michael Pollan piece in the NYTimes Magazine that deals with this very question. Here's a quotation: "Drewnowski [an obesity researcher] concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly — and get fat."
Now, it's probably better to be overweight than to be malnourished. Still, I think it's a little silly to view nutrition as one-dimensional. By that logic, 18th-century sailors with scurvy deserved no pity, so long as they had plenty of caloric intake. A reasonable view of nutrition takes into account not just calories, but also the other elements of a healthy diet: protein, vitamins, fiber, healthy fats, etc.
For some reason, many poor people in this country don't have good diets. Partly this may be ignorance or lack of self-discipline. As Pollan explains in the NYTimes piece, though, a lot of people are simply behaving rationally given limited income and massive subsidies to unhealthy food. This is therefore a legitimate question of public policy, and not merely a "self-inflicted malady."
As a final note, I think it's fairly callous to brush aside infant death simply because you think the parents made bad health choices. I believe in personal responsibility, but I don't think the concept applies particularly well to month-old babies. This mis-application of an otherwise sound principle is a staple of a certain brand of resentment that I find particularly toxic. Those poor people ought to know better! It's not our fault if they die so young! But of course it is our fault, in the sense that the deaths stem fairly directly from the choices we make about farm subsidies, WIC, etc.
posted by James | 11:21 PM
1 Comments:
I was looking at your blog for the first time in awhile and felt compelled to comment on this post, because the Michael Pollan article really bothered me at the time. Here's why - I completely accept that the way to maximize caloric intake from one's diet is to buy cheap, non-nutritious processed food. But, once you're obese from buying that food, you no longer need to maximize caloric intake - you should find a happy medium between the calories you need and the nutrients you need. Maybe you can't afford to get all your calories from lettuce...but if you're eating too many calories - how can we blame your obesity on your poverty - spend less on food, or spend some of it on healthier food.
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