mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude

Life on the plateau continues

I'm having another one of those hectic life periods--just add a community theatre project, an additional freelance gig, and some other random assorted volunteer commitments, and voila: schedule overload! But meanwhile, I continue to cruise along on the same weight plateau of 192 pounds I've been on for several weeks now. Given that a hectic schedule used to mean excuses to eat crazy while pulling all-nighters at the computer, I consider this plateau a raging success--it means I'm maintaining my food disciplines even when life gets crazy. Either that, or all this excess activity is wearing off any slight food excesses I might have committed. Either way, I call it good. (Though I'll be glad when I get to the end of this latest round of deadlines and can have myself a little vacation-at-home.)

Somewhere in there, I did also succeed in finishing The Omnivore's Dilemma, and while I do have a few criticisms of the book here and there, by and large it's really made a strong impression on me. I'm now on the library waiting list for Pollen's followup book, In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto, in which he sets out his nutritional desideratum: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," and then lays out all the obstacles to achieving that goal in American mainstream processed-food culture. I can't wait! (Although given the waiting list at the local library--last I checked, I was #72 in the queue!--it looks like waiting is what I'm doing.)

Confronting the omnivore's dilemma

You would think by now that I'd have read The Omnivore's Dilemma, given how much I have appreciated Michael Pollan's point of view in various articles and interviews. But finally, after several weeks of waiting to move up from #47 on the public library reserve waiting list, I succeeded in getting my hands on a copy--and boy am I ever finding it ... well, "enjoyable" is not quite the right word when you're talking about a book explaining exactly why and how our current industrial agriculture arrangements are wildly unsustainable from ecological and public health standpoints. Try "sadly enlightening," in the same vein that earned economics the sobriquet "the dismal science."

I'm only a third of the way through so far, but already I'm finding quotes that are just screaming out to me "post me in your blog!" So here's one now:

"... growing corn is the most efficient way to get energy--calories--from an acre of Iowa farmland. That corn-made calorie can find its way into our bodies in the form of an animal fat, a sugar, or a starch, such is the protean nature of the carbon in that big kernel. But as productive and protean as the corn plant is, finally it is a set of human choices that have made these molecules quite as cheap as they have become: a quarter century of farm policies designed to encourage the overproduction of this crop and hardly any other. Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest." (page 108)

So that quote should make it crystal-clear why this book is eminently on-topic for this blog: obesity, like any other public health concern, doesn't just happen in a vaccuum (whether biological, ecological, economic, or political). If a population is constantly bombarded by exhortations to consume some of the bazillions of food products processed in one way or another from that heavily government-subsidized mountain of cheap corn, sooner or later they're gonna get some of it on 'em, or in 'e,--and that'll inevitably show up on bathroom scales and glucose tolerance tests across the country.

P.S. Check out this previous post in this blog for a link to a video of Pollan moderating a vigorous panel discussion of the politics of obesity.