OTHER THINGS

Notes from Hungry Planet,
by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio

Released in late 2005, this books contains some fascinating photos and insights into what the world eats. Quoted below are excerpts from the foreward and various essays.

Marion Nestle: Everyone eats. People around the world differ in many ways, but dinner unites us all.

Until quite recently, the most serious problem related to food was getting enough to eat, and starvation was the most serious health consequence. Famines occurred regularly as a consequence of natural disasters or human conflict, and large numbers of people suffered from malnutrition. Even today, insufficient food is a daily torment for nearly a billion people on earth, half of them young children. This lack is especially disturbing because the world produces more than enough food for everyone; it is just not distributed equitably....Political conflict is the cause of these particular inequities...

As conflicts resolve and people in developing countries become better off, they acquire more stable resources and change the way they eat. They inevitably replace the grains and beans in their diets with foods obtained from animal sources. They buy more meat, more sweet foods, and more processed foods; they eat more meals prepared by others. Soon they eat more food in general. They start gaining weight, become overwieght, and then develop heart disease, diabetes, and the other chronic diseases so common in industrialized societies.

Here we have the great irony of modern nutrition: at a time when hundreds of million of people do not have enough to eat, hundreds of millions more are eating too much and are overweight or obese. Today, except in the very poorest countries, more people are overweight than underweight.

The phenomenon of going from not having enough food to overeating is now so common that it has been given its own name: the nutrition transition.

Rates of obesity are rising rapidly in all countries, but are highest in the most industrialized countries.

In today's fiercely competitive financial environment, food companies are required to expand sales and to demonstrate growth every quarter. Obesity and its health consequences are just collateral damage. Growth-seeking companies cannot imagine a better place to find new buyers than the emerging economies of developing nations. That is why China--with its more than one billion inhabitants--is of such intense interest to the maker of food products and fast foods.

Alfred W. Crosby: Cooking is even more uniquely characteristic of our species than language. Animals do at least bark, roar, chirp, do at least signal by sound; only we bake, boil, roast, and fry.

Michael Pollan: There's a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig--an animal easily as intelligent as a dog--that becomes the Christmas ham.

Except for our pets, real animals--animals living and dying--no longer figure in our everyday lives. Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible. The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there's no reality check, on either the sentiment or the brutality.

[John Berger] suggested that the loss of everyday contact between humans and animals--and specifically the loss of eye contact--has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species....nowdays, it seems, we either look away or become vegetarians.

[The American factory farm] are places where the subtleties of moral philosophy and animal cognition mean less than nothing, where everything we've learn about animals at least since Darwin has simply been...set aside. To visit a modern CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) is to enter a world that, for all its technological sophistication, is still designed according to Descartes' belief that animals are machines incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this any more, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate the system and a willingness to avert their eyes on the part of everyone else.

The industrialization--and dehumanization--of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to do it this way....the days of slaughtering 400 head of cattle an hour would come to an end. For who could stand the sight?

Charles Mann: In 1976, medical researcher Makoto Suzuki was fascinated to learn that Okinawa had the world's highest life expectancy and the highest percentage of centenarians in the world.

Suzuki came to believe that the Okinawan miracle is due, at least in part, to the island's combination of a low-paced, stress-free life; regular exercise (mainly martial arts); a good diet (lots of vegetables, fruits, tofu, and fish--little meat and dairy). In addition, many Okinawans believe in hara hachi bu--"eat only until 80 percent full." The body requires a long time to register satiety, so that Okinawans who live by the principle of hara hachi bu don't overeat.

Peter Menzel: Here in the United States, we spend nearly $5,000 per person per year on health care--much more than any other country in the world, yet we are becoming the fattest and unhealthiest people on the planet. Why? Experts have outlined the many interrelated causes: our postindustrial society, the decrease in jobs requiring physical, calorie-burning work; the ubiquitousness of the car culture and the ease of personal mobility; the low cost and high availability of sweet, fatty, starchy, and highly processed foods. For that last one, a big fat thank you to the giant food corporations for making life shorter for our rotund fellow Americans.

Don't Shoot the Dog, by Karen Pryor

Well worth reading, it will give you insights into your own behavior, the behavior of others, and, of course, your four-footed friends. Ms. Pryor says there are eight, and only eight, ways to modify behavior. Here they are in brief. Read the book for the details and the entertainment.

Method 1: "Shoot the animal!" This definitely works. You will never have to deal with that particular behavior in that particular subject again. Method 1 solves the problem in a way but may or may not be the method of choice in any given behavior. This is the equivalent of quitting your job, divorcing your spouse, etc.

Method 2: Punishment. Everybody's favorite, in spite of the fact that it almost never really works. These are seldom effective and lose effect with repetition but are widely used.

Method 3: Negative reinforcement. Remove something unpleasant when a desired behavior occurs. Negative reinforcement may be effective and the method of choice in some situations.

Method 4: Extinction; letting the behavior go away by itself. Method 4 is not useful for getting rid of well-learned, self-rewarding behavior patterns. It is good, however, for whining, sulking, or teasing. Even small children can learn--and are grateful to discover--that they can stop older children from teasing them merely by not reacting in any way, good or bad.

Method 5: Train an incompatible behavior. this method is especially useful for athletes and pet owners. Sensible people often employ this method. Singing and playing games in the car relieves parents as well as children from boredom. Diversions, distractions, and pleasant occupations are good alternatives during many tense moments.

Method 6: Put the behavior on cue. Then you never give the cue. This is the dolphin trainer's most elegant method of getting rid of unwanted behavior. It doesn't seem logical that this method would work, but it can be startlingly effective, and sometimes almost an instantaneous cure.

Method 7: "Shape the absence;" reinforce anything and everything that is not the undesired behavior. A kindly way to turn disagreeable relatives into agreeable relatives. This takes some conscious effort over a period of time, but it is often the best way to change deeply ingrained behavior.

Method 8: Change the motivation. This is the fundamental and most kindly method of all. If you can find a way to do it, this method always works and is the best of all.

The World of Work

As human beings we all must do some work for basic survival--but how much? According to Dr. Frithjof Bergmann "for most of human history people only worked for two or three hours per day. As we moved from agriculture to industrialization, work hours increased...The very notion that everyone should have a job only began with the Industrial Revolution."

In the nineteenth century the "common man" began to fight for a shorter work week. Champions for the workers claimed that fewer hours on the job would decrease fatigue and increase productivity...The work week, having fallen dramatically from sixty hours at the turn of the century to thirty-five hours during the Depression, became locked in at forty-hours for many and has crept up to fifty or even sixty hours a week in the last two decades. Why? During the Depression, free time became equated with unemployment. In an effort to boost the economy and reduce unemployment, the New Deal established the forty-hour week...Our concept of leisure has changed radically. From being considered a desirable and civilizing component of day-to-day life, it has become something to be feared, a reminder of unemployment during the years of the Depression.

Source: Your Money or Your Life, by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin

 

LINKS

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