Saturday, October 16, 2004
The National Eating Disorder
The magazine always has some cool articles. But I don't know how true this article is. Ti sounds good on the surfarce. It seems to me that those who are the most concerned with nutrition, and actually execute specific guidelines in US are in fact the more affluent and healthier people. Sure the attititude is there, but any regular old middle class American is going to eat whatever he had wanted to eat. To truly enjoy food anywhere, like to be able to truly enjoy anything else in life, is more a matter of social status. If you have more money (and free time, which has its monetary equivalents), you will have a more acute sense of pleasure from food. So, on to my Marxist critique of the food cultrue in America: perhaps it's the fact that there is a higher degree of social inequality that is at the root of the "American" deliemma.
The article also shows you what's wrong with humanities--you can make various statements via aecdotic evidence (my mother did so and so, therefore it must have been what EVERY mothre had done.) In fact the study WAS done, and the result is very surprising. The overall structrue of American diet, despite all the fads interjected, has not changed ALL THAT MUCH since the end of the WWII. The obesity phenomenon is a distinctly recent (~20 yrs) thing. It's really a hard, baffling question that shouldn't be attributed too easily (and pretentiously) to the fact that, Americans lack "culture" compared to the French--appeciating food is not like apprciating Bizet.
The magazine always has some cool articles. But I don't know how true this article is. Ti sounds good on the surfarce. It seems to me that those who are the most concerned with nutrition, and actually execute specific guidelines in US are in fact the more affluent and healthier people. Sure the attititude is there, but any regular old middle class American is going to eat whatever he had wanted to eat. To truly enjoy food anywhere, like to be able to truly enjoy anything else in life, is more a matter of social status. If you have more money (and free time, which has its monetary equivalents), you will have a more acute sense of pleasure from food. So, on to my Marxist critique of the food cultrue in America: perhaps it's the fact that there is a higher degree of social inequality that is at the root of the "American" deliemma.
The article also shows you what's wrong with humanities--you can make various statements via aecdotic evidence (my mother did so and so, therefore it must have been what EVERY mothre had done.) In fact the study WAS done, and the result is very surprising. The overall structrue of American diet, despite all the fads interjected, has not changed ALL THAT MUCH since the end of the WWII. The obesity phenomenon is a distinctly recent (~20 yrs) thing. It's really a hard, baffling question that shouldn't be attributed too easily (and pretentiously) to the fact that, Americans lack "culture" compared to the French--appeciating food is not like apprciating Bizet.
