Fatosphere

Taking a leave

2010-03-22T10:13:00.000-07:00

Hi all...

So I'm on leave from my teaching job, and I guess I've unintentionally taken a leave from this blog. I didn't mean to, but now that it's happened, I thought I'd write a quick post and kind of make it official that I am taking a break.

Since my last post in December, I'd have to say that the state of affairs vis a vis the fat stuff has probably gotten worse. I have always been in favor of healthcare reform in general, but I am worried about what will happen to fat people under the policy that was passed by the Congress yesterday. Apparently now that insurance companies can no longer deny coverage for pre-existing conditions, they will instead be allowed to jack up premiums for people with pre-existing conditions, including the "condition" of being fat. If true, this is deeply uncool. I am also pissed off about Michelle Obama's new "childhood obesity" initiative. I think it is nice to want to improve nutrition for kids, but I wish this wasn't being promoted on the backs of fat children. It is hard enough being a fat kid without there being a nationwide effort spearheaded by the first lady to eradicate your kind. And I am not even going to get started on Jamie Oliver and his patronizing attempt to educate the citizens of Huntington, West Virginia about the proper way to live. There was that cool moment when Kevin Smith gave a big F-U to Southwest Airlines for kicking him off a plane because he's fat -- but who knows if that will have any lasting effect. Maybe it will empower fat people in the future to make a fuss when these things happen and make it more uncomfortable for airline employees to single them out, thereby inhibiting them from doing so. That would be cool. But in general I feel kind of discouraged. I think that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better, and although I think things have to improve over the long term, it would make my blog posts significantly more negative and bitchy for a while if I were to keep up with everything here.

In any case, I'm going to check out for a while and observe the proceedings (or perhaps try in my own small ways to influence them) without commenting on them here.

Best coffee in Seattle

2009-12-10T12:20:00.001-08:00

Hi everyone, I've got a post brewing on the Fat Studies reader (in a nutshell: it is awesome), but in the mean time I thought I'd share something I learned recently, which is that Seattle has some fabulous coffee. Obviously I'd heard that before, but until last weekend I'd never gone and checked it out for myself. And now that I have done so, I figure I might as well post my findings, since a google search for "best coffee in Seattle" proved to be surprisingly unhelpful as I prepared for the trip.

We had four nights in Seattle, so even though we had a bunch of family stuff to do (we were there for a wedding), I figured I could hit at least four coffee shops. I went to the forums at coffeegeek.com to compile a list of places to hit, since the geeks on coffeegeek are super-anal about their coffee. There was a remarkable amount of overlap in the places that people mentioned. Here are a few: Victrola, Espresso Vivace, Zoka, Caffe Vita, Stella, Stumptown, Lighthouse Roasters, Cafe Ladro, Hotwire, Zeitgeist, and Caffe Umbria. In particular, it seemed like the consensus favorite was Vivace, though Victrola and Zoka are also well-liked. Caffe Vita and Caffe Umbria got mixed reviews.

The first night, we stopped at Victrola for some coffees to go. I got a cappuccino and the Admiral got a regular coffee. Both were great. The cappuccino had some seriously exquisite latte art going on; it made me wish we'd sat and enjoyed it right there, but we arrived late and I think they were closing.

The next day, I ventured out on my own to the Stumptown next to the University of Seattle campus. I was doing some reading, so I ordered a latte. It was delicious and had a beautiful rosette design. I wished I'd ordered a cappuccino to better facilitate comparison with the other places I visited, but anyway, I did enjoy the latte. As I was sitting there reading, this guy started setting up for a free public "cupping" (i.e., coffee tasting) next to me. So I stopped reading and joined in the cupping. It was such a cool experience -- a very elaborate ritual that really enhanced my appreciation for the different roasts they had on offer. I also got a serious buzz -- you're supposed to spit after tasting, which I did a few times, but when you're sipping coffee that good it's hard to just spit it out. I got the Admiral an Americano to go, and he reported that it was exceptionally good (by that point I was so saturated with caffeine that I declined to taste it).

On day 3, we walked all over town. Our first stop was Caffe Umbria in Pioneer Square. Some geek had posted something about how their famously rich steamed milk was achieved by nefarious means, namely, adding half and half to the milk. Scandalous!! Well, I have no idea if that's true -- the milk for my cappucino was poured straight out of a milk carton, but I suppose it could have been tampered with behind the scenes. In any case, the cappuccino was delicious. Almost as good as the one from Victrola. That afternoon we stopped at Caffe Ladro. My cappuccino was really good, better than you could find in most cities, but not exceptional. Points for friendly service and funky decor, however. And later that night, on our way back from the wedding, we stumbled upon Caffe Vita and decided to pop in. They were just about to close, which was too bad because they really had a nice, cozy atmosphere and I would have loved to stay a while. My cappuccino was excellent -- with lovely latte art and tasting just as good as the one from Victrola.

On our last day, we finally made it to Espresso Vivace, our 6th and final stop. I had high hopes, and I wasn't disappointed. The atmosphere was cozy, my cappuccino was delicious, and the barista's latte art (pictured above) was very nice. I kind of think once you get to that level it's really hard to distinguish among really excellent coffee drinks, so I can't say that I liked it better than Victrola or Vita, but it was equally good. I guess on the whole I'd say I liked Caffe Vita the best. But I look forward to a return visit so I can check out the rest of the list.

Omg panic: only 92% of "obese" people think they need to lose weight!

2009-11-23T09:34:00.000-08:00

This is not an Onion article, but it's so depressingly hilarious that you'd think it might be.

The article starts with a statistic: in the Dallas Heart study, of the 2056 "obese" people surveyed, 8% "said they were satisfied with their body size or felt they could gain weight."

Well, it's really a shame that only 8% of "obese" people are satisfied with their body size, but I guess that figure is not surprising. Maybe the article will go on to suggest ways we can help fat people to overcome their feelings of inadequacy in a culture that places such intense pressure on people to conform to an arbitrary and very small body norm? Oh... wait... I'm being told that wasn't the point of the article. No, it turns out that the "story" here, according to Tiffany Powell MD, is that those 8% are suffering from a "misperception" and "don't understand they are overweight," and so doctors need to hassle them about it more to get it through their fat skulls that they need to lose weight. Yes, Tiffany, I'm sure that's it: "obese" people are so stupid that they just "don't understand" that they're fat.

Of course, every article about "obesity" has to contain at least one gigantic and utterly unfounded leap of logic, and here it is: "Those with a misperception of body size believed they were healthy. But 35 percent of them had high blood pressure, 15 percent had high cholesterol, 14 percent had diabetes and 27 percent were current smokers. These risk factors are similar to obese individuals who acknowledged they had a weight problem and needed to lose weight, Powell said."

So did they also ask people if they "believed they were healthy," and it turned out that the exact same fat people who were satisfied with their bodies were the ones who said they believed they were healthy? Gee, that would be an interesting finding... but I have a sneaking suspicion that the author of this article is simply asserting that if a person said they were satisfied with their body size then that means they think they are healthy. Earth to mind-bogglingly stupid author of article: those two things are not the same at all. Maybe you should go back to reporting school. Or, like, preschool.

Another teeny problem is the inclusion of smoking as a risk factor that is supposed to have something to do with being "obese". Here's the logic as far as I can see: this person doesn't think she needs to lose weight, and therefore I will assume she thinks she is healthy even though she didn't say that. But really, this person is not healthy, which we know from the fact that she is a smoker. Therefore she needs to lose weight. And therefore she is an idiot for not knowing that she needs to lose weight, because all she needed to do was think about the fact that she is a smoker and therefore obviously unhealthy, and that there could only be one solution to this problem: lose weight!

So, OK, let's just set aside the smoking category (we'll assume the author was smoking something him/herself when he/she decided to include smoking) and look at those other "risk factors". Even if we simply add up all the percentages, we come to 77% of the "obese" people who thought they didn't need to lose weight as having some kind of health problem. Which means that at the very minimum, 23% of the "obese" people who supposedly thought they were "healthy" were absolutely right according to the health measures mentioned in the article! And let us remember that there is likely to be significant overlap between the people who had high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and possibly diabetes too. So possibly up to 65% of the stupid fatties in this study who think they're healthy are totally right.

But hey, let's not get bogged down with the facts -- or even the version of "facts" reported in the article. Let's just continue to assume that all fat people are unhealthy and that our goal should be to make sure that 100% of fat people (not a measly 92%) are fully aware that they are fat and therefore unhealthy and that they have to lose weight. Even if we grant all that, there are some other really questionable conclusions here. For example, "Those who misperceived their body size were less likely to go to a physician. In fact, 44 percent didn't visit a physician during the past year, compared to 26 percent of obese participants who correctly perceived they needed to lose weight." The idea is apparently that it's bad if you don't think you need to lose weight because then you won't go to the doctor. But I have some other ideas that would explain these correlations. How about this: if you are unhealthy you are more likely than a healthy person to go to the doctor. And if you are fat and unhealthy, given all the messages you hear about fat being unhealthy, you are probably somewhat likely to blame your poor health on being fat, and therefore to think that you need to lose weight. Even if not, if you are fat and unhealthy you are likely to be told by your doctor that you need to lose weight. So there, I've just explained the correlation, and notice how my explanation doesn't rely on the idea that a fat person who is stupid enough to be satisfied with his/her body is also too stupid to go to a doctor. Or here's another, more depressing possibility: people who are fat but don't think they need to lose weight avoid going to the doctor even when they get sick because the doctor is likely to tell them that they need to lose weight rather than actually bothering to diagnose their real health problem.

My friend who sent me the link pointed out a similarity between this and our cultural attitude towards "depression": if you're a sensitive, introspective person who feels saddened by the state of the world, rather than being able to glibly go through life thinking everything is hunky dory the way that most people apparently do without getting bummed out by things like war and global warming, then clearly you are the pathological one and you must have a medical problem that needs to be treated in order to bring your worldview into alignment with everyone else's.

Strikes and gutters

2009-11-12T07:00:00.000-08:00

I was so excited to see this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week. It's a really nice introduction to fat studies -- naturally, since the authors are editors of a Fat Studies Reader that came out last week (look for a review here -- my copy is due to arrive today!). It's so nice for once to read a sympathetic piece on fat studies that isn't "balanced" by a quote from some doctor saying "Yeah, but just because studies have repeatedly failed to show that being fat is a big health hazard, and 95% of people can't permanenly lose large amounts of weight anyway, it would be dangerous for fat people to think that they are OK." In fact, the article is totally free of such crap, with the teeny exception of the caption on the (awesome) photo of the Padded Lillies, which includes the term "overweight." It's not an unsympathetic caption, but it was clearly not written by the authors of the article, who I am pretty sure would not use the term "overweight". It's not quite as irritating a term as "obese", but for me it always brings to mind the question "over WHAT weight?" (aside: just now in googling the phrase "over what weight?" to see if I could figure out its origin, or at least remember the first place I saw it, I came across a very interesting feminist blog called Professor, What If...?. I've only read a few posts so far, but it seems worth checking out, especially this post.) I think many people consider the term to be more polite than "fat", but "overweight" clearly carries with it some normative weight that everyone should be, which I find icky. But that's a minor nitpick; you should really go read the article because it's great and I love that it appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. It seems to me that we'll need more of that in order for fat studies to really come into its own.

On the negative side, today's CNN.com features this lousy excuse for an article. Read it for yourselves (or don't); I just wanted to highlight a few of the most idiotic things about it here.

First there's this funny line: "[American Heart Association spokesman Russell] Pate and other childhood obesity experts say more American youths are becoming obese because so many are addicted to television, video games, testing and fast food." I find the thought of kids being addicted to testing pretty hilarious. I personally will confess that I like taking tests, especially the bubble kind, and I liked them when I was a kid too. But I'm pretty sure I was kind of a weird kid that way. Anyway, let's give the editors the benefit of the doubt and assume the author meant "texting"; I'm still going to call bullshit on it. This strikes me as just a list of stereotypes about what fat kids do with their time. Where's the evidence that fat kids engage in more of those activities listed than other kids do?

On a more serious note, there's the whole "ticking time bomb" concept that appears in the headline and is repeated in the article. What a terrible metaphor, especially when you're talking about kids. Hey parents, if you don't make your fat child lose weight right away, he/she will EXPLODE!!! This is exactly the kind of substance-free, sensationalized rhetoric that characterizes the entire "war on obesity" and should lead any thinking person to be skeptical about the whole enterprise.

And then there is the very telling description of Russell Pate's research methodology: "Pate, who has testified about childhood obesity before Congress, says he can tell how American kids have changed by looking at old yearbooks. 'You see fewer overweight kids,' Pate says. 'There were some kids that were overweight in the older yearbooks, but the typical kid was leaner.'" Wow, I can't wait to see the results of that super-objective study where a thin guy flips through yearbooks and concludes that there are more fat kids than there used to be, based on 1" square photos of the kids' faces (which are, by the way, kids' faces -- i.e., commonly kind of chubby regardless of the child's overall physique). Maybe I'll do my own study where I flip through some modern yearbooks and conclude "Hey, everybody looks OK to me!"

There are plenty of other things to pick on in the article, but I'll just point out one last little ironic thing, which is that the photo that goes with the article is of a chubby person (I guess it's supposed to be a kid, but it's hard to tell) in a swimming pool. So if the whole point of the article is that kids don't exercise anymore, isn't that kind of a stupid photo to run with it? Well, maybe the person who selected the photo was being subversive. If so, kudos to them for getting one thing right: it's entirely possible for a fat kid (or adult) to exercise and still be fat. When I was a kid I did a sport every season: swim team, soccer team, basketball team, softball team, plus horseback riding lessons, and later marching band. And I was still fat. Gym class in middle school and high school were almost humiliating enough to take all the joy out of exercising for me (like the time sophomore year when the gym teacher's daughter, who was in my class, got put in charge of weighing everyone and she told her friends how much I weighed... incidentally, although my body composition is a lot different, I weigh the same now as I did then; how many self-righteous fat-bashers can say that for themselves?). Somehow on my own I discovered the fun of running when I was in college, and I have continued with running and/or other kinds of exercise pretty consistently since then. But it was absolutely not due to gym class -- so the idea suggested in this article that phys ed classes are the solution to the "childhood obesity problem" is, in my opinion, way off base. I'm pretty sure the people quoted in the article who promote this idea were not fat kids, or they'd know that phys ed as it is traditionally taught in American schools is no way to get fat kids excited about fun and healthy ways of moving their bodies; quite the contrary.

Oh well. I guess I gotta remember that at least there are people out there like Sondra Solovay and Esther Rothblum and Marilyn Wann.

Fat Guy in a Little Controversy

2009-10-29T07:31:00.000-07:00

When I saw this ad, my first reactions were: Aww, fat guy in a little coat! I love that scene! and then Hey, Chris Farley is dead, so what the hell are they doing using him in a DirecTV commercial? Apparently I wasn't alone in thinking it was a little problematic making a dead person into a spokesman for your company.

According to this article (nitpick: the article incorrectly refers to the scene as "Fat Boy in a Little Coat," suggesting that the author had never even seen this classic scene before and therefore isn't in the best position to comment on how wrong it is that they turned it into a commercial... but whatever...), Chris Farley's family was totally on board with the ad, and David Spade thought it was a nice tribute to his friend, so everyone on board apparently has a clear conscience about the whole thing and doesn't intend to apologize or pull the ad.

I'm not going to tear into David Spade for this (though Gawker had no qualms about doing so). I blame Farley's family for giving their consent, and DirecTV for having poor taste. To paraphrase the late great Bill Hicks (hey, wouldn't it be hilarious if they used him in an advertisement? maybe for Orange Drink?), when you do a commercial, you're a corporate fucking shill. You're off the artistic roll call. Everything you say is suspect, and every word that comes out of your mouth is like a turd falling into my drink. (Bill meant his own drink, but hey, mine too.) So the thing is, when you choose to do an endorsement, it's like when an amateur goes pro -- you can't go back. From now on, when someone hears you say something, they will not know if you sincerely believe it or if someone just paid you to say it. So apparently David Spade made the calculation and thought, OK, the amount of money they're paying me makes it worth doing this. But poor Chris Farley doesn't have the luxury of making that kind of choice, now, does he? Maybe you don't think that's so bad, but think about it this way: there's a whole generation of people out there who were not yet born when Tommy Boy came out and might not have ever seen it, so the next time they see Chris Farley on TV their first thought may well be "Hey, it's the guy from the DirecTV ad!"

Maybe Chris Farley did other endorsements during his lifetime, in which case he was a corporate shill anyway (I'd still love the guy if that were true). Even so, the decision to use one's own talent and reputation in support of selling a particular product is one that only an individual can make for him/herself, and no matter how well his family knew Chris Farley they can't know for sure that he would have wanted to do an ad for fucking DirecTV. I'd like to think he wouldn't.

While I'm on this subject, have you all seen Jeff Bridges' ads for Duracell and Hyundai? Very un-Dude...

Nice

2009-10-05T21:05:00.000-07:00

I was glad to see this article on Slate.com today.

And, happily, I had some kind of problem loading the comments page, so I wasn't able to read the comments (despite which fact I am still confident that I could recite them to you almost verbatim). It was an all-around very enjoyable reading experience that has inspired me to stop reading comments in general -- except for the ones you post on my blog, of course, dear readers.

CNN clueless when it comes to... a lot of things

2009-09-29T17:48:00.000-07:00

CNN.com headline: "Parents clueless when it comes to kids' growth charts". The article basically says that when doctors (et al) distribute pediatric growth charts to parents, the parents often don't understand the charts and that this "has implications in the war against childhood obesity". God forbid that parents' stupidity should get in the way of the war effort!

The thing is, though, that many parents (at least the ones I know) are perfectly aware of their kids' percentiles on the growth charts. In fact, if anything (from the perspective on a non-parent who has politely sat through more conversations on the subject than I would prefer) I would say that parents probably dwell on the percentiles a little too much. In several cases, it seemed that doctors deliberately caused the parents to worry about their very young children by going on and on about the percentiles (not just on the height/weight spectrum, but also in terms of the timing of certain childhood milestones). It is true that most of the parents I know do not have low income or low education levels, and therefore according to the article they are more likely than others to be able to understand the charts. But I'm not convinced that being able to understand the charts is really such a wonderful thing if it causes people unnecessary worry about their children. Maybe in this instance, ignorance is bliss.

Just have a look at this example of a pediatric growth chart. Notice that height and weight are on separate charts -- even as crude a measure of the height-weight relationship as BMI is not represented. Now suppose little Johnny is 2 years old and he's in the 70th percentile for weight on the chart. What is a parent to "understand" about that? *Some* child has to be at the 70th percentile -- 'cause weight, like height, exhibits a normal distribution -- so what if it's *your* child? Well, if he's also at the 70th percentile for height then maybe the doctor would let it go. But what if he's at the 50th percentile for height? Is he then "overweight"? And should you therefore put your 2 year old on a diet to slim him down?

The weirdest part of this article to me is the part where this pediatrician suggests that pediatricians talk to parents about height and weight in terms of clothing size because "It is real to them if they are having to buy clothes frequently or if hems always need shortening to accommodate girth." OK, remember we are talking about *kids* here. Now every parent who has to buy clothes frequently is supposed to panic and flip out and think that their child is abnormal and "at risk for serious medical problems"? I can just imagine what those conversations will be like... "Well, Mrs. Jones, the reason that you have had to buy new pants for your daughter three times this year is that she has a height problem. As you can see on this chart here, Susie is in the 85th percentile for height at her age, which means that she is overheight." What, you think that's ridiculous? Because height is mostly genetic and is just a natural parameter of human variation that is virtually impossible to control? And while it's possible that extreme tallness or shortness could signal an underlying health problem, which the doctor may want to check for, it is also entirely possible that there's no problem at all and therefore there's no reason to cause the parents to panic? Well, I couldn't agree with you more. Now, why is weight not treated the same way? Hey, don't ask questions like that -- don't you know we're at war?

Fat and the health care debate

2009-09-15T09:47:00.000-07:00

Liberals: if you think that the solution to all our nation's health care problems, as well as the key to paying for a national health care plan, resides in getting rid of fat people, you are in good company: your president agrees. However, as much as I like Obama, he's just plain wrong about this. If he thinks we can "prevent obesity", he's got another think coming. And even supposing we could do that, if Obama thinks that eliminating fat people would eliminate all of our nation's medical problems and save us a trillion dollars, well, he's got even more thinking to do.

The facts are these: (1) You can't make fat people thin in the long term. (2) Making people thin doesn't necessarily make them healthy anyway -- in fact in many cases it does just the opposite. And (3) a national health care plan is going to be expensive, and rather than pretend like we can eliminate all the costs by forcing or guilting everyone into getting thin, we need to just suck it up and pay for the plan, even if that means raising taxes.

I have noticed a lot of anti-fat rhetoric associated with the health care debate. There's John Mackey's controversial WSJ editorial, and Michael Pollan's response in the New York Times, and Obama repeating his previous claims. And then there's Ashton Kutcher's statement on Bill Maher's show (which Maher of course did not call him out on): "Frankly, I don’t want to pay for the guy who’s getting a triple-bypass because he’s eating fast food all day and deep-fried snickers bars." (I should immediately point out that this quote doesn't single out fat people, just people who eat a non-Ashton Kutcher-approved diet. But I think it's not totally out of line to imagine a fat person as the stereotypical person that he had in mind with this statement.) But I've also seen it coming increasingly from ordinary people -- in debates on Facebook, for example, and in the comments that people make on some of the articles mentioned above.

Here is what I would like to say to everyone who favors universal health care: our message has to be consistent or we are doomed. It is totally hypocritical for a pro-choice liberal to declare that "a woman's body is her own" but then turn around and try to tell others what to eat and how much to exercise and how much body fat they are allowed to have. Universal health care means covering everybody, regardless of whose "fault" it is when they get sick. That is the whole point. If you keep talking about policing the way people live their lives as a way to drive down costs, you are playing right into the Republicans' fear-mongering about how Big Government takes away our freedom. We liberals need to get our thinking straight about this, or this whole health care thing is going nowhere.

P.S. Sorry for the comment moderation; I've been getting spam comments every day on my last post and I don't know how else to block them. I'll try to approve your comments quickly.

P.P.S. I just got wind of a new blog called Fat Habitat that may be of interest. It's about fat and sustainability. There aren't many posts yet (and the last one was pro-Michael Pollan before he made his recent anti-fat remarks, so it will be interesting to see how he's treated in the next post), but this will be one to watch.

Automatically refreshing

2009-07-26T15:50:00.000-07:00

(I got tired of the SkyMall catalog shtick.)

On recommendation from Guy Fieri (a.k.a. "Guido"), we decided to check out Taylor's Automatic Refresher. For those not familiar with Guido's oeuvre, he's the Guy from Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives (a.k.a. "Triple-D"). A cheeseball, most certainly, but we like him and his show (more on that below), and he hasn't steered us wrong yet (in addition to Taylor's, we recently went to Byways Cafe in Portland, also featured on the show, also awesome).

Anyway, so Taylor's. They have three locations -- one in St. Helena, one in Napa, and one in San Francisco. Triple-D featured the Napa location, but we hit the one in SF, which is in the Ferry Building (which we recommend in general as a cool place to spend an hour or two -- they've got a bunch of shops including Cowgirl Creamery and Scharffen Berger, plus the Slanted Door, which is a great restaurant with a great bar). Our meal (pictured above) included the ahi burger, which is basically what got us in the door, and which turned out to be really super awesome. We had actually already tried making it with some friends about a month ago based on the recipe in Guido's book (Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives) and it was really delicious -- our grill-master did an excellent job and the ginger-wasabi mayo and asian slaw, courtesy of the Admiral, really made it. The version in the restaurant was just as good; OK, better. Plus we got some super-garlicky garlic fries with it, which definitely enhanced the experience, and a nice bottle of wine. The Admiral ordered the bleu cheese burger but accidentally got the cheeseburger (as he pointed out, more differentiation among the names of the menu items couldn't hurt), which was tasty too. It certainly wasn't cheap for a meal of burgers and fries, but oh my, it was yummy.

Back to Guido. There's a lot of hate out there on the internet for some reason (try googling "Guy Fieri" with "douchebag" and you'll see what I mean). And, you know, I can see how some people might find him annoying, although I also suspect people are jealous of how awesome his job is. But anyway, not liking him is fine (even though I don't really see how anyone can dispute the fact that it's cool how his show highlights independent local hangout spots that generally have moderate to low prices and often are into making all their food from scratch using organic and/or local ingredients), and certainly making snarky comments about a public figure is not something I disapprove of. What really grinds my gears, however, is the way that so many of people's negative remarks about him make reference to his being fat -- just try googling "Guy Fieri" with "fat". I have to admit that maybe his being a chunky fellow is part of why I like him -- granted, it's probably easier and more common for a fat man to get his own TV show than a fat woman, but still, not that many fat people have TV shows. So I give him props for making it in spite of being fat (actually I don't think he's all that fat -- but he's definitely fat for TV). Am I a hypocrite if I like the guy more because he's fat but I think it's bad if people like him less because he's fat? Well, no, I don't think so. Maybe I would be if there was someone I disliked because they were thin, but I'm pretty sure I'm not that way. And furthermore, it's probably pretty uncommon for someone to have to overcome anti-thin prejudice in order to make it on TV (I don't deny that anti-thin prejudice exists, but I'm thinking it's not much of a problem in Hollywood).

The Fish & Farm Carrot Cake Cocktail.

2009-07-20T23:28:00.000-07:00

So we met up with a buddy at Fish & Farm in San Francisco, a nifty gastropub that I highly recommend. They're doing some very cool stuff with good ingredients that are local, organic, etc. Another interesting thing about them is that the prices on the menu are "all-inclusive" -- so no taxes or tips to worry about (and sales tax in SF ain't cheap -- 9.5%!). This means that what look like moderately expensive prices are actually quite reasonable for what you get.

I started with a carrot cake cocktail (pictured above). Sound disgusting? Well, it was actually quite tasty. According to the menu, the ingredients are: roasted carrot vodka (?!?), cake spice brandy, cream, brown sugar, and brandy-plumped raisins (mine only had one, which sat cutely in the bottom of the glass waiting for me to finish the drink and eat it up). It really does taste like carrot cake, too, which is a personal favorite of mine -- more on that in a future post.

The food was awesome too. Among the three of us, we tried fish and chips, a super-tasty burger, and fried chicken. All were excellent.

I should also mention that in addition to the carrot cake cocktail, Fish & Farm offers a bacon cocktail (yes, a bacon cocktail) called the Bacon-Drop. Of course the Admiral couldn't resist ordering it. I tried it, flexitarian that I am, and actually I rather liked it. He kinda hated it, himself. De gustibus non est disputandum, I suppose.

Any SF cocktail fans out there recognize the glassware?

The Cheeseboard Pizza.

2009-07-16T16:15:00.000-07:00

Cheeseboard Pizza is this awesome pizza place in Berkeley that's part of the Cheeseboard Collective, a co-op that has a truly amazing selection of cheeses. They are really nice in there and will let you taste any number of cheeses and give you recommendations until you find the cheese you want. Anyway, the pizza place is truly outstanding and one of my favorite things in the bay area. Basically every day they make one kind of pizza, always vegetarian, no sauce, a good amount of garlic and oil, and usually with creative ingredients and some kind of fancy cheese. The day we went they had the above pictured pizza on offer (fyi, in case it just looks like a pile of pizza, the deal is that they give you a free half slice with every half pie, so we got two free half slices with our whole pie, which is what you see sitting on top). It had mozzarella, garlic, some kind of yummy mushrooms, and was topped with spinach and parmesan cheese and a little lemon. The spinach seemed like it would be a little weird but had a nice effect. This is my absolute favorite pizza anywhere.

The Gordo Burrito.

2009-07-08T14:42:00.000-07:00

There are few better things in life than a burrito from Gordo. I can't believe we were in the Bay Area for 3 days before we actually got around to having one.

Check out the photo. (FYI, I had to nibble off the top of the burrito very carefully to get that cross-section -- so don't say I never did anything for you!) Do you see the melted cheese? That, my friends, is the key to an excellent burrito. In every other city where I've had a burrito, you get little cold pieces of shredded cheese that don't really melt, and therefore they don't get fully integrated into your burrito experience. But at Gordo, they have this steam thingy. They take the tortilla and put a slice or two of cheese on it, and then they lay it onto this round thing and pull down another round thing on top of it, and some steam comes out, and then when they pull out the tortilla, the cheese is all melted and the tortilla itself is floppy and kind of sticky. Then they put in the rest of the ingredients -- the way I order my Super Bean and Cheese, I get pinto beans, rice, fresh salsa, guacamole, and sour cream (incidentally, the guac's not bad, especially for how cheap it is -- though of course it's no Gloriously Garlicky Guacamole) and roll it up. You can also get meat and/or hot sauce, and you can get other kinds of beans. Regardless of how you order it, your cheese mingles beautifully with the other contents of the burrito, and since the tortilla gets kind of sticky, that means that it wraps up well into a tight (but fat!) burrito. I can usually eat mine very neatly without dropping anything out of it. There's no drippage, nothing wet coming out of the burrito at all. And did I mention how cheap this place is? We're talking super cheap.

Another thing to point out about Gordo is how awesome the name is (it means "fat", for those who don't know, and I believe it can also be used as a noun to mean "fat person" or "fat thing", though I'm no scholar of Spanish). So that makes it a good way to kick off my Bay Area food blogging. More soon!

We'll be sure to wear flowers in our hair

2009-07-03T10:49:00.000-07:00

So we're getting ready to head to the Bay Area for about a month, and I'm very excited. It's for an academic thing, which I am looking forward to, but I have to confess that I am a little more excited about seeing our friends and (more relevant to the blog) eating wonderful food. I don't want to turn this into a food blog, but I've decided I'm going to take pictures of our culinary adventures for the month and share the highlights with you all. I envision a mixture of our old favorites (burritos from Gordo, cannoli from Cafe Trieste) and stuff from places we haven't tried yet, especially in San Francisco proper (since I never felt I explored the city sufficiently when we lived in the area).

Don't you worry, though: after the trip is over, soon enough I'm sure I'll get back to complaining about the state of the world and how stupid and mean people are.

Sometimes you're pleasantly surprised

2009-06-23T12:07:00.001-07:00

I saw this link on CNN today about Sanjay Gupta's new "Four Months to Fitness" program and I was like, oh no, what new anti-fat crap is he going to have for us today? Because let's face it, the guy has a history of saying some pretty fucked-up shit about fat (that last one really gets me -- there's a part where Gupta says "The obesity epidemic radically changed the way new Natalie's Bridal Shop does business. Five to 10 years ago, owner Jeannie Posner sold mostly size 6 and 8. Now it's more like 8 to 14" -- er, yeah, because people who wear sizes 8-14 are totally obese...?).

I started reading and the first specific detail he mentioned about the plan was a website for tracking what you eat, and I figured this was more of Gupta's same old anti-obesity bullshit. But then I kept reading and it got to be mostly about exercise, and my fat ass almost fell out of my chair when I got to this sentence: "While smaller waists and less weight are things that will inevitably occur as you start incorporating these tips into your life, the real goal is a longer, more functional and exceptional life – free of disease and dysfunction." Wow. I mean, I don't agree that weight loss is "inevitabl[e]" with exercise and/or eating a healthy diet (as opposed to a weight loss diet), but I can totally get behind the whole rest of what he's saying there. Maybe this program is actually kind of cool. It almost makes me want to join, except not quite, because Sanjay Gupta is still an asshole. Maybe just less of an asshole than I thought before.

Book Chat

2009-06-01T14:58:00.000-07:00

My pal Anne and I used to have Book Chat every now and then. We haven't done it in a while -- I don't know about her, but my excuse is that I haven't been reading any books outside of my own academic field lately! So sad. But anyway, I just got back from a trip to the UK, so on the plane I had ample time for reading, and I read Zadie Smith's On Beauty based on recommendations from multiple friends. Since it touches on issues I talk about in this blog, I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone (sorry, I hate that metaphor; the other one I really despise is "flesh out," but sometimes they're apt, so what can you do?) and simultaneously do a blog post and a Book Chat. So Anne, if you're reading, this one's for you!

This is way too complex and interesting a book for me to write a full review of in a blog post. Instead I thought I'd just mention a couple of things about it.

The main point of interest (here, anyway), is that one of the main characters (since there's not a single main character in my opinion -- there are many characters that are sympathetic and well developed), Kiki, is fat. She's described as being 250 or 300 lbs. Her fatness is something that comes up multiple times in the book, but what's nice is that it doesn't define her, and she is nothing like a token fat character or a one-dimensional caricature of a fat person. In fact, she is an extremely complex and interesting person. Her relationship with her husband Howard is also affected by her being fat (particularly since she wasn't fat when they got married), but it's only one factor in a relationship that's otherwise complicated by her and Howard's psychological quirks (he's a neurotic academic; she doesn't really consider herself to be an intellectual even though she thinks deeply about a lot of things and is very sensitive and insightful), race (she's African-American; he's British), and their long history together. There are some scenes in the book where Kiki feels self-conscious and you get the idea that her being fat is contributing to it, but since she's a non-academic surrounded by a bunch of academics (Howard teaches at a small college in a small town) you figure that in many instances a thin white person in her situation would have felt self-conscious too. I only remember one scene where explicit mention is made of Kiki feeling self-conscious about being fat, and that's an incident mentioned in passing where she's in a hurry and gets herself a bagel and coffee and feels like people are watching her eat since this is what people do to a fat person who dares to eat in public. I thought that was a really interesting observation on the part of the author, because that is exactly what people do to a fat person eating in public! But I don't know how Zadie Smith knew that -- having seen a picture of her, she doesn't look the slightest bit fat. So, good for her for thinking of it. (On the other hand, maybe the reason she knows is that she has found herself doing it! But based on her sensitive portrayal of Kiki, she certainly doesn't seem like she's anti-fat.)

There's an interesting thread running through the descriptions of Kiki having to do with her as an "African queen" or a goddess. She's described as being pretty, but in at least one case where someone tells her she's pretty, it's in the context of the African queen idea. There's a related notion of Kiki as a "strong black woman". Kiki has an uneasy relationship with both of these ideas -- on the one hand, they're both flattering on the surface, but on the other hand, she's tired of them, and she is not convinced that they're accurate. She tries to use the "strong black woman" idea for inspiration to get through a difficult situation, but deep down she seems to think it's bullshit. Both of these ideas are ways in which people spin her fatness as being OK or positive, but they imply that if she weren't black then her fatness would not be OK. So it seems she'd rather do without them, although maybe she also enjoys the benefits of them. I have to admit I never thought too deeply about either of these ideas, but now that I've read this and thought about it, yeah, I think they are both kind of problematic, and certainly trite in any case.

Relating to the race/fatness issue, at some point it it turns out that Kiki and Howard's adolescent son Levi (who himself is thin) is attracted to fat women. I think the first time it comes up is at a point when Kiki and Howard are having a crisis in their marriage, and it seems like Levi gets interested in fat women as a way of siding with his mother or expressing solidarity with her (even though at that moment he doesn't actually tell her about it). What's kind of interesting is that it also seems to be a way for Levi to assert his blackness. At the same time as he starts being interested in fat women, he also is getting involved with a group of friends whose nationality and station in life are very different from his own (he goes to great lengths to hide from them where he comes from), but who are unified by being black. Later on, we find out that Levi has pictures from fat porn magazines in his bedroom (and I think the women are black, though I don't remember for sure). Kiki comments on Levi's attraction to fat women once, saying something like of course men ought to like women with a little meat on their bones that don't look like they're undernourished. She clearly has a particular situation in mind but states it in general terms. Usually she is good-natured and doesn't make a lot of negative remarks (except when arguing with Howard), but this is one of the few comments that comes off as bitter.

Anyway, I haven't done this book justice at all, but these are just a few items that I thought might get some of you interested in reading the book. I highly recommend it, for lots of other reasons than what I talked about here! If you've read it (or if you read it in the future), please feel free to leave a comment about any aspect of the book or my interpretation of it.

Jeers

2009-05-07T10:53:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone, did you know that if you gain 83 lbs. you can get yourself on the cover of People magazine? Just ask Kirstie Alley. As far as I can tell, that's the only thing she has ever really accomplished. Let's face it, she sucked ass on Cheers. Now all she does is get paid by Jenny Craig to get thin and brag about it, then get interviewed by People magazine about how she got fat again.

All this would be fine and kind of boring, just another example of a narcissistic celebrity looking for a way to get into the news, if it weren't for the fact that she is spreading such a damaging message. In the People interview she refers to herself as "disgusting" because at 5'8" she let herself get up to 228 lbs. Yes, god forbid someone who's 5'8" should weigh that much. Can you imagine?! Jesus, how disgusting!! She also enlightens us all about how she got to such a disgusting size: she "went wild", she banished her workout equipment to the garage, and for dinner she would eat two cups of pasta with six tablespoons of butter. Um, OK, actually that last part *is* disgusting. In fact it's so disgusting that I'm going to go ahead and suggest that it's an exaggeration (or dare I say a lie?). But even if she really did eat that much butter on her pasta, unfortunately the implication is that other people who weigh 228 lbs. eat six tablespoons of butter on their pasta too. And they just "go wild" with their eating, and of course they don't work out. (Otherwise how could someone get to such a disgusting weight?!) This is just what we need, isn't it? The best part is that at the bottom of the People article there's a link that says "Does Kirstie's will to lose inspire you?" That seriously made me laugh out loud.

Kirstie, please shut the fuck up! If you want to lose weight, have at it, but does the whole fucking world have to hear about it? Your stupid "inspirational" story is not the slightest bit inspirational, for many reasons including the fact that half of it is probably complete bullshit. You got paid by Jenny Craig to promote their dumb-ass weight loss program, so why should we think that anything you have to say about it in a "candid" interview is anything but more propaganda?

In other news, just wanted to give you a heads-up that it's troll season. A couple of days ago a book was released called Lessons from the Fat-o-Sphere (no relation; I haven't read it yet but I look forward to it) and so there have been a lot more random hits on this blog. Which is totally great and all, except that some of the people who stop by here and post comments are assholes. Usually you can spot them by name ("Anonymous") but other times you have to read like one or two words into their comments to figure it out for sure. If any of them are excessively vile I will delete them; otherwise, I'm leaving the comments open, so feel free to respond to any and all comments from trolls. (Also please remember that I try to avoid anti-thin stuff around here, so if you want to say mean stuff to a troll, please make it about something else.)

Fat people are destroying the planet

2009-04-25T13:11:00.001-07:00

Not just by uglying up the place, but through global warming. Don't take my word for it -- just ask these guys from the "London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine"! It turns out that all of us Fatty McFattersons could save the planet, if only we didn't insist on being so fat. Fortunately some other bloggers were on top of this and have pretty much skewered it, so I'll just direct you to them: Fillyjonk over at Shapely Prose brings the snark; CarrieP at Big Fat Blog gives another good analysis and points out that for their calculations, the "researchers" assumed that fat people drive bigger cars (!).

As a follow-up to the United Airlines post, in case you're interested, here's a petition you can sign that will be sent to United telling them it's not OK for them to have their gate agents size people up and make them pay double to fly as punishment for being fat. Part of United's justification for their newly articulated policy was that they received 700 complaints from people who felt inconvenienced by having to sit next to a fat person. So the goal of the petition is to show United that their new policy is going to piss off a lot more than 700 people (there was another similar petition on PetitionOnline that had already reached 700 signatures, but sadly someone hacked it and managed to get it deleted from the site before the owner was able to compile everything to send to United).

United We Are Assholes

2009-04-17T11:21:00.000-07:00

Oh god, what to do... United was my favorite airline until now. I have racked up a bunch of frequent flyer miles with them, and just last weekend I got a free upgrade to first class on a United flight from Chicago, just because I put myself on standby for an early flight and they sold out all the economy seats but still had room in first! It was totally awesome.

But now United is going to start charging fat people for two tickets. Granted, I don't personally meet the criteria for being required to buy an extra seat according to this article, but now I feel like I ought to stop patronizing them. Even if I didn't feel some obligation to express solidarity with my fellow fatties, I'm also a little worried that I might get hassled at the gate. As Kate Harding points out in the post linked to above, how are they going to decide whether a person meets the criteria or not? Probably by authorizing the gate agents to visually size people up and decide whether someone looks too fat or not. Even if I never got forced to buy an extra ticket or miss my flight because of being fat, I would be absolutely outraged if I got pulled aside and grilled about whether I use a seatbelt extender (I don't, as it happens) or if I can lower the armrest (I can, and I always do if there's someone in the seat next to me, but it sure isn't comfortable), or worse -- if they made me sit in a seat in front of everyone at the gate and prove it. Even the thought that from now on the United gate agents will be looking me over and thinking about such things makes me feel angry and uncomfortable.

Of course Southwest had this same brilliant idea a while back, and it caused a little stir which has since (apparently) dissipated. There were some widely publicized cases of people being harrassed at the gate, Southwest got some bad PR, and then I imagine they asked the gate agents to back off a little bit even though they kept their discriminatory policy on the books. At least I haven't heard much about it since. I've flown on Southwest since then -- maybe that makes me a hypocrite, but they're so cheap and convenient that I just couldn't help myself. United, on the other hand, isn't particularly unique. I probably could avoid United without too much inconvenience or paying more for flights -- though I do have those frequent flyer miles, which are probably enough for a flight at this point... dilemma...

Well, anyway, I guess I'll have to think about it a little more. In the mean time, I'll daydream about a time when all this airline bullshit will be largely irrelevant (at least for domestic travel), thanks to this.

Yeah, but you're still a tool

2009-03-28T10:31:00.000-07:00

So David Noonan can't believe he's still a vegan. What I can't believe is that this is considered "news". This guy is obviously a huge fucking narcissist, but why on earth did an editor have to indulge him in it? David Noonan, I do not give a shit if you are vegan. And I really don't care about your philosophy of "food as fuel", except perhaps as a data point in our recent poll. What I do care about, though, is your asshole attitude towards fat, because unfortunately someone thought it would be a great idea to give you a large audience for your smug little rant. I'm sure you just think it's cute and funny, but did it ever occur to you that reinforcing the idea that being fat is a fate worse than death might contribute to people choosing death over fat? And before you say that's ridiculous, just take a look at this, and this, and this. And then go fuck yourself.

On a lighter note, my friend's brother features as the villain/instigator in this story on ESPN.com about the "Krispy Kreme Challenge," a very interesting annual tradition at NC State where you run 4 miles. Oh yeah, and eat a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts in the middle of it. The idea appeals to me for so many reasons, but watching the video convinced me that this is not an event that I ever need to try to participate in myself. See what you think!

D'oh of the week

2009-03-10T00:40:00.000-07:00

Ahh, CNN, you are so rife with fodder for my blog. When I'm in a rush and feeling guilty about not having posted recently, I know I can count on you to have something obnoxious about "obesity" right on your front page. You didn't let me down today! This article is a perfect example of how to imply that being fat raises cholesterol, without actually having to say anything that is technically false! Just say, "Given the increase in childhood obesity and diabetes in the United States..." and then go on to talk about how more kids are being diagnosed with high cholesterol these days. Sure, you didn't say "obesity causes high cholesterol," but will your average reader notice the distinction? Does the author of the article even understand the distinction? My guess is no on both counts.

And about that "increase in childhood obesity"? Uhh, yeah, that kind of ended ten years ago. But hey, the point still stands, right? Assholes.

The Joy of Eating

2009-02-15T13:39:00.000-08:00

I'd like to do a little informal poll. Here is a statement: "Food is just fuel for your body. I don't eat for pleasure; if I want pleasure I get it from other sources." Before you read on, please think about your reaction to the statement (and post it in the comments, if you're willing -- on this one, I actually invite people who are anti-fat and stumbled onto this post for some reason to please chime in). Does it apply to you? If not, do you aspire to it? Do you think it is a mainstream view?

OK, now the context. This statement is something that my trainer at the gym told me. He used to be fat (he was 300 lbs., and I think he's about 5'7") -- now he is more like 200 lbs. and very lean. He doesn't lecture me about losing weight (if he did, I'd tell him off and/or quit working with him), so this kind of indirect parable-type thing is the only way I've ever heard his philosophy on the subject. He said he hasn't eaten any cheese in probably 3 or 4 months. I'm not really asking if he is "right," since I don't think there is one right way to think about such things (it is surely obvious to my regular readers how I feel about it, but I'm not arguing for my own view here). So I'm not asking whether a person "should" eat for pleasure. But I do wonder how common a view it is, and whether people who are fat-haters would agree with it or not. I actually have conflicting expectations about this. On the one hand, I can imagine that it's a common view among bodybuilders, and a lot of fat-haters are bodybuilders (or claim to be bodybuilders, when they're posting nasty comments on people's blogs). On the other hand, a common uncharitable claim about fat people is that we do not know how to really eat for pleasure, we just cram as much cheap, low-quality food as possible down the gullet in as short a period as possible. So this would lead me to expect that the fat-haters would argue that you "should" try to get pleasure out of eating.

On another note, I have an update on the last post. I got a very nice response from the person I emailed. It still seems like we disagree about some things, but she seems open to talking about it. Also, it turns out that some of the materials they are using in class are about the physical and psychological damage that can be caused by dieting. I am not sure how she is reconciling these things with the CDC slideshow that, as I pointed out, feeds into the "obesity panic" which in turn puts more pressure on people to diet. But I was happy at least to know that the students are getting some materials that challenge the pro-diet view.

One last thing. The Admiral sent a link to this article on why Sanjay Gupta should not be Surgeon General. I agree, not only because of Gupta's views on single-payer health care, but for these additional reasons.

Fat in the classroom

2009-02-12T16:38:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday I attended a lecture on campus, and as I walked into the room, a class had just ended and the professor (whom I know casually) was still packing up her stuff. I saw on the whiteboard some what looked like a list of reasons why people are fat. So I asked the professor what class it was and what they had been talking about, and she said it was a health psychology course and that today's lecture was about "weight". I mentioned that I had an interest in this subject and was curious about what they talked about, and she said they had discussed the conscientious objectors experiment (I assume she meant this) and she showed a CDC slideshow about the change in "obesity" rates in the US over time (scare quotes mine) (and I'm guessing it was this). In the most casual possible way, I asked what the slideshow did about the fact that the BMI cutoff for obesity was changed in 1998 (well, I actually said I wasn't sure, but it was in the 1990's and I thought 1996). She responded that the cutoff was 30 and had been 30 for a very long time and that she never heard of the change I was referring to. This I found kind of disturbing, since here she was lecturing students about BMI but didn't know the history of the BMI standards. Maybe it's a minor point, though. Anyway, what bothered me even more was that she went on to say about the CDC slideshow, "What's really striking about it is the change." And I was like, "The change?" and she was like, "Yeah, the increase in the percentage of obesity state-by-state over the years." And I said, "Hmm, I wonder how much of that is attributable to demographic changes," and she replied, "No, it can't possibly be explained by that because the change is way too dramatic." Since the lecture was about to start, I just smiled and said, "Hmm," and then added that I'd love to talk more about this stuff with her sometime, and she said that sounded good.

So I sat there during the lecture, totally unable to focus, instead just stewing about how the students at my institution are getting a misinformed view about fat. When I got back to my office, I wrote the following email:

"Hi [name],

It was interesting chatting with you this morning and I wish we'd had more time to talk! While I'm thinking of it, I just wanted to send you a link to a post on a blog that I read, where Paul Campos critiques the traditional view of BMI (I don't know if you're familiar with his work, but I could send you some references if you're interested). Here is the link: http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2008/08/obesity-apocalypse.html. If you get a chance to look at it, I'd be curious to know your reaction to this line of argumentation. One of the most interesting points, to me, is the fact that the average weight has not actually gone up by a very large amount in the last 30 years (and I think it would be even less if you factored in the increased average height over the same period). So I wonder whether demographic trends actually could explain quite a bit of the change. I also think it is interesting to consider what other factors have contributed -- it sounds like you talked a bit about that in your class. I'd love to know if you have the students reading anything in particular about this that I might be able to get ahold of.

Also, I looked around online and found some references to the change in BMI standards. Apparently it happened in 1998, not 1996 as I thought. I forget what happened to the standard for "overweight," but the "obese" cutoff was a BMI of 32 prior to 1998 and then changed to 30. I don't know what the CDC materials do about this change -- I think I found the slide show you mentioned, and it just says "BMI >=30", implying that they applied the new standard to the data from all years including pre-1998. On the other hand, impressionistically it looks like there's a big jump between 1998 and 1999, so I wonder whether they could actually be applying the old standard to the data from 1998 and previous, and then just stating the modern cutoff. That would certainly be interesting to know! I also think it is interesting to think about what the motivation was for the cutoff being revised, and indeed for the cutoffs in general.

Anyway, I just thought I'd drop you a line about this, and if you are interested in talking more I would be glad to do so.

Best,
Mary"

After I sent it I obsessed about how she would react to the email, because from the little that I know about her I actually like this person, and people around campus seem to respect her. And I kind of think if another professor sent me an email challenging something I had taught in class, I might get a little defensive about it no matter how nicely it was worded. So I forwarded my email to a colleague who knows her well (and who isn't necessarily a true believer in everything I think about fat, so I figured she'd be objective), and she said she thought it was "completely collegial". For the rest of the day on Tuesday I kept checking my email and wondering when she'd write back. But now that a couple of days have gone by, I've realized that the reaction is not actually the most important thing here. First of all, there's a chance I got the wrong impression and this person actually has a more enlightened view than I'm giving her credit for. I did see that one of the things on the list written on the board was "Genetics 50-60%" (I may have the numbers wrong, but it was something like that), so at least that was apparently acknowledged (though I think the actual figure is higher, to the extent you buy into these percentages that people try to assign to the role of genetics in X). But even if her views are actually quite yucky, at least I've given her a little taste of the idea that there exists a critique of the mainstream view. I wouldn't expect to suddenly change someone's mind with an email, but who knows, maybe next time she lectures on this stuff she'll at least say, "There are those who disagree..." and then perhaps a student will pick up on the comment and go out and learn about the alternative point of view for him/herself.

Random

2009-01-27T14:41:00.000-08:00

Hi all, sorry for the hiatus. I've had a busy couple of weeks -- first I went to San Francisco, and then two days after I got back I went to Amsterdam, arriving home on the very day that classes started here.

Anyhoo, just a couple of random thoughts. First, this photo. I took it in a cheese shop in Amsterdam. I figured I'd share it with you all, since I'm all about promoting happiness here. And this certainly makes me happy. The cheese was just as good as you might imagine. We tried an awesome edam, and a really awesome orange something or other that was gouda-like but not gouda (it's in the photo but I can't make out the name), and a delicious aged gouda with big salt chunks. Anyone out there got a favorite cheese? I really love this one cheese called Robusto that we used to get at Whole Foods, which is one of those aged goudas (or gouda-like cheeses anyway). I also really like this one particular cheese called Humboldt Fog which is a goat milk cheese with a layer of ash in it. And as far as less exotic things go, I also really enjoy fresh mozzarella. And ricotta. And cotija. Oh, cheese.

On an unrelated note, the Admiral sent me this article about Oprah. You've all no doubt heard Oprah's recent revelation that she's gained a bunch of weight, and maybe you've read some critiques of her hand-wringing about it. But I think this article puts the whole thing into perspective in an interesting way.

I guess that's it for now. I swear I'll post more regularly in the future!

Happy F*&@^#ing New Year!

2008-12-31T11:46:00.001-08:00

I've said it before and I'll say it again. New Year's resolutions suck. Does anybody ever resolve to do anything that is genuinely worthwhile, and if so, do they ever actually do it? If not, what the hell is the point, other than to increase gym membership sales and/or to make people feel bad?

The worst part is the "experts" who come crawling out of the woodwork at this time every year to tell you why human beings are such weak and pathetic pieces of shit and to give you advice on sticking to your resolutions. Here's a great example. In this CNN article, Kelly Haws informs us that the reason people fail to keep their resolutions is that "people are resistant to things that are uncomfortable or have them feeling deprived." Wow, no shit? I thought people loved things that are uncomfortable and make them feel deprived. I guess that's why Kelly Haws is an assistant professor of marketing at Texas A&M and I'm not.

Also, why is this article so hung up on demonizing lattes? What's wrong with a daily latte? Caffeine, in moderation at least, is good for you. In the short term, it increases your endurance so you can exercise longer and harder, which is also good for you, at least up to a point. Dairy, by most people's reckoning, is also good for you, especially the fat-free kind. Lattes taste good and are aesthetically and even spiritually satisfying. They are a nice way to start your day. If you make them at home, they are inexpensive. So what exactly is the problem with lattes (other than that they are the beverage of choice of the elitist left-wing god-hating terrorist-loving Volvo-driving intelligentsia)? The beverage pictured in the article with the caption under it referring to a "latte" isn't even a latte. I don't know what the hell it is, but it's not a latte.

Happy New Year anyway.

How about a jagoff tax instead?

2008-12-18T14:59:00.000-08:00

Found this gem on CNN.com today. Apparently David Paterson thinks the state of New York needs an "obesity tax". (To be fair, that was what the headline said, not necessarily what Paterson called it, but his editorial is chock-full of anti-"obesity" rhetoric.) Actually the proposal is not to tax people for being fat, but rather to tax non-diet "sugared drinks". Because, you know, there is a direct correlation between consumption of non-diet soda and being fat. Well, except when there isn't.

Two things really get me about this editorial. The first is Paterson's assertion that "No one can deny the urgency of reducing the rate of obesity". That is certainly one way of forcing people to agree with you -- just say "No one can deny that...", and then how could anyone have the nerve to disagree? The second thing that irks me is the idea that diet soda is healthy for people. First of all, there is still the possibility that aspartame causes cancer -- there have been some conflicting reports, but it's not as if the connection is just some fringe idea. And then there is this bit of delicious irony: drinking diet soda may actually *increase* weight gain. Does anyone else find that totally hilarious or do I just have a sick sense of humor?

Good article on AlterNet

2008-12-05T11:34:00.000-08:00

Hi all, I wanted to draw your attention to this article on AlterNet (thanks to the Admiral for the heads-up). It's about a 2007 documentary that somehow I never heard about, called "Fat: What No One Is Telling You", which definitely sounds worthy of checking out on Netflix.

The article itself (don't know yet about the movie) is stuck on the old idea of "obesity" as a "disease" and suffers from a few other misconceptions, but it made me happy anyway (well, "happy"... I mean, it's not a happy article, but I'm glad it was written). It's not all that common for lefties to come to the defense of fat people these days (unfortunately you see this in some of the comments on the article, which I recommend avoiding), so it's nice to see this on AlterNet.

Happy Buy Nothing Day!

2008-11-28T11:28:00.001-08:00

I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving. We sure did! Great food, great booze, great company. Our hosts handled most of the cooking, so we just contributed four items: a green bean casserole, mulled wine (the Admiral's concoction), a pumpkin pie (the tried and true Joy of Cooking recipe) with fresh whipped cream, and a fabulous persimmon cake. The latter is adapted from a recipe called "Fuyu Bundt Cake" that I dug up online last year when we kept getting persimmons in the box from our CSA. The source attributes the recipe to an old Sunset magazine. I wouldn't be surprised, since I've found all the Sunset recipes I've tried to be absolutely delicious. (Did you see the Cranberry Obsession Snow Cake on the cover of the last issue? It looks awesome. I am *so* making that for Christmas.) I'm going to go ahead and post my version of the persimmon cake recipe below.

But first, a word about Buy Nothing Day. I've soured on Adbusters magazine because of their insistence on holding up fat people as symbols of our society's insatiable appetite for energy and consumer goods. But I still acknowledge that they've had some good ideas over the years -- one of them being (in my opinion) Buy Nothing Day. The idea is that on the day after Thanksgiving, instead of running out to Wal-Mart and participating in the orgy of pre-Christmas spending (at the risk of getting trampled), we should commit to going 24 hours without spending a dime. This way, we basically drop out of the economy for a day and we don't contribute to this one big day of retail sales that adds to everybody's crushing credit card debt and basically keeps our unsustainable way of life going for another year. Adbusters suggests some protests that you can stage to celebrate Buy Nothing Day -- for example, you can go to a mall with a pair of scissors and offer to cut up people's credit cards. Another idea that wasn't necessarily suggested by Adbusters, but which they endorsed after the fact, was a mass vomit where people went to a mall and took ipecac and all barfed in unison. That seems a bit extreme to me and I'm not sure there was a direct connection to Buy Nothing Day. I think it had to do with eating as a metaphor for consumption in general, and therefore barfing as a rejection of consumption; but really I think the idea was to gross out the customers so they would leave and not buy as much (unfortunately, the only guaranteed consequence was that some mall employee had to clean up the barf, but I guess a hard-core Culture Jammer might argue that a mall employee is a cog in the wheel and therefore deserves to have to clean up barf, or something like that). So anyway, all this is to say that although I'm not participating in any protests, I'm also not buying anything today. Instead, I'll just stay home and get some reading done, and eat some leftover persimmon cake. And now, on to that recipe.

Persmimmon Bundt Cake

5 fuyu persimmons, peeled and chopped (it's crucial to get fuyus b/c hachiyas can be tart if they aren't ripe)
2 t. baking soda
1 stick butter, softened
1 2/3 c. sugar
2 eggs
2 t. lemon juice
2 t. vanilla
2 c. flour
1 t. baking powder
1 t. salt
1 t. ground cloves
1 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. ground nutmeg
powdered sugar

Grease and flour a bundt cake pan.

Preheat oven to 350.

Blend baking soda with chopped fuyus (this can be done in a blender). Set aside.

In a large bowl, beat butter with sugar. Add eggs, lemon juice, and vanilla, and beat until fluffy.

Stir in fuyu mix.

In a separate bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, salt, ground cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

Stir flour mixture into fuyu mixture until just blended.

Spoon mixture into prepared bundt pan. Bake at 350 for 45 minutes or until toothpick tests clean.

Cool in pan 15 minutes. Turn onto serving plate (preferably a dark-colored one).

Put some powdered sugar into a small strainer and, holding it over the cake, tap the edge of it to create an even dusting of sugar over the top of the cake and the plate.

Eat!

Why, oh why, didn't I take a picture of the cake yesterday? It was so pretty. Oh well, anyway, here's a picture of a fuyu persimmon. This is the kind you want; hachiyas are longer and pointier at the bottom.

It's time for another episode of...

2008-11-22T21:39:00.000-08:00

Spot The Cliche!

How many can you count in this CNN article?

Sorry for the lack of posts lately -- I've just been busy. More soon.

Yay! But... ack!

2008-11-10T22:17:00.000-08:00

It's been almost a week since the election, and I still feel happy and glowy. About most of what happened, anyway. Not this so much. At least Ohio came through, as promised.

But here's a question: will President Obama be proactive about taking care of this little problem? This is some scary stuff, people...

Cookies

2008-10-30T09:30:00.001-07:00

It's no secret that I love cookies. You've all seen my mom's sugar cookie recipe (scroll to the bottom), and if you've had the pleasure of trying it, you must know that my family and I are not fucking around when it comes to cookies. Hell, I even had the nickname "Cookie" when I was in the marching band, back in the day.

But now I am here to tell you that cookies hold the key to our future. Just check out the results of the Busken presidential cookie poll. Busken is a bakery in Cincinnati that makes cookies with each candidate's face on them every election season (FYI, they do ship, though I don't know whether you can still order in time for election day), and according to this post, the Busken poll has correctly predicted the winner in Ohio in every election since 1984. Which is significant enough in its own right, but remember also that Ohio has gone for the winner of every presidential election since 1960. Yes, people, Ohio went for Bill Clinton both times, so quit acting like it will be such a miracle if Obama wins it too.

Returning to my earlier point about family pride, I just wanted to share the fact that my parents are both working for Obama in Ohio. On Monday my mom is going to go to the homes of people who've said they're for Obama to encourage them to vote and give them flyers with information about their polling locations and hours. And on Sunday my dad is going to go around to the local churches to see if anyone is putting nasty flyers on people's windshields during church (and, if so, to take them off). This is actually just his own idea (not organized by the Obama campaign) inspired by the fact that in 2004, ~~the Bush campaign~~ someone who I'm sure was acting alone and had nothing to do with the Bush campaign went to my mom's church the Sunday before the election and flyered everyone's windshields with a bunch of extremely nasty anti-Kerry flyers with gross lies and smears about how he's a baby-killer. That kind of crap worked last time, but it's not going to work this time.

Cookies, people. Cookies!

A cure for Depression?

2008-10-13T20:05:00.000-07:00

Nifty article here by Steve Almond (author of Candyfreak, which I highly recommend) on "recession gardens" (soon to be upgraded to "depression gardens" if Sarah Palin is to be believed -- though I'd argue she isn't to be believed about much of anything).

The Admiral and I were just talking yesterday about whether people could (or *would*) grow enough food in their gardens to make a dent in their monthly grocery expenditures. I was thinking no, because I've been discouraged this year by the ratio of effort to yield in our own garden (we got some great stuff out of it, but not in large quantities, and lots of stuff either never sprouted or got eaten by birds and/or grasshoppers). It was so hot this summer that we had to water the garden every day, and even then some things clearly did not get enough water, and if we ever forgot or watered too late, things died. All things considered, though, we were pretty on top of things, so I was thinking that others who weren't willing to be as diligent about the garden or didn't know as much about growing stuff as we did (which admittedly isn't a ton, though I do pretty well with houseplants when I apply myself) would fare even worse.

But Almond's story is encouraging. He didn't know anything about gardening, but he was motivated by the high cost of groceries to research it and to get help and advice from others who do know about gardening to get his garden going. In the end, the garden was highly successful and yielded a whole lot of good stuff. He did admit that his house is on land that used to be farmland. But still, with enough compost and whatnot, anybody's yard ought to be able to produce *something*. So now I'm inspired. I'm thinking that next time we just need to (a) rent a rototiller, (b) install a drip system (we never got around to setting up our soaker hose, but people tell me they don't work that great anyway), (c) put up some nets around our tomatoes and maybe over the seeds to keep the birds out, and (d) think of some non-poisonous way to get rid of those damn grasshoppers.

In ironic twist, animal advocacy organization beats dead horse

2008-10-01T09:52:00.000-07:00

You guys are going to love this Newsweek article by Karen Springen about "flexitarians". Are we still seriously having a debate about whether it would be good if everyone reduced their meat consumption? Well, no, actually, *we* aren't having that debate -- *we* concluded a long time ago that of course it would be a good thing. *PETA*, on the other hand (as well as VegNews, I might add, but I'm not gonna go there today), isn't so sure. Their spokesperson thinks that being a flexitarian is like "pouring a pint of gasoline down a drain." Um... how's that?

Fortunately in the end Springen seems to come down on the side of common sense, despite giving a disturbing amount of space (and the subtitle of the article) to the PETA side. But on the topic of that subtitle ("Advocates call it flexitarianism, but critics say being a little bit vegetarian is like being a little bit pregnant"), a commenter on the original Newsweek post rightly points out that the analogy to pregnancy completely misses the whole point of the "little bit pregnant" concept -- namely, that it is *literally* impossible to be a little bit pregnant -- it's not just impossible if you're some asshole from PETA and you assert that pregnancy has to be an all-or-nothing thing. Of course, we don't know if the PETA asshole is the one who brought up the pregnancy idea or if it was Springen or just some moron headline writer.

But we do know that Springen is an unthinking zombie in at least one respect, namely, FAT = BAD... WEIGHT LOSS = GOOD... ARTICLE ABOUT FOOD MUST FIND WAY TO WORK IN REFERENCES TO WEIGHT LOSS AND "OBESITY"... Not just any reference to "obesity", mind you, but even better: "globesity"! For those who haven't heard of "globesity" before, this is the idea of "obesity" as a worldwide epidemic. You know, like that super-scary "obesity epidemic" we've all heard about, but even scarier! Because it's global! Get it? Global + obesity = globesity! This charming concept is mentioned in the article as a topic in a forthcoming book by Mark Bittman, which apparently discusses "how our diet affects global warming and 'globesity'." Is Bittman (and/or Springen) actually putting "globesity" on a par with global warming as a problem facing the world? Wow. I mean, wow.

Before a troll lumbers over here to inform me that "obesity" is in fact a serious health problem and I am responsible for it because I am spreading all these lies about how it's OK to be fat, let me just say that I don't deny we have a serious worldwide problem with food production and distribution, such that a lot of people in developing countries who aren't starving still can't eat a healthy diet, and that no doubt leads to a whole ton of serious health problems including diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, etc. that are often what people have in mind when they refer to "obesity". But can we please, please just take fat out of it? Plenty of thin people have health problems caused or exacerbated by diet, and plenty of fat people don't have health problems at all and have a good diet. Guess what? There are even fat vegetarians. I know that's a shocker, so I'll just let that sink in for a second.

Got it? OK, good. Back to the PETA thing. I just want to say one last thing, which is that no good ever came out of a "purity" movement. I don't know if these PETA fucks truly believe that reducing meat consumption isn't something to work for or feel good about, but they sure sound convincing when they say it. I guess to them, the protection of animals from human exploitation is the very most important thing -- even more important than saving the planet from global warming (which, btw, is killing a lot of animals...). These are the same people who wring their hands over whether it is OK to eat honey since it exploits bees. They shouldn't be taken seriously. If you're a meat eater and you're thinking about reducing your meat intake, do it. If it helps to give yourself a label like "flexitarian" or even "vegetarian", do it. There are a lot more important things than taking what PETA considers to be the high road.

Even people who get it don't get it

2008-09-18T13:42:00.000-07:00

Saw this article in the LA Times today and got encouraged, then read the article and got unencouraged.

In a nutshell: Mary McNamara has just noticed that TV actresses are, like, really thin (no, like *really* thin!) (no, seriously, you guys!), and it's bothering her because it's interfering with her viewing pleasure.

I do think it's good to point out the very extreme average thinness of TV actresses as sort of a reality check, to guard against young women thinking that size 2 is the norm. Too bad they seem to get that idea anyway. But that's OK, according to Mary McNamara, because the thinness of TV actresses doesn't contribute to eating disorders. Her evidence? "We are in the midst of a childhood obesity epidemic." Oh. But, I mean, isn't it possible that there's still a real issue here and that we could start to alleviate some of the societal pressures leading young women to develop a poor body image if we had some size diversity on TV (and not just via fat villains, but maybe some real, complex, sympathetic characters in a range of different shapes and sizes)? Apparently not, according to Mary McNamara; after all, "even the Gap carries size 16 nowadays". Thanks a lot for your insightful analysis, Mary.

A lot of people don't seem to understand that insulting thin people isn't really helpful, in much the same way that insulting fat people is also unhelpful. In this article you get insults a-plenty. You get adjectives like "horrifyingly thin" and "frightening," lame cliches, and nuggets like this: "The ladies of 'Desperate Housewives' are so far gone in terms of resembling humans that it's almost laughable to mention them." Yes, the women mentioned in the article are extremely thin. But there's no need for insults. And furthermore, some LA Times reporter has no idea (and no business speculating) on whether a person has an eating disorder. Yes, you might say, but so many actresses are thin that it can't be a coincidence, so they must have eating disorders! Well, some of them undoubtedly do. But let's not forget that very thin women are more likely to get TV roles than larger women. That doesn't mean the thin women all have eating disorders -- there's an element of biased selection going on as well. Correlation does not equal causation. You've heard it here before, folks.

But getting to the main premise of the Times article (I think), the big problem with super-thin actresses is that Mary McNamara isn't enjoying 90210 as much as she would like to, because she is too distracted by the thinness. I'm just going to put an idea out here, as an avid watcher of an awesome show with an awesome lead actress who happens to be really thin (season finale tonight on USA; be there or be square): Maybe Mary McNamara finds it difficult to "concentrate on the drama of the story" on 90210 because 90210 sucks.

You know how sometimes you just don't like a person, and then only later do you figure out why?

2008-09-05T12:51:00.000-07:00

I haven't really commented much on the presidential race here, mostly because I haven't been all that excited about it. My candidate from the beginning was Dennis Kucinich, and since he dropped out of the race before the California Democratic primary, I didn't even bother voting. I leaned towards Obama because Hillary voted for the war, but didn't really care which of them ended up with the nomination. After Obama voted for the FISA bill in July, I was pissed off but figured I'd probably vote for him in November anyway, given the alternatives. I did enjoy the Democratic convention -- especially Bill Clinton's speech, but also Obama's, which I thought was really good though somewhat lacking in specifics. But the thing that is finally starting to get me fired up about Obama (and the reason I'm posting about it) is the Republicans, and in particular, Sarah Palin.

In a nutshell: she sucks. She's super anti-choice, doesn't believe in evolution, and is pro-drilling. Worse, she is nasty, sarcastic, and smug. I can't even bring myself to watch her convention speech because the clips I've been have been so deeply offensive -- of particular note would be the crack against community organizers, and her blatant lie about saying "thanks but no thanks" to the "bridge to nowhere" (in fact, she supported it very publicly). There's nothing in her record to suggest she has any business being vice president, and yet she actually has the gall to question Obama's qualifications. When I first heard that she was McCain's running mate, I was reminded of Harriet Miers -- here's some random woman who's super right-wing, totally unqualified for the job, and pretty obviously chosen because she's a woman. But now that I've seen how people are reacting to her speech, I'm thinking she's more like Dick Cheney to McCain's Bush. It's like a wink and a nod from McCain -- don't worry, I have to keep saying this "maverick" bullshit to attract independent voters, but now that I've chosen my VP you can be reassured as to what kind of president I'll be. And unfortunately it looks like it may be working.

But something else was bugging me about Sarah Palin and her fans, apart from her obnoxious speech, and it had to do with her kids. For one thing, she is having her cake and eating it too -- in order to deflect attention from her pregnant teenage daughter, she says people's kids shouldn't be made into a political issue, but then she flat-out *used* the announcement of her daughter's pregnancy to quiet a rumor that threatened to undermine her image of integrity (to the extent she had an image at all). And I don't know how much she's said this explicitly herself, but she is certainly benefitting from all the talk about how great it is that she chose to bear her fifth child to term after finding out he had Down syndrome (here is one nauseating example), and nobody can deny that she's used him as a prop. The Daily Show had an awesome bit last night with Samantha Bee with commentary on how hypocritical it is to praise Palin for making this particular choice when she wants the government to prevent women from having any "choice" at all. But there's another troubling issue here, and Sweet Machine has an awesome piece that puts into words what I was feeling, over at Shakesville. A summary: all this rhetoric about Palin's "choice" is blatantly ableist because it assumes that a child with Down syndrome is inferior and a terrible burden for a parent to bear, so any woman who chooses not to have an abortion "even" if she knows the child has Down syndrome is obviously some kind of saint. I won't go into any more detail, because you should just go over and read Sweet Machine's post.

Quiz time

2008-08-28T14:55:00.000-07:00

That's right, it's time for another awesome quiz, just in time for BACK 2 SCHOOL! Today's quiz is another gem from CNN.com. The link from the CNN.com homepage calls it "Fit or fat?" (hmm, how about "both"?), so you already know it's going to be a doozy. It's actually worth going to CNN.com right now (until they take it down) just so you can look at the link. The title is "Lose Weight with Knowledge" (ha!), the subtitle informs you that "What you don't know could be making you fat," and it comes complete with a picture of some dude's back, which is supposed to gross you out or something because he has love handles. But he has a shirt on and he's not really all that fat, so I don't totally get the image.

Anyhoo, the quiz. The first page promises that the quiz is going to show you just how easy it is to "Commit to Get Fit". I'm thinking they wrote this intro having no idea what the content of the quiz would be, because the quiz doesn't really have that much to do with committing to get fit, or showing how easy it is, or anything like that. There are only 6 questions, and they're mostly just trivia. For example, Question 1, "How many calories make up one pound of fat?" All you biology teachers out there are probably giving your head a good thump on the desk after that one. Who knew that fat is "made up of" calories? And I'm not even going to comment on the photo that goes with Question 1; it speaks for itself.

Overall, I got 5 out of 6 right. So I guess it must be the one I got wrong (#6) that's making me fat.

Once you go black, you'll never go back

2008-08-24T22:43:00.000-07:00

I just came across this article, and for some reason I found it really hilarious even though I'm sure it's true (or, anyway, I have no reason to believe that it's not). Basically it says that black food (i.e., food that is black in color) is good for you because it contains a lot of antioxidants. I guess the reason I thought it was funny was that (a) I started imagining a whole meal of black food and how disgusting that would look on a plate, despite being probably very healthy; and (b) it reminded me of the time a few years ago when I made a dark chocolate bowling ball cake for our Big Lebowski party (pictured above with bowling pin and starburst cookies -- you can't really tell from the blurry picture, but I actually cut out finger holes and carefully frosted inside each of them) with black food coloring in both the cake batter and the frosting to make the whole ball uniformly black, and it made everyone's crap turn black (and in some cases, their barf too -- it was one hell of a party). Good times!

(Note to those who eat my baked goods: don't worry, I don't use food coloring anymore.)

On the subject of cakes, I found this blog via a link from Meg, and it is cracking me up. This post made me laugh so hard I cried.

No shit

2008-08-12T18:22:00.000-07:00

This article came out today. And it's about time.

Question: if it turns out that all that bad stuff "associated with obesity" isn't really caused by being fat at all, but rather by some mixture of unlucky genetics, poor diet, and lack of exercise, do you suppose we could just do away with the term "obesity" altogether?

Nah, probably too much to hope for.

More on the AP article here.

I heart Paul Campos

2008-08-05T15:33:00.000-07:00

I just became aware of an awesome blog called Lawyers, Guns and Money that is definitely worth checking out. One of the bloggers is Paul Campos (I've mentioned him before), who's posted a couple of truly excellent pieces on fat in the last week or so. This one addresses the role of pharmaceutical companies in creating the "obesity epidemic", and this one takes apart the claim that the entire population is going to be "overweight" or "obese" by the year 2048. I always appreciate what Campos has to say because he has done a lot of research and he is a very clear writer. Sadly, he describes himself in his Blogger profile as a fan of University of Michigan football (to which I have already gone on record as saying this), but I'm willing to look past it.

On a different topic, one thing I am *not* willing to look past is Anthony Bourdain's remarks about "obesity". If you are prepared for some serious hate-spewage, check out this video where Bourdain chats with Ted Nugent about how gross fat people are. I found the link via Rachel's post on the F-Word Blog. Mega dittos, Rachel. Can there be a bigger hypocrite on the planet than Anthony Bourdain? I used to like him. Now, not so much. Never did like Ted Nugent. I love the part where he talks about how disgusting it is to look at fat people. You know, because Nugent himself is such a hottie.

So as not to end on such a negative note, allow me to point you to this article about how kids' meals at fast-food restaurants have come under scrutiny for being unhealthy. I'm not up on my kids' meals and don't have a strong opinion about their content, but the refreshing thing about this article is that it never once mentions "the childhood obesity epidemic". Instead, it focuses on the healthiness (or lack thereof) of the food and on real medical conditions that result from eating what's in those kids' meals, rather than made-up ones meant to scare people. It would be nice to see a bit more of this in what passes for health and science reporting these days.

News from the trans fatosphere

2008-07-28T13:52:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the hiatus.

I guess the big news since last time is that California is banning trans fats from restaurants.

It sounds like good news to me, but already the whining has begun. The owner of Bertha's Soul Food in Los Angeles is quoted in the LA Times as saying that "The government is infringing too much on the rights of people to even eat what they want." OK everyone, raise your hand if you "want" to eat trans fats... I didn't think so.

This is the problem with America. (OK, one of a few problems with America.) Here we have restaurants selling us all sorts of nasty-ass chemicals and calling it "food" and not being legally required to even tell us what kind of terrible shit is in there. Finally the state government has decided to step in to protect its citizens from one particularly insidious type of "food" ingredient that should never have been invented, and now restaurant owners are calling this an infringement on consumers' rights. Give me a fucking break.

Now, I will admit that the trans fat ban may be based partly on some wrong, crappy attitudes held by some of our fine leaders in Sacramento. According to this New York Times piece, the author of the trans fats bill, (Democrat) Tony Mendoza, was motivated by "obese children": "They are heavy. They eat out a lot, and you realize there are trans fats out there." Umm, connection? Not really seeing it. But at least the Governator's statement about the bill (the parts I've seen in the news reports, anyway) refrained from veering into scary-fat-kids-OMG-panic-obesity-epidemic territory. Of course we know he's not the world's most enlightened guy when it comes to things fat, but at least in his statement he focuses on the link between trans fats and heart disease rather than "obesity". And in any case, whatever the real motivation for the trans fat ban, I consider it a win.

Now, how long before VegNews gets in on the whining?

The image is from ABC News. Do you love it as much as I do?

Continental sux redux

2008-07-17T14:42:00.000-07:00

A quick follow-up from last week's post: I encountered the same problem on my return trip. This time, my "meal" was a little packet of about 8 baby carrots, and the old familiar Fun Pack of M&Ms. And a mustard packet. At least this time when I asked whether there was a Vegetarian Option, the flight attendant had the decency to say no.

So I get off the plane in Houston, starving, and make my way to the food court where I order a veggie burrito at this little Mexican place called Pappasito's. The cashier asks if I'm vegetarian. I say yes, thinking she's just making small talk. Then she's like, "Well, the sour cream has chicken broth in it." I'm only half paying attention, so I'm like, "That's okay," thinking she's just asked if it's okay to cook my veggies on the same grill as the meat. Then it actually registers what she said. And I'm like, "Excuse me, did you just say the sour cream has chicken broth in it?" And she's like, "Yeah." And I'm like "???"

Houston, we have a problem

2008-07-09T16:41:00.001-07:00

Not a major problem, mind you, but I just wanted to say "Houston, we have a problem." I told Seamus I was going to find some excuse to say that today since I have a layover in Houston (which is where I'm blogging from now). I was thinking I'd go to Starbucks and order a drink, and then tell them they got my order wrong and go, "Houston, we have a problem." (This is where you laugh.) (You probably had to be there.) (Which would technically be impossible since I didn't actually do it, I was just talking about doing it.)

Anyhoo, moving on, here's my problem: the "Vegetarian" option. On Continental Airlines, they might as well rename it the "Don't Bother" option. What happens is that when you buy your ticket, you click a box that says you want the "Vegetarian" option (if it's a long enough flight that they're serving a meal). Then, they ignore your request. Then, when you get on the plane, you have to tell them that you want the "Vegetarian" option. Which is what I did. I said, "Do you have a vegetarian version?" and the flight attendant said "Yes," then handed me my little plastic box that contained: a flaccid iceberg lettuce "salad" (with no other veggies in it), a packet of dressing, a "fun pack" of M&Ms with about 25 M&Ms in it, and a ketchup packet. She also gave one to my seat-mate, and then she handed him a hot sandwich. I sat there munching on my nasty salad, waiting for my cheese sandwich or whatever it was while the flight attendant chatted with someone about the total awesomeness of Veggie Tales (irony!) and how much her kid looooooves it, but it turned out there was no cheese sandwich. The "Vegetarian" option is just the regular old ketchup and M&Ms salad, sans sandwich. So I'm pretty sure I didn't derive any nutritional benefit from my "lunch", except for maybe 200 calories (I guess it would have been 225 if I'd eaten the ketchup) and some minimal amount of fiber from the lettuce. They serve better lunches in Gitmo. They also serve (marginally) better lunches at faculty meetings at the fine institution where I teach. At least in the vegetarian lunch at faculty meetings, you get some little cabbage pieces and maybe some carrots mixed into your iceberg lettuce. And if you get there early enough, there are even cut up pieces of hard-boiled egg that you can use to add that extra special something to your meal. Yum-o!

Will this be the year that I work up the courage to round up some fellow vegetarian faculty members and demand that the administration offer us a vegetarian option that's equivalent to the turkey wraps that come with the non-veg option? I mean, everyone knows that when it comes to the airline industry, you just have to bend over and take what they give you. And of course people have been complaining about airline food and will do so until the end of time (or until the end of air travel as we know it, which could come sooner than we think, but that's a topic for a different post). But higher education is supposed to be different, dammit! So who's with me??

Just when you thought you'd heard it all...

2008-07-07T13:17:00.000-07:00

...CNN reports that the American Academy of Pediatrics is recommending low-fat milk for 1-year-olds and CHOLESTEROL DRUGS FOR 8-YEAR-OLDS.

8-year-olds, Dude.

Could I just remind everyone that the rate of "childhood obesity" in the U.S. leveled off in 1999, meaning this "epidemic" we keep hearing about is a complete load of horse shit? And could I also remind you that the BMI standards defining "overweight" and "obese" were lowered (from 27 and 32, respectively, to 25 and 30) after an NIH report that came out in 1998, based on research funded (natch) by the weight loss industry and pharmaceutical companies? No wonder "childhood obesity" rates leveled off in 1999 -- they were level before, then millions of people (both adults and children) became "overweight" or "obese" overnight when the BMI standards were lowered in 1998, yielding a big jump in the percentages, and then they were level again. Could all this obesity hysteria really be based on a statistical trick designed to make more money for the diet industry, you ask? Yes. Yes, it could.

Before I blow a gasket and become one of those obesity-related casualties we keep hearing about, I'm going to just go back to the specifics of this CNN article. Here are some things that are causing my left eyebrow to arch so high that it may just migrate right off my face:

(1) The AAP spokesdoctor quoted in the article, Stephen Daniels, "has worked as a consultant to Abbott Laboratories and Merck & Co." -- "but not on matters involving their cholesterol drugs". OHHHHH, thank god he wasn't working on matters involving their cholesterol drugs. Because you might think he had some impure motives in recommending his former employer's cholesterol drugs to 8 year-olds if he had worked on matters involving their cholesterol drugs, but since he didn't work on matters involving their cholesterol drugs, I can't see any possible conflict of interest, can you?

(2) Cholesterol screening is now "recommended sometime after age 2 but no later than age 10". Yes, you read that right. They want you to have your 2-year-old's cholesterol screened.

(3) "The academy has long recommended against reduced-fat milk for children up to age 2 because saturated fats are needed for brain development. 'But now we have the obesity epidemic and people are thinking maybe this isn't such a good idea,' said Dr. Frank Greer..." Yeah, who gives a shit about brain development, people??? WE'VE GOT AN OBESITY EPIDEMIC HERE!!!!1!11

(4) "...the academy recommendations say low-fat milk is appropriate for 1-year-olds 'for whom overweight or obesity is a concern'. Daniels, a pediatrician in the Denver, Colorado, area, agreed that could include virtually all children" (italics mine). Two thoughts. First: ARRRGH!!! Second: do you think they literally mean '1-year-olds for whom overweight or obesity is a concern'? Because I don't know a lot of 1-year-olds, but I'm guessing most of them aren't concerned about overweight or obesity (yet) (although in Australia they're putting 3-year-olds into compulsory diet and exercise programs, and 5-year-olds are being diagnosed with anorexia, so I guess weight-conscious 1-year-olds wouldn't surprise me much at this point).

(5) "With one-third of U.S. children overweight and about 17 percent obese, the new recommendations are important, said Dr. Jennifer Li, a Duke University children's heart specialist. 'We need to do something to stem the tide of childhood obesity,' Li said." Yeah, you know, that tide that came crashing onto the shore about, oh, NINE YEARS AGO WHEN THEY LOWERED THE BMI CUTOFFS, THEREBY ARTIFICIALLY CREATING AN OBESITY EPIDEMIC.

Um, excuse me, have we managed to colonize Mars yet, or is there some other planet I can relocate to? Because this one is really starting to freak me out.

As if all this weren't enough, Cookie Monster is cutting back on cookies to set a good example for all those little fatties out there, letting them know that "A Cookie is a Sometimes Food". This happened a while back, but I only heard about it from Cookie Monster's recent appearance on the Colbert Report. I thought it was a joke, but it's true -- Cookie Monster is ~~on a diet~~ changing his lifestyle.

Is nothing sacred?

Kids say the darndest things

2008-06-30T09:30:00.000-07:00

For my birthday, the Admiral got me a box set of all five seasons of Kids in the Hall on DVD. I had almost forgotten what a great show that was. I'd also forgotten (or didn't realize before, since I was pretty young when the show originally aired) how progressive it was. As I watch it now, it doesn't seem scandalous, but I think that in the late 80s there weren't that many places on TV where you would regularly find cross-dressing and openly gay characters. At the time I just thought it was funny, but now I realize that they were really pushing the envelope.

Another really cool thing (and the reason I'm telling you about it) is that we ran across a sketch with a fat-positive (or at least an anti-anti-fat) message. The transcript is here and there's a video here. The setup is that Kevin is hitchhiking, and Dave picks him up and proceeds to hurl all sorts of nasty anti-fat insults at him. Part of the absurdity of the sketch comes from the fact that Kevin isn't even remotely fat (though part of the background is that apparently in real life he really was fat and lost a bunch of weight). The insults are also hilariously over the top, like when Dave says, "Boy, am I hungry. You know, I guess I haven't had anything to eat in about, uh, an hour. You ever done that? You ever gone a whole hour without eating?" But the best part is at the end when Dave gets fed up and orders Kevin to "drag your cavernous stretch marks outta my car," so Kevin gets out and then Dave says, "God, I hate fat people. I hate what it says about their personality." It's such a great send-up of anti-fat rhetoric, and I think it's really interesting that these guys were in touch with this stuff 20 years ago, before things got quite as nasty as they are today.

Musings On Our Third Blogiversary

2008-06-18T14:05:00.000-07:00

It was three years ago today that this blog was born. I guess the main thing that's changed since then is the coining of the term "fatosphere" referring collectively to Fat Acceptance blogs. What that means for this blog is a lot more traffic, since this is the first page that comes up when you Google "fatosphere" (which a lot of people do).

There is also now a popular RSS feed called "Notes from the Fatosphere". At first I put off trying to register this blog on the feed for no particular reason, and then kind of gradually decided I didn't want to. I'm still torn about it and there are lots of great blogs featured there, but I feel like adding my blog to the feed would give me a responsibility that I don't want (not to mention probably bringing a lot more trolls my way). Once a blog is on the Fatosphere feed, it gets traffic not only from Fat Acceptance blogs but also from forums devoted to eating disorders. So when a blog on the Fatosphere feed features, for example, a pro-dieting post, people go apeshit. I can't say I blame them -- we hear enough pro-dieting rhetoric already, and none of us need to hear more of it, especially those for whom diet talk may serve as a trigger for disordered eating. You are never going to find pro-diet talk on this blog, but I still don't want to have to worry about people having any particular expectations based on the blog being on the Fatosphere feed. Those of you who don't really read other FA blogs might not think this is such a big deal, but you can check out this post (and the comments) to see just how ugly things get when a putative FA blog posts unexpected stuff and readers dare to complain about being blindsided by it. I guess the silver lining here is that people are really passionate about FA and about trying to define it and defend it. This kind of conversation wasn't even happening a few years ago, so I think it's a good development. The discussion just gets uncomfortable at times.

Elsewhere, unfortunately I have to say I think things have gotten worse for fat people everywhere in the last three years. Maybe I just think this because I'm paying more attention, but I think fatphobia has reached a new level. In Japan, for example, companies and local governments are now forced to measure their citizens' and employees' waistlines, and they will be fined for not reaching the state-mandated "targets". Any person (regardless of height or build) whose waistline measures more than 33.5 inches (male) or 35.4 inches (female) will be made to lose weight, and if they don't, they will be "re-educated". How long before fat (or, really, non-thin) people are fired or kicked out so that their employers and local governments don't have to pay the fines? How long before we get similar policies in the US? Oh, wait, looks like we've already started. This and all the other anti-fat policy and rhetoric out there seems to be exacerbated by the failing economy and degraded environment -- after all, back before everyone "believed in" global warming and before they started rationing rice at CostCo, nobody would have thought to blame all the world's problems on the fatties.

I guess in general, I feel pretty cynical about the whole state of affairs, but I also have some reasons to hope that things will improve. Regardless, I'm just going to keep on blogging.

Reach Your Fitness Goals, the Severed Panda Head Way

2008-06-14T12:34:00.001-07:00

Some friends of ours got Wii Fit, so we had a chance to try it out yesterday. In a nutshell, most of the horrible things you've heard about it are true, but it's more fun than you might think.

Wii Fit got some negative press when it was first released because it told some guy's 10 year old daughter that she was fat. Nintendo apologized and said BMI isn't necessarily accurate for "younger age groups". Or for anyone else, I might add.

I figured maybe the Wii Fit had some other fun stuff in it, if you just didn't do the BMI measurement part. That turned out to be partly true, but the system won't *let* you not do the BMI part. At the beginning, you select your Mii and then it asks you your height and date of birth, and then you step on and it weighs you and calculates your BMI. You can't get past that part to get straight to the game.

The BMI thing is interesting. They obviously thought parts of it through pretty carefully, even though the entire premise is ridiculous. You step on and it asks you how much your clothing weighs (!), and then it tells you your BMI. And then in an awful but hilarious twist, your Mii expands to reflect how fat it thinks you are. It never displays your weight on the screen; in fact, you have the option of using a password to protect your weight so that nobody else can ever look at it (of course, if they know your height and the BMI formula then they can calculate your weight). It does tell you if you are "Underweight", "Normal", "Overweight", or "Obese". It doesn't use the word "Fat", so the news stories about Wii Fit telling that girl she was "Fat" must not have been quite right. Anyway, for some reason I found it kind of funny standing there waiting for it to tell me how fat I am. I was thinking that 5 years ago I would have been really bothered by a game calling me "Obese" in front of my friends, but now not so much. In fact, I was probably the least bothered out of all of us, since I knew there wouldn't be any surprises. Some others got called "Overweight", which was pretty surprising. Everyone took it well, though, and I don't think anyone plans to go on a crash diet or start purging as a result of the label. But one extremely messed up thing is that not only does the game tell you that it is best to be "Normal", but it also says that within the "Normal" range, people with a BMI of 22 are the "least likely to get sick". One of us had a BMI of a little over 23, which is in the "Normal" range, but the game told that person that they should really aim for 22. Of all the BMI nonsense, that was the one thing that made me blow a gasket. I guess you can never be Normal enough!

After the BMI test comes the balance test. This I found extremely strange. Does anyone out there who knows Japanese culture care to generalize as to whether the Japanese are obsessed with posture and balance? Because I definitely got that feeling, but it could just be this game. You get a lecture about how putting more weight on one leg when you stand causes you to have bad posture, which in turn will somehow cause you to be less healthy -- and to get fat! (Don't ask me what the connection is.) You have to stand on the pad for several seconds and then it shows you where your "center of balance" was during that time and how much it moved. The goal is to have it right in the middle and perfectly still. Then you get this test where you have to lean a certain amount to the left or right and hold it exactly there for three seconds, and if you move out of the correct range then it starts the three seconds over. There are five tasks like this and they're all timed. It's a pretty hard task (especially when you've had a cocktail or two). I did well, but one person did so hilariously badly that a couple of us broke out into uncontrollable laughter verging on tears. At the end of the balance test, the game gives you a score, and if you do poorly it tells you that you have bad balance and asks, "Do you find yourself tripping a lot when you walk?"

Once you've finished the balance test, you get your Wii Fit Age. Somehow it takes your real age and then it figures out how old you really seem. Your Mii stands there looking nervous and drumming its fingers together while the Wii calculates your Age, and then you get a big number on the screen. I figured it would tell me I was really old because of my BMI, but surprisingly I was the youngest in the group by far. We're all in our late 20s/early 30s, but our Wii Fit Ages were 31, 39, 41, and 51. I was the 31, which was described as "+1" meaning that my Wii Fit Age is one year more than my actual age. Er, OK, my 31st birthday is less than a week away -- which Wii Fit knows perfectly well since it asked for my birthday -- but whatever. Anyway, I'm not sure exactly how the Wii Fit Age is calculated, but it is obvious that the balance test is the most important thing. The 51 year old in our group tried the balance test again and instantly took off 20 years with a performance that was much less hilarious than the first time (and surprisingly, this was *after* a shot of tequila).

After you get your Age, you get to set a goal. The goal is very narrowly defined to mean a *weight* goal. I find this terribly lame, but on the positive side, the goal can be anything you want including no change at all. The game doesn't judge your goal. The "Normal" person in our group decided to gain 22 lbs. in two weeks, thereby moving into the "Overweight" category. I thought the game might try to discourage this or issue a reminder about how great it is to be "Normal", but it didn't say anything. In fact, later when the Personal Trainer came on the scene, he actually used the goal as motivation during a workout: "Come on! You need to gain 22 lbs.!" We didn't play around too much with the weight goals, but there don't seem to be any limits. Although I appreciate the lack of prescriptivism in some respects, I think this could be dangerous in the hands of a child or a stupid person, or especially a stupid child. (Or, on a more serious note, a person with an eating disorder.)

Finally after you go through all that body testing stuff, you get to the game. There's a lot of yoga and aerobics stuff we didn't try. We basically focused on the balance games. Which are hilarious. There is a slalom ski course and a ski jump, both fun. Then there's a table with a hole in it where you have to tilt the table to roll a ball (which, weirdly, has your Mii's face on it) into the hole. That one is hard. And then there is a tightrope, where you kind of pick your feet up a little bit to simulate walking, but you try not to lean too much or your Mii plunges to his/her death. The best part about the tightrope game is the Jaws of Death. After you make it 19 yards on the tightrope, the Jaws of Death come at you (because, you know, walking on a tightrope isn't enough of a challenge). You have to squat and then quickly stand up, at the exactly the right moment, to simulate jumping over the Jaws of Death. None of us was able to time the jump correctly, so the record stands at 19 yards. But the best balance game (so far) is definitely soccer. You stand there while a bunch of kids line up and kick soccer balls at you in rapid succession, and you have to shift your weight to position your Mii's head in the right place to head the balls away, and you get points for every ball you head. But the trick is that it's not just soccer balls coming at you. For every four or five soccer balls, instead of a ball some kid will throw a foreign object at you (see, this is why I'm not having kids), which subtracts points if it hits you in the head. One such object is a soccer shoe (with cleats, as I recall). The other is THE SEVERED HEAD OF A PANDA. And no, I am totally not making this up. The problem with the panda head is that from a distance it looks like a soccer ball, but just as it approaches you realize there's some red on it (THIS WOULD BE THE PANDA'S BLOODY NECK STUMP) so you have to shift your weight away from it quickly or lose 3 points. What can I say, it's fun, until you think about it.

In fact, I'd say Wii Fit is like one big severed panda head. Yes, it is furry and fun to play games with, but ultimately it's a dead panda.

Shiny, happy fat people

2008-06-10T14:50:00.001-07:00

I just picked up these little fat figures at a gallery down the street and they really made my day. I especially love the fat thinker.

These are just resin reproductions (the dancers are about 6" tall), and I am trying to find out some information about the original artist since the web address that I got doesn't work. I'll post an update in case anyone is interested.

National Donut Day

2008-06-06T08:31:00.000-07:00

Today is National Donut Day. I shit you not!

There is even a fun quiz for you to take on the LaMar's website (warning: the interface isn't great because when you mouse over the question it shows you the answer). I scored 5 out of 10 -- d'oh!

Unfortunately I don't know of a good donut place around here (in fact I don't know of *any* in the immediate area; my primary criterion for a 'good donut place' is that they use white pastry cream, like at Krispy Kreme, rather than custard, in their cream-filled donuts). So I'm going to have a bagel for breakfast... at least it's got a hole.

Thanks to Admiral Seamus for the tip!

Pie recipe

2008-06-05T16:12:00.000-07:00

By popular demand (i.e., one person asked me), I'm posting the strawberry pie recipe that I use. This is not the same pie as in last week's photo, but I'll bet it tastes even better.

Fresh Strawberry Pie

1 pie crust, baked and cooled (I recommend Trader Joe's because it tastes homemade and doesn't have any trans fats or other nasty ingredients)
2 lbs. fresh strawberries, divided
1/4 c. cornstarch
3/4 c. sugar
pinch of salt
2 T. fresh lemon juice
homemade whipped cream

Rinse and drain strawberries and cut off the tops. Slice half of the strawberries into 1/4" thick slices.

Put the remaining whole strawberries into a molcajete or large mortar and crush them to a pulp. Add cornstarch, sugar, and salt, and stir until the cornstarch dissolves. Scoop into a saucepan and cook over medium heat, stirring, until the mixture thickens. Remove from heat and stir in lemon juice. Cool for 30 minutes, stirring a few times, until the mixture cools to room temperature.

Stir in the sliced strawberries. Pour into pie shell, then refrigerate until chilled. Top with whipped cream.

Yum!

Happiness pie

2008-05-27T22:38:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted for several days because nothing pissed me off enough. Today there were plenty of things that pissed me off that I was considering blogging about, namely:

1. This children's book.

2. 'Roided-out pervy weightlifters with butt-fucking ugly faces' coming on FA blogs to tell us we're too fat to snag hotties like them.

3. The daily, incessant objectification of women and vilification of fat.

4. Lies about fat in the media.

5. Stereotypes, fear-mongering, and general bullshit, even in articles reporting the fact that childhood "obesity" rates leveled off almost ten fucking years ago (so where's this big scary epidemic we keep hearing about?).

But then I decided, fuck it. Other people did a pretty good job handling most of those issues anyway (except for #5 -- I haven't seen any responses on FA blogs yet, but I'm sure they'll be out there by tomorrow). And I've realized that I have a little bit of a formula going on here: read a news article about fat that pisses me off, blog about it.

I'm going to try a new approach in the future, which involves being more proactive and less reactive. For those who enjoy bitter rants, don't worry, I have plenty in me, and god knows there are plenty of dumbshit "journalists" out there with their heads way up their asses (Shirley Skeel, anyone?) who are eager to keep spewing hate and ignorance and provide me with fodder. But for every pissed-off rant, I'm going to try and balance things out with a positive post that isn't directly prompted by some fatphobic asshole.

For today, since I'm busy getting ready to go out of town, I'll keep things short and simple. Here are five things that are cool and/or make me happy:

1. This guy's mixes.

2. Slugs.

3. Coffee porn.

4. TypeRacer.

5. This cat.

Finally a voice of reason

2008-05-20T10:04:00.000-07:00

I've been holding off from posting since all that's come out lately has been a bunch of negative stuff. On Friday, the BBC ran this piece of shit (see sweetmachine's funny response). Then in the Sunday Times Online, this nasty bit of totally illogical fat hatred and misogyny came spurting out of a person called Rod Liddle (maybe his name is code for "little rod" and that's why he's so angry). There is a terrible series this week in the Washington Post that's basically a bunch of fear-mongering about "childhood obesity" (I won't even link to it... but I'll link to this wonderful deconstruction of it). And if you've been reading the comments section of my blog, you know that we've had some "visitors" stopping by -- one person who came on rude but actually seemed to respond to my engaging him/her in discussion in the comments, and another person calling him/herself "anonymous no. 2" who was too condescending and sarcastic for me to bother with (what's with the name, anyway? -- it's bad enough calling yourself "anonymous", but being "anonymous no. 2" takes a special kind of coward).

So I was really happy when I saw this awesome article about the scapegoating of fat people for our addiction to oil. In reading it I felt like it could have been written by my own Admiral Seamus, but I guess this dude Raj Patel beat him to the punch. The article also made it onto Common Dreams, which makes me doubly happy since, as I've pointed out before, some of the worst fatphobia comes from liberals. So far the comments on the Common Dreams post have mostly been positive, but even in the positive comments there are still some people making dim remarks like, "Well, we know fat is bad, but..." Oh well, baby steps, right? At least the comments are better than the ones made (presumably) by the Brits on the Guardian's version of the article. Clearly we still have a long way to go.

A comment on comments: I've been thinking about turning on comment moderation again, but decided against it for now because I'd like my thoughtful readers to be able to comment without hassle. So instead, I've decided that I'm just going to delete any and all obnoxious comments. It's my damn blog, after all, and I don't want to subject my readers to any more of the fatphobia that they witness elsewhere on a regular basis. So a note to would-be commenters: if you call me a name, wish death on me, direct mean sarcasm at me, or otherwise rub me the wrong way (and yes I have gotten all of these -- the one with the death wish was several months ago, and I deleted it), you will have wasted your time because your comment won't see the light of day.

Mini-rant of the day

2008-05-09T10:25:00.000-07:00

I just read something annoying on CNN.com and got peeved and felt like venting.

This article tells the story of one Barbara Aldrich, who was 5'11" and 255 lbs. (OMG FAT!!!) and borderline diabetic. When she turned 50, she decided enough was enough, so she "traded in high-calorie, carbohydrate-laden meals and junk food for a diet of lean meats, vegetables, fruits and healthier snacks" and started walking every day. After 4 months, she lost 75 pounds and feels like a new woman, and now she does things like go on trips and get manicures. Of course the whole concept behind the story, along with what they say about Aldrich pre-weight loss and the notion that her improved health from eating healthy and exercising could only be measured by her 75 pound weight loss, is irksome and obnoxious. Same with the idea that it was her fat that prevented her from going on trips and getting manicures before, rather than society making her feel like shit about herself (and that what needed to change was her weight, rather than her attitude or anyone else's). But that's pretty much par for the course in this whole "Fit Nation" series, which is basically a bunch of "this person was fat and unhealthy like you, but s/he lost a ton of weight and now his/her life is totally perfect, and yours can be too if you just get off your ass" features.

One thing really stood out about this article in particular, though. First, they say that Aldrich lost 4 or 5 pounds per week and talk about how great that is. Then in one line that's not contextualized or integrated into the story at all, they point out that the Mayo Clinic website says that a weight loss of only 1-2 pounds per week is recommended. So on the one hand, they devote an entire article to making you feel like you should get out there and lose weight like Barbara Aldrich did, because it was so easy for her and now she's so much healthier blah blah blah. But then they point out that actually if you really did lose 4-5 pounds per week it wouldn't necessarily be a healthy thing. It's kind of like the "*Results not typical" that you get at the bottom of a Jenny Craig ad, but even worse because this one is more like "*Don't try this at home." I guess I ought to be glad they mentioned it at all, but somehow I'm not.

I also feel the need to point out Aldrich's quote at the end of the article: "I love myself, I love how I look now. I feel better, younger ... just a complete 360." OK, obviously she meant to say "180" (or maybe she even did say that and the reporter misquoted her). But I'm thinking this is a kind of interesting slip, because basically in terms of the way she thinks about herself, she really did do a 360. Before she lost weight, her attitude towards herself was tied up with her body size and she felt ashamed go out and do things she wanted to do. After she lost weight, her attitude towards herself is still tied up with her body size, so much so that only now after losing 75 pounds does she love herself. I think that is pretty sad.

Happy International No Diet Day!

2008-05-06T16:18:00.000-07:00

It is, in fact, International No Diet Day. I think you all know what to do.

I, for one, am making an Ohio Lemon Pie (a.k.a. Shaker Lemon Pie) in celebration of this fine holiday. The recipe is below (the image is from Sushiesque, where there's a slightly different recipe). I'll let you know how it turns out.

Ohio Lemon Pie

3 organic lemons (organic is important because pesticides are absorbed in the rind, and you'll be using the rind)
2 cups sugar
2 pie crusts (I like Trader Joe's)
4 eggs, beaten

Wash the lemons. Zest the lemons and put the zest into a medium-sized bowl. Cut the ends off the lemons, then cut 2 and a half of the lemons into extremely thin slices and put them into the bowl. Squeeze the juice of the remaining half lemon into the bowl. Put the sugar in the bowl and stir to coat all the lemon pieces. Set aside at room temperature for 5 hours.

Preheat oven to 450. Put the bottom crust in a pie pan and prick it all over with a fork. Add the eggs to the lemons and stir until evenly mixed. Pour into the crust, then put on the top crust. Pinch the crusts together, then cut slits into the top crust to vent.

Bake for 15 minutes, then turn heat down to 375 and bake for 30 minutes or until crust is brown and a knife inserted into the pie comes out (relatively) clean. Cool before serving.

And now back to that other horse race

2008-05-04T21:04:00.000-07:00

The title got me excited, but this thing turned out to be an insipid piece of garbage.

I wonder, though, who *would* get the fat vote? Most fat acceptance people whose politics I have any knowledge of are left-leaning, so if we're talking about the self-identified fat vote, then I'd say McCain is out. (Apparently he thinks "obesity", even *childhood* obesity, is a question of Personal Responsibility, so fuck that guy. Of course, he also thinks it would be cool if we were in Iraq for another 100 years, so fuck him anyway.)

I've already discussed Obama's naive views on how getting rid of all the fatties will save Medicare, and Hillary Clinton says the exact same stupid thing.

So, what's a fat girl to do? Vote Nader? Hardly. Stay home on election day, eating baby donuts? Mmm, donuts...

What if Shirley Skeel had a brain?

2008-04-25T15:08:00.000-07:00

Today I found this wretched piece of dreck by Shirley Skeel entitled "What if no one were fat?" via a link from Cthulhu's Cafeteria, where Teppy gives it a proper (and hilarious) skewering. I won't even bother, myself.

There are some other good responses to the article here and here.

I was looking for info on this Shirley Skeel person, but didn't find much. She has a page on Biznik, which describes itself as "business networking that doesn't suck" -- of course Biznik never claims that "people who use our business networking don't suck".

That is all for now.

Things that make you go hmm...

2008-04-16T10:48:00.000-07:00

My buddy K sent this link yesterday, which he found via a nifty site that our other buddy works on called Allvoices. The article is about how France is going to ban pro-anorexia (a.k.a. "pro-ana") websites and blogs.

Pro-anorexia websites, you ask? Oh, yes. They have been around for a long time. I'd link to an example of one, but then again, I think I won't. You can find them yourself through the miracle of Google if you really want to. In a nutshell, these websites give you instructions on how to eat as little as possible without dying, how to negotiate your everyday life without people finding out you're anorexic, etc. And they also give you pictures of super-thin people (and, I suppose, fat people) to be your "thinspiration" (no I am not making up that term, but how long before some diet company starts using it?).

Some people may be a bit concerned that banning pro-ana websites sets a bad precedent for restricting free speech on the Internet. People who maintain these sites seem to claim that they just want an online community and that they're not trying to recruit new anorexics. Here's a sample of the sort of rhetoric you find: 'when i was younger, i was always told of how anorexia was a "mental illness" and that it was a hideous one at that! Now that i have it, i dont see it as a mental illness, even though deep down i know it is, i would not encourage anybody to attempt to find ana, however, for those of us who ana has already found, this website is for you! This website is not encouraging any kind of eating didorders and i will not be blamed for anybodys! [sic]' So yeah.

My first reaction when I read the article was two-fold. First I thought "Yay," because encouraging people to starve themselves amounts to incitement to (self-inflicted) violence and (self-) hatred, and therefore shouldn't be protected as free speech. That's basically what the French official quoted in the article has to say about it. And I also thought hmm, this is sort of a slippery slope, because if you examine regular old diets, a lot of them use language and suggest dieting techniques that are quite similar to what you get on pro-ana sites. For example, you get tips about colon cleansing, drinking lots of water to feel full, cutting your food up into tiny little pieces -- all stuff that gets promoted on various mainstream diet sites. Of course I figured that mainstream dieting sites would never be banned, but I thought it would be swell if there was a big argument about it that caused people to realize that dieting and disordered eating have more overlap between them than one might think. Fillyjonk over at Shapely Prose makes this point.

But on further reflection, my feelings about this thing are a bit more mixed. The French government has decided, based on published scientific reports and a widespread general consensus, that anorexia is unhealthy and often deadly. So they are going to prohibit people from having websites that tell people it's OK to be anorexic, that being ultra-thin is attractive, and give tips on how you can keep up your anorexia, including how to handle other people (like family members and doctors) when they accuse you of being anorexic and tell you it's unhealthy. But suppose that a government (say, the US government) decided that "obesity" is unhealthy and often deadly (check). Suppose then that they decided to prohibit people from having websites that tell people it's OK to be fat, that being fat is attractive, and give tips on how to recover from disordered eating ("dieting") and eat what you want when you're hungry even if that means you're going to stay fat, and tips on how to handle other people when they tell you how unhealthy and disgusting you are for being fat. That would mean that virtually every blog in the fatosphere would get banned.

So, I dunno, I'm feeling kind of torn about the ban... I feel like there's a big difference between pro-anorexia and fat acceptance, but when I try to come up with the specific differences, they break down. For example, contrary to popular belief, fat acceptance blogs generally aren't "pro-fat" per se. But then again, the pro-ana sites claim not to really be "pro-anorexia" either. They say they're just for people who are already anorexic and just looking for support from other people like them. Sounds like acceptance. And then there's the science -- I can say all I want (and I do truly believe this) that being fat has not been shown (in any credible studies not funded by the diet industry) to cause diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, etc. But in fact there is a close association between these disorders and some lifestyle choices that can also lead to weight gain, e.g., a high-calorie, high-fat diet and not enough exercise, so people are going to keep on believing that fat "causes" those diseases. I could imagine (though I haven't seen this) someone who's pro-anorexia trying to make similar arguments, like that it's not being super-thin that causes death, but rather fasting for too many days in a row, not getting enough vitamins, etc. I would be inclined not to buy such arguments, but then most of our society is inclined not to buy my arguments about fat. I could point to the fact that anorexia has a vastly higher death rate than "obesity", even if were to use the CDC's original wildly overstated numbers for "deaths caused by obesity" that they later had to retract because they were (at least) 14 times the actual number. But then I'd be reducing the whole thing to a matter of degrees, and I don't think that's quite the right thing either.

So I guess I'm kind of stumped at the moment. I haven't had a chance to read the comments on Shapely Prose or other places where people have blogged about this story, but maybe that will give me some ideas. In the mean time: your thoughts?

I'd say they could lose 150 or so right off the bat by getting rid of Michele Martinez

2008-04-11T23:13:00.000-07:00

The city of Santa Ana has decided that its citizens need to lose a million pounds in one year. Councilwoman Michele Martinez sure seems like a lovely person and all, but her quotes in the article are obnoxious. For starters, in support of this initiative Martinez says, "We want to really change the culture here in this city." Umm, from what to what exactly? When I think Orange County I don't exactly think "too open-minded; need to scrutinize people's bodies more." I don't suppose that's what she meant exactly, but then who knows. But even worse is when Martinez says, "We want to say, 'You know what, you need to get moving.'" Argh, that pisses me off for so many reasons. It's smug, it presupposes that fat people don't "move", and worst of all it starts out with "You know what..." which is about as patronizing as you can get. You know what, Michele, it's counterproductive (not to mention poor form) to talk down to people as if they're idiots and you have the simple solution to all their problems.

As part of the initiative, the city plans to organize some 5K races. That is really swell, and I'm always looking for good 5K's in the area. But after reading the stupid xenophopic comments on the article made by some of Orange County's finest mouth-breathing morons (e.g., someone called "ocgrandma" who helpfully suggests that "if they got rid of all the illegals they would shed 3 million pounds and exceed their goal!"), I really think I'll just stay home, thanks.

And yeah, the picture doesn't really have anything to do with the article, but I thought it was too awesome for me not to use it.

A small revelation

2008-04-03T20:01:00.000-07:00

I was folding some pants and came to a realization about how stupid "fat pants" pictures are. You know, like the famous photo of Subway tool Jared Fogle, or like this lady? Yeah.

Anyway, I realized that if you just hold up your own pants in front of yourself, they look a lot wider than you are, even if they are pants that fit you perfectly well at your current size. This is because -- wait for it -- a person is three-dimensional!!

Granted, we all know that Jared lost a lot of weight. But who knows about that other lady or anyone else who poses for those stupid photos. And anyway, I feel like the whole thing is just a little sick. I know part of it is just to illustrate one person's change in size, but surely another part of it is to make fun of how huge the pants look. Golly, fat people's pants sure are hilarious!

There is the other type of fat pants photo like the one on this page, where the person is actually *in* the pants, so at least there's not the same exaggeration of the size difference. But there's still the ridicule factor, I think.

That is all.

They'd still never make it as supermodels

2008-03-28T00:32:00.000-07:00

Saw this disturbing piece at Shapely Prose yesterday. In a nutshell: the Sweet Valley High twins have had their size changed to a 4 in the latest version of the books, down from a size 6. And this is a big deal in the SVH series, because *every fucking book* has the same stupid description of the twins and their blonde hair, aqua-colored eyes, and perfect size X. So they really hammer it in. I could even swear that it used to be a size 8 back when I was reading, but Feministing's original post says that the 1983 versions had them as a size 6, so maybe I'm misremembering.

Now that I'm thinking more about it, I remember that there were a couple of poor pathetic chubby girls in the books. I'd love to go back and reread them with a more critical approach to the treatment of the chubby girls... but then again, fuck it.

And before anyone says the change is probably just due to size inflation (which is a comment I've seen on a couple of other sites), let me ask you this: why the fuck do the books have to mention the girls' size in the first place?

Tell us something we didn't already know

2008-03-19T19:57:00.000-07:00

I guess I shouldn't be so cynical, but it's Oprah, so I can't help it. I was just tipped off to this short article that appeared in the February issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. It reports on the CDC study that showed that "overweight" people have the longest lifespan of all BMI groups (including, notably, people of "normal" [sic] weight). The thing is, we already heard about this study three years ago. So, like, why did it take so long for Oprah to find out about it?

I guess I should be glad that this study is getting some attention, but it's just kind of annoying when, three years after the fact, it gets reported on as if it's the News of the Weird. The first sentence of the article begins, "As if America's weight problem weren't already complicated enough..." and already I'm thinking, "Is it, really?" Argh. But I do have to admit that the rest of the article does a better job. Now, if we could just get Oprah to pass this along to her pal Barack Obama, who claimed that "if we could go back to the obesity rates of 1980, we could save the Medicare system a trillion dollars." Gee, Barack, where'd you get that nice, round trillion dollar figure? Maybe straight out of your (skinny) ass? (See a good reaction to Obama's remarks here.)

Check this out

2008-03-14T23:59:00.001-07:00

Hi everyone, I'm sorry I have been so negligent lately... blah blah blah, insert excuses here...

Anyhoo, until I have time to post something longer, check this out. It's funny.

Lose 60 lbs. instantly!!!

2008-03-04T21:11:00.001-08:00

I don't think this is my original idea, but I can't remember where I got it (don't you hate that?). Anyway, at some point I started thinking about all these glib promises you see in advertising and magazine fluff pieces that a particular product will allow you to "lose 10 lbs. instantly!" etc. So I decided to see just how much weight one could hope to lose instantly by using all of these products simultaneously. A search of the internets reveals that you can lose a full 60 lbs. instantly -- and this only counts claims that gave a specific amount of weight (i.e., I didn't count ones that just said "lose weight instantly"). So I give you: Mary's Guaranteed Instant 60-Pound Weight Loss Strategy! (Note: do not try this if losing 60 lbs. will cause you to be unhealthily thin. I don't want to be responsible for any delayed aftereffects.)

Mary's Guaranteed Instant 60-Pound Weight Loss Strategy

Improve your posture (lose 10 lbs.)

Wear Spanx (lose 10 lbs.)

Wear a Jeunique bra (lose 10 lbs.)

Wear a top made out of Slinky fabric (lose 10 lbs.)

Get highlights in your hair (lose 5 lbs.)

Get a smaller purse (lose 5 lbs.)

Wear a Body Shaper (lose 5 lbs.)

Wear Bend Over slacks (lose 5 lbs.)

Do all of these things at once (what a fucking awesome outfit that would be) and LOSE 60 LBS. INSTANTLY!!!

I also want to point out that this does not count claims that you can "look 10 lbs. thinner," etc. If you add those in, you can probably look hundreds of pounds thinner (maybe at some point I'll investigate that and let you know).

Update on last week's post: Seamus sent me this relevant article. Scary stuff.

National Eating Disorders Awareness Week

2008-02-27T17:17:00.000-08:00

Kate Harding at Shapely Prose reminds us that it is National Eating Disorders Awareness Week.

It is a good time to think about eating disorders, how much they suck, and how many more of them people have thanks to our society's disordered *thinking* (or non-thinking). This year's theme for NEDAW is 'Be comfortable in your genes,' which I think is a great message. They have a nice list of things you can do for NEDAW. A couple of my favorite items:

-Celebrate Fearless Friday - A Day Without Dieting - and feel how empowering a diet-free day of self-acceptance can be!

-Donate your jeans and other old clothes that no longer fit your body comfortably to charity. Someone else will appreciate them, and you won’t have to worry about the way they fit anymore.

Wow, they did it

2008-02-21T18:50:00.001-08:00

They actually found a way to inject more obnoxiousness into the wedding industry. Check this out. Yeah, there is now a show called Bulging Brides, where you can get inspired by dumb chicks who bought their wedding dresses too small.

Well, I would just say that these brides are dumb for buying into the bullshit and thinking they had to get super-thin before the Big Day. But actually the dress companies provide a nifty added incentive for ordering your dress too small and trying to shrink into it: namely, that you have to pay more for "larger sizes". And naturally, the sizes run smaller than department store sizes, so you pay lots extra and feel really crappy about yourself for ordering the size you really need. One time I was in a wedding and had to buy a size 22 dress (at the time I normally wore an 18), and so I had to pay $80 extra for the dress -- a $40 charge for a "large size" (which applied to sizes 14-16-18), and another $40 charge for a "really fucking large size" (i.e. 20-22-24). I wrote an angry letter to the company and got a reply that claimed the $80 was for "extra fabric". OK, it is true that larger dresses require more fabric, but $80 worth? And if that's really the reason for the extra charge, why not have a sliding scale and charge more for a size 10 than a size 0? Hmm... maybe because it's not really a charge for extra fabric, but rather it's a fat tax. And they figure women will be willing to pay it (as I did), since most women probably feel ashamed when they realize they wear a "large size". The alternative, which I didn't think of (but which is apparently pretty popular) is to just buy a dress that's too small. Brilliant!

Live long and prosper, Leonard Nimoy

2008-02-15T10:26:00.001-08:00

OK, Leonard Nimoy is awesome.

Did you all see his interview on the Colbert Report last night? If not, you can view the clip here (go to New Videos and scroll down to the bottom). Nimoy was on the show to talk about The Full Body Project, a new book containing his nude photographs of fat women. You can see some images from the book on Nimoy's website. I think these photographs are so cool. They will be shocking to some, but they're not sensationalized. The selection of the models (some of whom are really fat) shows that Nimoy didn't want to 'play it safe', and yet the photos don't put any undue emphasis on the more unusual aspects of the women's anatomy; they have a genuine sensitive and loving feel to them. They are playful but not mocking. I can't help feeling that someday people will look at these nice photos with their children and have to explain that "back then, photos of women this fat were considered shocking," and the kids will only halfway believe that people could have been that ignorant.

The Colbert interview is interesting for a variety of reasons. For one thing, Nimoy gets in some great points that people from the Fat Acceptance movement have been saying, which is nice because usually the only people quoted as saying those things are fat activists -- so it feels like some of the arguments may be gaining more widespread traction. I'm not sure his closing argument about young girls choosing oral sex over the "other kind" because of their poor body image is the very most compelling argument (especially since it's also true that teens with poor body image have higher suicide rates), but overall he does an exceptionally good job. And of course it's an accomplishment just to get a word in edgewise on that show in the first place!

One interesting moment in the interview comes when they show the first image from the book. It's a side view of a very fat, older woman lying in a Sphinxlike pose, and when the image comes up, a few people in the audience laugh. I can't really tell if it's male or female voices laughing. At first I thought it was because Colbert says something like, "I like this photo in particular because she looks relaxed, rested, and ready," and I thought maybe people were interpreting "ready" as referring to sex. But on a second viewing, it's clear that the laughter starts as soon as the image comes up, before Colbert says anything. Of course it's hard to interpret laughter -- maybe people were uncomfortable with the image, or maybe they thought the woman looked ridiculous, or maybe it's just that being part of a live audience for a comedy show predisposes people to laugh. Regardless, what happens next is really cool -- in response to Colbert asking something about the photo like "What do you call this?", Nimoy says "I call this a beautiful person," and a significant portion of the crowd (mostly with high-pitched voices) erupts in cheering.

Maybe there is hope yet.

This is not a post about VegNews

2008-02-11T19:20:00.000-08:00

Read a book review on Salon.com today that was so great I had to draw your attention to it.

It's a review of both Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin's book Skinny Bitch and also their recently released companion cookbook, Skinny Bitch in the Kitch. In the review, Julie Klausner describes how both books are basically vegan manifestos masquerading as diet books. And not just any diet books, but mean ones. (And popular -- Skinny Bitch was a New York Times bestseller and is currently (2/11/08) ranked #38 on the Amazon.com bestsellers list.)

I've flipped through Skinny Bitch in the bookstore and was appalled at how nasty it was. Klausner's review points out a few of the meaner lines, like "you need to exercise, you lazy shit," and "don't be a fat pig anymore." The whole book is littered with that kind of inspirational language. Klausner relates the reaction of a formerly anorexic friend of hers: "When you have an eating disorder, that's the voice you hear in your head all the time." So isn't it lovely to know that this book is reaching such a large audience, no doubt including teenagers who are just reaching their prime purging years?

Another obnoxious aspect of this book discussed by Klausner is that the reader thinks she is getting a diet book (bad enough) and ends up getting a self-righteous lecture on how non-vegans represent everything wrong with America. So basically Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin are awesome perfect gorgeous human beings, and the reader is a fat, cruel, thoughtless piece of shit. Never mind that these two lovely ladies came straight from that wholesome, totally unproblematic asset to our society known as the modeling industry (with virtually no credentials in the field of diet and nutrition, but why should they let that stop them?) -- they are still superior to you, since you "are crap".

Does all of this smug, self-congratulatory, anti-fat, pro-vegan bullshit ring a bell for anyone? You know, remind you of anything? Well, it's no coincidence. Rory Freedman writes for VegNews, and those assholes have been falling all over themselves to promote the book. Their August newsletter gleefully informs us that "Getting out the message that it's easy to be skinny and healthy when you don't fill your body with junk food like meat and dairy is a snap when the advice comes from someone as smart and charming as our very own Skinny Bitch."

As for me, I'm just having such trouble deciding. Which is the more egregious waste of carbon: meat-eating, or Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin?

Whip it good

2008-02-10T00:16:00.000-08:00

Oh, man, did I have a great time in Vienna. Pretty much every aspect of my trip was fabulous, but the baked goods and the coffee were phenomenal. Much better than expected (and I had high expectations).

Pictured here is the famous sachertorte from Cafe Sacher. I can't begin to describe how delicious it was. And as my travel companion can attest, I was really excited about the whipped cream. The torte itself was out of this world, but the whipped cream... ahh, the whipped cream. It was the densest whipped cream I've ever had, and not too sweet. In fact I'm not sure there was any sugar in it at all. Which is normally not how I like things, but this was so good. I think it revolutionized my thinking about whipped cream (and yes, believe it or not, whipped cream is something I've put a not insignificant amount of thought into over the years).

The coffee pictured here (a 'brauner', i.e. espresso with a little pitcher of milk)was also fantastic. It was the best espresso I've ever had, even better than Caffe Trieste (who, incidentally, have put out a call for someone wanting to open a new location in SoCal... anybody want to open one down here and be my new best friend?).

Back to more substantive topics next time (probably).

Fatosphere on a week-long hiatus; try not to miss me too much!

2008-01-30T23:08:00.000-08:00

Hi all, I'm leaving tomorrow for Vienna, so I won't be posting for at least a week.

As I mentioned in the Comments section, I have had to turn on comment moderation due to some nasty comments that some random trolls were leaving on the blog. I thought I'd turned on moderation successfully, then somehow an extremely nasty comment got through the cracks (I later deleted the comment so you know it must have been bad, given that I've refrained from deleting some pretty rude ones already). I think moderation is on now, but in my absence if any mean comments make it onto the blog somehow, I hope I can count on some of you guys to smack them down for me. :)

If you comment while I'm gone, it may be a day or two until I have email access and can approve the comment for posting. Sorry about that. This is only a temporary thing due to the fallout from the New York Times article.

Will be back in a week or so, hopefully with pictures of some yummy pastries that I will have eaten in Vienna.

Holy guacamole

2008-01-27T12:43:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I won third prize in the 6th Annual Guacamole Bowl at the Kellogg Ranch Farm Store. The competition was pretty intense, and it was judged by a chef from the Restaurant at Kellogg Ranch who definitely knew how to put on a show. I actually found myself getting really nervous as he kept going back to taste my guacamole along with a couple of others (which turned out to be the first and second place finishers). Incidentally, one thing the judge praised about each of the top three finishers was the nice avocado flavor. I actually got the avocados from last week's organic produce box that we got from the Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm we belong to, Tierra Miguel Farm, so I thought I'd give them a little shout-out.

Anyway, I figured I'd share my recipe with all of you -- I am not proprietary about it since (a) it is a very traditional recipe, and (b) I adapted it from my friend Teresa's recipe in the first place. That being said, though, if any of you show up at next year's Guacamole Bowl with this recipe as your entry, I will kick your ass. :) Anyway, without further ado, below is my prize-winning recipe...

Gloriously Garlicky Guacamole

There are no peppers in this guacamole -- the spiciness comes from the extreme quantity of garlic. Warning: if you eat a lot of this, you will stink.

12 cloves garlic, peeled
1/2 medium white onion, finely chopped
1/3 cup fresh cilantro, leaves only, coarsely chopped
3 very ripe roma tomatoes
3 ripe avocados
juice of 1/2 lime
salt

Smash the garlic in a molcajete. Sprinkle some salt on it and set aside.

Cut the tomatoes in half, scoop out and discard all seeds and guts. Finely chop the tomatoes and put them in a large bowl with the onion, cilantro, and lime juice.

Cut the avocados in half, remove the pits, and scoop the insides into the molcajete. Smash the avocados into the garlic, leaving some lumps of avocado.

Spoon the avocados and garlic into the bowl and stir everything together, adding salt to taste. Be gentle when stirring, to leave the guacamole chunky and not too smooth.

Enjoy!

An update regarding this "fatosphere" stuff: On Thursday, I had 1129 hits, the vast majority of which came from Google searches for "fatosphere". The numbers are back down now (138 on Friday and 41 yesterday), but they're still slightly elevated, so I'm hoping we have some new regular readers. Welcome to all of you, and feel free to comment!

Let's play "Spot the Cliché"

2008-01-25T10:31:00.000-08:00

Here is your assignment: Read this article on CNN.com and see how many worn-out stereotypes about fat people and weight loss you can find. I count at least 30 of them. Perhaps I'll enumerate them in a future post, but I wanted to let you all have a crack at it first!

I do have to say one thing, though: if this woman at 5'9" and 250 lbs. felt that "walking in the shopping mall" was difficult and that life was "a constant struggle", I'd say she had some serious problems going on, independent of being fat.

Our 15 minutes

2008-01-23T22:31:00.000-08:00

This article in yesterday's New York Times has just sent a shitload of new readers to the Fatosphere! I got 62 hits yesterday, 41 of which were from Google searches for "fatosphere". Hurray for picking an obvious blog name. :)

Anyway, I recommend the NYT article, especially if you're interested in reading some other fat blogs. I think I've already linked to most of the ones they mention, but you get a little more information about what they're about and who writes them.

For those who are new visitors here, welcome and enjoy! Feel free to comment (the comments aren't moderated, but I reserve the right to delete any comments that are mean).

...and then we make your happy happy

2008-01-17T00:44:00.000-08:00

I finally just finished a CD compilation that I have meant to do for years. The theme is "happy jazz", so I thought I'd share it with you all in the spirit of promoting happiness. Here's the playlist:

1. the spanish flea - trudy pitts
2. the preacher - horace silver
3. cariba - wes montgomery
4. joy spring - clifford brown
5. hallelujah, i love her so - groove holmes
6. flying home - lionel hampton
7. the cat - jimmy smith
8. skad my to znamy? - krzystof sadowski
9. take your pick - hank mobley
10. island lady - sonny rollins
11. in the mood (bis) - rhoda scott
12. happy people - kenny garrett
13. change - donald byrd
14. cold bear - the gaturs
15. be young, be foolish, be happy - booker t & the mg's
16. flute thing - seatrain
17. summer samba (samba de verão) - walter wanderley

In my selection process, "happy" didn't necessarily mean "not blues" or "in a major key". I basically just decided whether the overall "mood" of the piece was happy. It was hard because there were plenty of tracks on my original list that make me happy because I like them, but if I really thought about someone else listening to them I had to admit that they wouldn't necessarily inspire instant happiness. There were also tunes that are pretty happy-sounding but have non-happy names, like Filthy McNasty (Horace Silver), so I eliminated those. And there were some that are super-happy but not really jazz, like Whipped Cream (Herb Alpert) and Soul Finger (Bar-Kays), so those were out.

This whole thing started because one day several years ago, I got home from school and the Admiral said he was feeling kind of depressed. I asked if he knew why, and he said maybe it was because he'd been listening to jazz all day. That got me thinking that, yeah, a lot of jazz is kind of vaguely depressing, but surely there was plenty of jazz out there that could make you happy. Offhand I could only think of a handful of jazz numbers that could legitimately be called "happy", I started collecting them up. I ended up with over 3 hours of happy jazz, but these 17 tracks were among the happiest. I'm listening to them now... and yeah, I'd say they are making me pretty happy.

Pop quiz, hotshot!

2008-01-11T13:59:00.000-08:00

I always thought I was good at taking tests, but I got 1 out of 9 on this awesome quiz about "portion sizes". Admiral Seamus is no slouch at tests either, but he also got a big old "F" on this one (4 out of 9). Yeah, I get that they are trying to shock us with HOW HUGE THE PORTIONS ARE THESE DAYS and how we are ALL TOTALLY OBLIVIOUS ABOUT HOW MUCH WE EAT which is why we're ALL TURNING INTO HUGE FATTIES OMG PANIC!!!! But you can't ace this thing if you just pick the highest number on every question. (Nor, it seems, if you actually try to use reason to pick the best answer.) Here are some of my personal favorites:

-Diameter and calorie count of the "average bagel"... I don't know, did they really count all the bagels in the world and average them out? Wouldn't that tend to skew towards the diameter and calorie count of the most popular brands? Or is it the average of all the *types* of bagels out there? Are they counting mini bagels?

-Average calories in a "turkey sandwich". Umm.

-A story problem for you: "Today's coffee portions are about double the 8 ounces from 20 years ago. The old cup held about 45 calories. How many calories are in today's?"

Seamus' answer: "Still zero?"

But that wasn't an option. I foolishly tried to work with these guys and actually figure out what they were going for. So, OK, "double the 8 ounces", so that's 16 ounces, no wait, that's a decoy, I just have to multiply the calories by 2... okay, 45 calories, times 2, gotta get out my calculator for this one, okay, ummmmm... 90 calories???

No, I'm so wrong!!! Because I forgot to take into account "all the extra flavors and creams added to coffee today"!!!! No wonder I'm so fat!!!!!

So we both did pretty poorly. Let me know how you do! (Of course, I've already helped you out on the coffee question.)

You say you want a resolution...

2008-01-01T11:40:00.001-08:00

Have you come up with your New Year's resolution yet? Mine is to not bother making one. But apparently a lot of people do, and one of the most popular resolutions is to lose weight. If that's you, boy are you in luck, because now $tarbuck$ is going to support you every step of the way!

That's right, the evil empire is introducing a new "platform" called the "Skinny Latte" (which means nonfat milk and sugar-free syrup) so that you can "stick to your New Year's goals". Because obviously everybody's New Year's goal is to lose weight, and obviously the best way to do that is to get help from Starbucks.

This is the time of year for shameless pitches from all kinds of gyms, weight loss programs, etc. But really, Starbucks? It seems like a bit of a stretch. As pointed out over at the f-word blog, ordering a "skinny" won't even cut all that many calories. It's pretty clear that this is just a dumb PR stunt to capitalize on everybody's New Year's-induced guilt.

Also, why is it assumed that a latte will have syrup in it?

Oh, whatever.

On a tangentially related point, I have this hypothesis that the terms "skim" and "nonfat" may have a geographical distribution. I always used to call it skim, then when I moved to Berkeley if I asked for "skim" at a coffee shop they'd give me a blank look, so I started saying "nonfat". Then when I moved to Pittsburgh, I'd get the look for calling it "nonfat" so I started saying "skim" again. But then when I moved to SoCal, "skim" was clearly not cutting it, so now I'm back to "nonfat". I'm not sure where the boundary is, but I'm pretty sure there is one. So here's a Reader's Poll for you: Does anybody east of the Mississippi call it "nonfat"? Or does anyone out west call it "skim"? If I don't get any responses, I'll just go on assuming I am right.

Also as an aside, as I was poking around on the web for stuff on the Skinny Latte platform (wtf is up with the "platform" thing, anyway?), I found this post about a guy who got a coupon for a free drink at Starbucks and tried to come up with the most expensive one he could get -- his 13 shot venti soy hazelnut vanilla cinnamon white mocha with extra white mocha and caramel totaled $13.76. I'll bet that tasted really awesome! For some reason it reminds me of that Domino's pizza thing that Meg linked to a while back...

Anyway, Happy New Year, everybody!

Happy holidays!

2007-12-24T11:31:00.001-08:00

Hope everybody has a very Merry Christmas, etc.

Here is a picture of Bunpote eating our Christmas tree!

The poison keyboard

2007-12-18T19:21:00.000-08:00

This month's Utne Reader included their list of nominations for the Utne Independent Press Awards, and guess who's on it: your favorite and mine, VegNews! And what's more, they were nominated not for design (which I think they have been in the past) but for "Health/Wellness Coverage"!

This was really too much for me. So I decided to take bold, swift action and... write a letter to the editor. Here's what I said:

I'm puzzled as to why VegNews was nominated for an Utne Independent Press Award for Health/Wellness Coverage. As a health-conscious vegetarian, I recently stopped my subscription to VegNews because they promote veganism for reasons of animal rights, not human health. Any time the two come into conflict, they side with the animals. For example, a recent issue bemoaned the impending ban on trans fats in New York City restaurants because it will raise costs for vegan fast food restaurants. They also regularly promote packaged, processed food products as alternatives to animal products, and they recently attacked the Slow Food Movement (referring to it as the "Developmentally Disabled Movement") because it doesn't have any prominent vegetarians on its board.

I could understand VegNews being nominated for Political Coverage, or for Best Design, but Health/Wellness? Not unless you mean the health and wellness of animals rather than (and sometimes at the expense of) humans.

Think they'll run it? I'm not holding my breath. My last letter to the editor (of VegNews) didn't get published and I'll bet they never even read it. Here's what that one said:

In your August issue, Dan Piraro the nutrition expert/cartoonist claims to have discovered "the reason" people are fat: Dairy! Oh, so that half cup of nonfat organic milk in my morning coffee is the reason for my "sizeable posterior"? And if I just went vegan then I'd get skinny and have a healthier heart? OK, I'll just start eating only VegNews recipes and watch the pounds melt away – after all, the amount of coconut milk in your Thai-Style Coconut Soup recipe on page 65 only has 177 grams of saturated fat! And while I'm at it, I'll head over to Food Swings in Brooklyn (page 25) and get some vegan fast food loaded with heart-healthy trans fats.

I've considered going vegan in the past but have hesitated because of concerns about margarine and soy. If you want to convince vegetarians to go vegan for health, then get a real nutritionist to make the case that a vegan diet is healthy, rather than just reinforcing our society's hatred towards fat people and pretending it's all about health. Smug articles like Piraro's that hurl insults and make unfounded judgments about people's health based on their size will only push people away.

I thought maybe the sarcasm kept my letter out of the magazine, so I decided to tone it down for Utne. But in fact, VegNews only prints letters that tell them how great they are, so I suspect that they wouldn't have run it either way. In any case, whether Utne prints my letter or not, I'll look forward to seeing the next issue where they announce that somebody other than VegNews won the award for Health/Wellness Coverage (the winner was, in fact, POZ).

And now I think I am done being bitter about VegNews.

The new war on Christmas

2007-12-11T10:38:00.000-08:00

Forget about Bill O'Reilly's worn-out claim that liberals are waging a war on Christmas. The new war on Christmas cuts across party lines, since it's being waged by fatphobes and the diet industry. In case you didn't know: they want to slim down Santa! (Here is just one example.)

Happily, there is an organization trying to combat this effort with a campaign of their own: Keep Santa Fat. The whole thing is about half tongue-in-cheek (i.e., I think they are serious about it, but they aren't pretending like this is the most important issue in the world). But there is one very real positive consequence to the campaign: for every person who signs their petition to Keep Santa Fat, they will donate one pound of food to America's Second Harvest, which is a charity organization that runs food banks around the US. Apparently there is always a shortage around the holidays, so the timing of the campaign is particularly... uh... timely. I recommend the Keep Santa Fat site anyway since it's interesting and funny, but if you agree with the cause then it would be particularly nice if you would go and sign the petition and help out the food banks.

Incidentally, my own favorite Santa isn't fat at all. But I'm pretty sure that wasn't a deliberate attempt to send an anti-obesity message, given that Willie Stoke isn't exactly a model for clean living otherwise...

So close, yet so far away

2007-12-05T22:46:00.001-08:00

An Alert Reader sent me a link to this article (Alert Reader, do you have a preferred nickname?), which says so many things that I like. For example, that exercise performance is the best predictor of longevity, period. And that it is a far better predictor of longevity than BMI. That "what something looks like does not tell you how it runs" (my favorite quote in the story, from cardiologist Paul Thompson). That exercise reverses some of the so-called risk factors of obesity including insulin resistance, low HDL cholesterol, and hypertension (we already knew all that, but incidentally, doesn't the fact that exercise "reverses" these factors even in "obese" people suggest that they are not risk factors of obesity at all, but rather risk factors of a sedentary lifestyle?). That "fitness" can result from as little as 30 minutes of walking 5 days a week.

So then why, oh why, is the second page of the article subtitled "Obesity Still a Big, Fat Problem", even though nothing after that subtitle provides any evidence whatsoever for fat being inherently bad for you? And why does the author of this otherwise lovely article feel compelled to add that "Experts say that for the most part, it's uncommon to be fit and fat, which means staying trim is just as important as exercising"? OK, here's a GRE question for you all: does the second half of that sentence follow from the first? Argh. And this is followed up by a gem of a quote from Nathan Wong: "In real life, few abdominally obese patients have a high level of fitness, so practically from a public health point of view, getting across any message implying we place less importance on obesity is ill-advised." So this guy is suggesting that even though a new study just showed, once again, how much more important fitness is than BMI, we still have to be obsessed with fat because of a correlation. Say it with me, people: Correlation does not imply causation. Now say it again, louder, so Nathan Wong can hear you. This pisses me off so much I feel like just typing it over and over again. Correlation does not imply causation. Correlation does not imply causation. Correlation does not imply causation. Correlation does not imply causation. Correlation does not imply causation. Correlation does not imply causation. Correlation does not imply causation. Correlation does not imply causation. Correlation does not imply causation.

The Admiral sent me a Newsweek article that suffers from the same problem, but in reverse. You think it is going to be a totally crappy piece because it basically says that fat women's weight loss goals are not ambitious enough, in that on average the fat woman's ideal amount of weight loss would still leave her in the "overweight" BMI category (god forbid). And we all know that all this "obesity" is really "alarming" (in fact we get the words "alarmingly" and "alarming" in back-to-back sentences in the same paragraph, in case you weren't alarmed enough after the first instance). The author of the study that revealed fat women's modest weight loss goals suggested that a 5'2" woman who weighs 200 pounds probably just thinks it's totally unrealistic to get down to 120 lbs. (which it is, statistically speaking). But then the authors of the Newsweek article follow that up by saying that this "may just mean that women who are very overweight might need to achieve small weight loss goals before they can envision larger losses and change their eating and exercise behaviors accordingly." Oh, yeah, totally, I'm sure that would make it 100% easier; in fact, they should market this as a new foolproof weight loss strategy! Just lose a little bit of weight, and then you will believe that you can lose a lot more weight, and then you will totally do it! It reminds me of the Jenny Craig counselor (a thin woman) who once brilliantly advised my mom, "Maybe if you could just not eat as much..."

This article also cites that lovely "having fat friends will make you fat" idea from a while back, and here is how they explain the effect supposedly found in that study: People with fat friends "may simply see being fat as the new normal." Does this strike anyone else as being completely idiotic? Like somehow if you have fat friends you become incapable of figuring out if someone is fat or not? For some reason I am reminded of Stephen Colbert's claim that he doesn't see race -- like, literally, he can't tell if someone is black. But the difference is that the authors of this article aren't trying to be ironic.

So why am I even bothering to tell you about this article? Well, because at the end, they finally get around to saying that maybe women should be encouraged to feel good about themselves regardless of whether society tells them they are too fat. They cite a study that showed that "girls who felt good about themselves were more likely to be physically active and pay more attention to what they ate," and they advocate "encouraging women to love and care for their bodies — even when they don't match the Hollywood ideal". Then again, they say that the reason to encourage women to feel good about their bodies is that statistically, a woman who feels good about her body is less likely to gain weight, so therefore this may help "reverse or at least slow the progression of the obesity epidemic." So let me just make sure I'm clear on this: We should encourage women to feel good about their bodies, even if they are fat. But if they are fat, that is "alarming", and if they don't make large enough weight-loss goals for themselves, then they just need to lose some weight so they will feel like they can lose more weight so they can become "normal" and therefore not be so alarming to everybody else. But in the mean time they should still try to feel good about themselves.

OK, never mind, that article just plain sucks.

Now I feel like less of a freak

2007-11-29T18:23:00.000-08:00

This is such perfect timing -- I was going to tell you my Bunpote poo story today anyway, but I felt like you'd all think I was nuts (for reasons to be explained). Now I feel vindicated thanks to this story (for reasons to be explained).

I've mostly refrained from cat blogging, because I have some readers who don't love cats, Shhh in particular. But fortunately those same readers love talking about poo. So I realized, hey, a story about cat poo, everyone will be happy. And also, those of you who know my other poo stories (especially the one about the keys) will know that I'm unlikely ever to share those on my blog. So if there has to be a poo story (and yes, there has to be one), this is it.

OK, so here's what happened. On Tuesday night I woke up at about 4am having to go to the bathroom. I was a little drunk or hungover, or both, since some friends had dropped by earlier and we had some wine (and by "some" I mean "a lot of"). So anyway, I went downstairs and went to the bathroom, and then I decided to get myself a glass of water. And a key element to the story is that I did all this with the lights off. The reason for this is that I did not want to shut off my melatonin production. Melatonin (as is explained in the article I linked to above) is a hormone whose release is triggered by darkness. It helps you sleep and I think its production is also facilitated by sleeping. I remember reading a study several years ago that said that sleeping in an insufficiently darkened room was linked to higher breast cancer levels in women, and I also think I've read that decreased melatonin is the reason for the link between not getting enough sleep and being fat (and god knows I wouldn't want to get fat!). So anyway, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I avoid turning on the lights because apparently as soon as you are exposed to light in the middle of the night, it shuts off your melatonin production for some number of hours because your body is fooled into thinking it's daytime. Brad, if you're reading this, please feel free to tell me that I have the science all wrong here. But getting the science right isn't crucial to my story; what is crucial is that I *believed* all of this to be true on the fateful night in question.

After I went to the bathroom (in the dark), I decided I needed to get a drink of water. When I walked into the kitchen I was like, eww, has it been that long since I cleaned the litterbox? And then I realized that Bunpote must have just recently taken a fresh crap, because no way could a dirty litterbox smell that bad. And then I realized that even a fresh crap in the litterbox doesn't smell that bad, so then I was all "uh oh"... and at the precise moment when I came to this realization, I put my (socked) foot into something squishy. And finally I realized that the cat had crapped on the floor.

Now, to be fair to the little fellow, I'm sure he didn't do it on purpose. I think what happens is that sometimes a little bit of poo sticks to his behind and then he carries it with him for a little bit until it falls off. That would explain why the poo that I occasionally find around the house is in little chunk form, never full-blown turds. But in any case, intentional or not, that night the cat crapped on the kitchen floor and, by extension, on my sock.

I remained calm (probably because of the wine mentioned earlier), removed my sock, and scrubbed it with some soap in the bathroom sink and hung it to dry (in the dark). But I couldn't very well leave the remaining crap on the kitchen floor, or else the cat would probably step in it and track it everywhere. On the other hand, why let some cat crap on the floor cause me to shut off my melatonin production and give myself cancer? So I got a paper towel with some soap and water (in the dark) and attempted to scrub the crap off of its original location on the floor and the second spot where I had put my sock down again before realizing that I had stepped in crap (in the dark). And then I washed my hands thoroughly and went to bed (in the dark).

The next morning I came downstairs and was faced with quite a scene: in the bathroom, a wet, soapy sock hanging on the towel rack with crap all over it. And, in the kitchen, a big blob of crap with a shiny clean spot next to it, and a smaller smeared blob of crap nearby, with another clean spot right next to it. And a cat, looking up at me and meowing in an accusatory way, as if to say, "(1) Feed me, and (2) What the fuck were you doing trying to clean all that up without turning the lights on, dumbass?"

What's worse, I didn't get back to sleep until about 6am, because of the alcohol or the adrenaline rush associated with my horrifying discovery in the kitchen. So not shutting off my melatonin production apparently didn't help me get back to sleep. That morning as I was cleaning up the crime scene, I concluded that the moral of the story was that I should have just turned on the damn lights, because one night of decreased melatonin production wasn't going to kill me. But now thanks to that CNN article, as I said, I feel vindicated, since it turns out that melatonin may be even more important to preventing cancer than was previously thought, based on the fact that people who work the graveyard shift have significantly elevated rates of cancer. So the next time I find crap on the floor in the middle of the night, I'm leaving it there, and I'm leaving the lights off, and that's that.

That's a lot of turkey

2007-11-23T17:17:00.000-08:00

You thought you ate a lot yesterday? Pat Bertoletti ate 6.91 lbs. of turkey in 8 minutes at yesterday's Turkey Bowl in Las Vegas (you can watch the video here). It is a truly disgusting spectacle, especially the cranberry sauce eating contest at the beginning, and the commentary is really outstanding as well as the interviews and trash-talking before the turkey eating contest. And there is such great jargon that goes along with the whole thing -- my favorite terms are the "reversal" and "Elvis has left the building" (both refer to the same phenomenon). Pat Bertoletti is regarded as the next big thing in the world of competitive eating, so it is kind of a big deal that he won this event (as well as a recent chicken wing eating contest), and some say this signals the end of the era of Takeru Kobayashi's dominance in the "sport".

Some who are not fans of MLE (Major League Eating), such as the University of Iowa spokesperson quoted in this article say that competitive eating is inappropriate because a lot of Americans are fat. I'm not sure there's really a connection (the article quotes a doctor and a food science researcher as saying pretty much the same thing) -- my guess is that people who do see a connection imagine that this is how fat people eat. No forks, just cram it in as fast as you can. But the reality is that, for one thing, some of the best competitive eaters aren't fat themselves at all. The winner of the cranberry sauce eating contest, Juliet Lee, weighs in at 105 lbs. -- she ate 13.23 lbs. of cranberry sauce in 8 minutes. And furthermore, if you watch these events, you can see that competitive eaters are doing something completely different from everyday eating. I know some good eaters (and I can take care of a lot of food myself when called upon to do so), but nobody I know can eat like this. It requires training and discipline. Would I go so far as to call it a sport? Well, I'd say it's more of a sport than other stuff that shows up on ESPN, like poker and spelling bees. But sport or not, and whether you think it is funny or too disgusting to watch, I'd say if you are looking for a symbol of American overconsumption, there are more obvious things to point to than an eating contest. For example, try 20 billion dollars in retail sales on Black Friday.

Happy Holidays...

Are you ready for some football?

2007-11-16T11:07:00.000-08:00

I don't hate people from the state of Michigan or anything like that, I just really want the Buckeyes to beat U of M's football team this weekend. But it's hard to fit all that onto a cookie, so that's why I had to condense it into a more concise phrase. I made these cookies for game day in 1996, and everybody loved them -- not only because of the rude message but because my mom's sugar cookie recipe kicks ass (see below for recipe).

I wasn't going to write about football this week, but I've been thinking a lot about it and couldn't hold back this post. A lot of my readers are fellow academics and may wonder why a person who fancies herself an intellectual would admit so proudly and publicly to being a football fan. Some feel that football programs do harm to acadmic programs at universities because they drain money away from academic budgets, or exploit student athletes, or put too much emphasis on athletics at the expense of the real intellectual purpose of universities, or create rivalries that result in nastiness and violence. Or all of the above. Not to mention the fact that it is somewhat of a barbaric sport when you think about it. So, why do I still love college football?

Well, for starters, I don't love college football, I love Ohio State football, and Cal football to a lesser extent. But University of Illinois football, for example, can go straight to hell. So let's talk about Ohio State football. First of all, Ohio State's athletic department is fully self-funded, drawing no money from the general budget. In fact, its athletic program actually makes a profit (this was true of only 19 schools last year, according to this article). Some of the revenues are given over to the academic side; for example, the athletic department has donated $5 million to the massive Main Library renovation project that is currently underway. Yes, $5 million is a drop in the bucket ("the bucket" being a $109 million athletics budget). Still, I'm sure the library appreciated that $5 million just the same.

As for student athletes, yes, it does seem to be the case that many of them don't get a real college experience because they are pressured to excel in athletics. I'm not sure if I agree that college football players are being exploited since they get a free education and plenty of perks and probably wouldn't or couldn't go to the NFL even if they were allowed to do so straight out of high school -- but in any case, Michael Lewis' proposal to pay college football players for their services is a total loser in my opinion. King Kaufman thinks Lewis' article is "Well-reasoned, well-argued, and just plain right"; I couldn't disagree more (as is often the case with me and KK). First of all, it is wrong and downright cynical to think that no football player actually wants to go to college; for many of these kids the scholarship therefore has a real value. Also, I suspect that even if the NFL allowed high school students to enter the draft, the vast majority would go to college anyway, so I'm not sure the rules are really preventing a lot of people from earning money in the NFL. It seems to me that the exploitation argument really comes down to the fact that athletes have to spend a lot of time in the gym and at practice in order to be good enough to keep their scholarships, and this detracts from their education. But it this is all a matter of degree -- what about a kid who has to do work-study to get financial aid -- is that better than the athlete's situation because of the smaller number of work hours? At least athletes can enroll in sports for credit (not true for work-study) so that during the term when the sport is in season, they can take a smaller number of academic courses. At Ohio State, for example, I believe a player can sign up for 2 credit hours of football, meaning they only have to take two 5-hour academic courses during fall quarter and still be full-time (12 hours per quarter). So football gets in the way of the number of courses a player can reasonably complete during the quarter, but I doubt it seriously interferes with success in the courses. Two courses isn't very many, no matter what else you have going on in your life.

So I am not so sure about the exploitation angle to begin with. But on a practical level, if football programs gave away all their revenues to the players, how would universities fund the rest of their athletic teams? This would basically impose a death sentence on non-profitable sports, unless schools were to pay for their non-profitable sports out of general university budgets (another terrible idea since that would take money away from academics). In any case, to the extent that there is an exploitation problem, it is likely be dealt with thoughtfully at Ohio State in the coming years, now that they have a president who has very publicly and radically addressed this very issue at another institution.

I am not sure what constitutes "too much emphasis on athletics," but I strongly disagree with the notion that an emphasis on athletics precludes or diminishes the acadmic purpose of an institution. Football helps attract students to Ohio State, including plenty of academic-minded students. I personally have to say that my decision to go to Ohio State probably had a lot to do with the fact that I grew up on Ohio State football, and I have plenty of friends who were excellent students and contributed a lot to the academic environment at Ohio State and who I suspect decided to go to Ohio State at least partly because of football. A lot of them were in the marching band with me, and this was the most demanding, most time-intensive, most fun element in my (and, I suspect, their) college experience. I feel I got an outstanding education, but I would have to say that the biggest reason I look back fondly on my college years is the band (and therefore, indirectly, football). Football games also provide an excuse for alumni to come back and visit the campus, whether for Homecoming or reunions or whatever, and this keeps people connected and also encourages alumni to donate to the university. So contrary the notion that the "football school" label diminishes the value of the education, I'd say there are ways in which the football tradition substantially enhances and reinforces the academics and people's general goodwill towards the institution.

Finally, about this rivalry thing. I think the vast majority of people don't take it personally, they just get into the rivalry for the fun and the tradition. To the extent that things get nasty, there are often cultural differences that the football rivalry is merely standing in for (not causing). For example, when a USC kid goes to a game wearing a t-shirt that says "My maid went to UCLA," this is plain old classism; ditto when Stanford kids chant "State school!" at the Cal game. In the case of Ohio State vs. Michigan, both are huge state schools with (I think) similar academic standards and similar cultures. And people from Ohio and Michigan are, I think, pretty similar (except that people from Michigan have funny vowels and they go around doing this weird thing with their hand to show where in the state they are from if someone asks). So this rivalry pretty much centers around old grudges about games from years (or even decades) gone by. The Big Ten title is almost always on the line in that game, and often someone's national championship hopes as well. There are many of us who felt that winning last year's game when Ohio State was #1 in the nation and Michigan was #2 was the ultimate prize, and that the national championship game was almost anticlimactic (sadly, it seems possible that the team felt this way too, which may have contributed to the outcome). Michigan will certainly have that game on their minds on Saturday, when both teams will have their pride on the line (in addition to the Big Ten title) since both teams lost last week. What I will have on my mind is "FUCK MICHIGAN" (though I mean that in the nicest possible way).

And now for the cookie recipe. These are the best sugar cookies -- no, the best cookies -- I have ever eaten. My mom got this recipe in her Home Ec class in 1962, and now I pass it along to you. A note about butter: the original recipe calls for 1 c. shortening instead of the butter, and the version with shortening does taste slightly better, but I couldn't in good conscience tell you to put shortening in your cookies given my own well-known anti-shortening position. But you do what you want...

Home Ec Christmas Cookies

2 sticks butter, softened
2 c. sugar
4 eggs
4 T. milk
2 t. vanilla
5 c. sifted flour
1/2 t. baking soda (mom says she heaps the 1/2 t. a little)
1 t. salt

Cream the butter and sugar. Add beaten eggs, vanilla, and milk, and mix again. Sift flour, soda, and salt together and add to mixture. Mix. Chill overnight. Roll out on floured board and cut out with cookie cutters. Bake on ungreased cookie sheet for 8 - 10 minutes at 325 degrees. The key is not to overbake them -- bake until the tops are dry (not shiny anymore), but no longer than that (i.e. don't let them get even a little bit browned). Then frost with your choice of frosting and sprinkles... they taste great with the canned Betty Crocker stuff, FYI, but again I am not going to explicitly recommend this because there's partially hydrogenated what-have-you in there... so make your own decision...

Welcome to Coffee Talk

2007-11-11T23:41:00.000-08:00

OK, I haven't discovered any new atrocities on the fat front in the last few days, and there certainly will not be any football blogging this week. So I thought instead I would give you an update on my latte art efforts.

I finally got my espresso machine back after a month in the shop. It was a horrible time, but I made it through. Unfortunately my art suffered, so I've had a lot of ugly (but still tasty) results since being reunited with the machine. You may recall my previous best effort. Above is my latest best effort. I agree it is not outstanding, but I think there are promising signs here, namely the shape and curve of the leaves. Now if only I could make the leaves a little thinner, get rid of the errant blobs and drips, not splash the espresso up onto the side of the mug, and center it better... and, uh, like make it look better... then it would look better. At least it is better than some of my previous failures such as the Christmas Tree Cappuccino and the Gonzo (that one in honor of Ralph Steadman). And even though the Stripe may have looked prettier, I think this latest one gets more technical points for filling up the mug and looking more like the rosetta supposed to look. (Here is an example of what the rosetta is supposed to look like, but I think this dude is cheating by pouring the milk over a spoon -- you are not supposed to have to do that).

In case anyone else is sick enough to want to try doing this stuff yourself, here is an article on latte art, and another one, and here are some examples of what good latte art looks like. Yes, I know, mine doesn't look like that. But this stuff is hard, people! So throw me a bone.

News Flash

2007-11-08T22:22:00.001-08:00

Thanks to all who forwarded me versions of this article, which summarizes results of a recent study showing that being fat isn't as deadly as some researchers previously thought it was. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

OK, quick, suppose you're some kind of "expert" and a reporter calls to get your take on these new findings. How can you continue to insist that Fat Is Bad if it doesn't actually increase mortality? Well, if you're Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, here's your new angle: "...excess weight makes it more difficult to move about."

Seriously. No, seriously, she said that. (Or something like it -- it's not a direct quote in the article).

Fillyjonk has already skewered several of the dumbass reactions to the study, including Manson's dumbass reaction above, but I couldn't help drawing your attention to it here.

On an unrelated note, I found this quiz on MSNBC. The link said "Apples or bananas? Which is better?" And I was like mmm, bananas are better, yummy, food quiz, yay, click!

Well, it turns out that it's not really a quiz about what food you like best, it's about which ones are objectively "best" in terms of calorie count, fat grams, fiber, etc. As if between two fruits or vegetables there is a single "best" one for everybody all the time. I don't know, but I think if I ate a banana at breakfast, then maybe an apple would be "best" for me with lunch.

But whatever, I don't want to spoil the fun quiz for you, I just wanted to point out this one funny part. If you take the quiz, read what it says after "Corn Muffin vs. Plain Bagel". I was like, corn muffin, what the hell do they mean by that, like cornbread in the shape of a muffin? Well, it turns out that they meant the "corn muffin" that they sell at Dunkin Donuts. Who the hell even knew or cared that Dunkin Donuts has something called a "corn muffin"? It's probably deep fried for all we know, and I doubt there's any actual corn in it besides maybe high fructose corn syrup. So keep that in mind when you take the quiz -- assume that every food item they ask about is from Dunkin Donuts, since I'm sure that's where you usually are when you're faced with trying to make healthy food choices for the day.

The mediocre elitist

2007-11-03T12:14:00.000-07:00

New Rule (with apologies to Bill Maher): You can't be an elitist if you're not elite.

Edward McClelland doesn't think you should run a marathon unless you are really fast. He's pissed off because tomorrow's New York Marathon is going to have 37,000 runners, and because those runners will have energy gel and better shoes than runners did 30 years ago. McClelland blames Oprah Winfrey's running of the Marine Corps marathon ("a middle-aged woman hauling her flab around the District of Columbia") for opening up the sport to non-elite athletes. God forbid.

According to McClelland, Oprah's marathon time is 4:29. Evidently this is just way too disgustingly slow. McClelland's own time in the only marathon he ever ran was 4:16 -- but hey, at least he had the decency to be "embarrassed". He says he will try again next year and his goal will be "to do it in the spirit of the first running boom, in under three and a half hours".

3:30? Come on, that's pathetic. That's 63% slower than Ryan Hall's 2:09:02 winning time in today's highly anticipated US Olympic marathon trials in New York (which were unfortunately marred by tragedy when Ryan Shay, the 2003 US marathon champion, collapsed on the course and died). Oprah's 4:29 is only 28% slower than McClelland's 3:30, and keep in mind that he hasn't even run that time, he just intends to. So, as much scorn as he heaps on Oprah (which I can't help thinking has more to do with her "flab" than with her time), he deserves a double helping of it from the truly elite runners like Hall. There's nothing magical about 3:30 -- it's just McClelland's arbitrary cutoff for what constitutes a respectable marathon since that's the time he thinks he himself can do. What a fucking hypocritical asshole.

As for those real elite American runners, McClelland has plenty of criticism for them too. He says Hall has no chance of medaling in the Olympics because America's "marathoning spirit been trampled by hordes of joggers whose only goal is to stagger across the finish line", and he points out that the only American who has medaled in the Olympics lately was born in Eritrea (Meb Keflezighi), so apparently he doesn't really count as American.

Well, hey, news flash for Mr. McClelland (who, one might imagine, is of Irish descent -- i.e., not really American in comparison to someone like Brandon Leslie). The top three finishers in today's time trials were Hall, Dathan Ritzenhein, and Brian Sell, all born in the US (in California, Michigan, and Pennsylvania respectively). Keflezighi finished 8th. I blame Oprah.

Drinking responsibly

2007-10-30T17:44:00.000-07:00

Sorry to leave you hanging for a couple of weeks -- I went out of town two weekends in a row. We now return you to your regularly scheduled bitchfest.

But no, actually I have something relatively pleasant to report today. It's about drinking responsibly. And I don't mean not getting shitfaced and puking in the bathroom at a wedding reception (Who among us hasn't done that?). I mean buying alcohol in such a way so as to minimize the damage you are doing to the planet. (Who gives a shit about your liver? Life is short.)

This article appeared on Salon.com today. It summarizes a paper that basically says that if you live east of Columbus, then surprisingly it takes less energy to get your wine from Europe (assuming it's shipped by sea rather than by air) than from California. This is because the California wine will arrive via trucks, and trucks suck. (Yay trains!) My Columbus readers ought to like it since you all get a shout-out, and also I think we should listen to the authors of this study because one of them appears to have added umlauts to his name for toughness.

Anyway, apparently Columbus is the spot where the average carbon costs are equivalent such that you can choose California or European wines based on your own preferences without feeling guilty about not making a green choice. Incidentally, if you like California wines and you are interested in sustainable farming practices, you may be interested in Benziger. We visited their winery in Sonoma the weekend before last for a tasting and we heard about their new sustainable, organic, and/or biodymanic farming practices that they are trying to implement for all their grapes. I was very happy to see this because I always liked their wines anyway, and have otherwise not really liked many of the organic wines I've tried. (Please let me know in the comments if you know of any good ones!) Admittedly, the Admiral was not a huge fan of the reds that we tasted at Benziger. But his taste is just incorrect -- really the reds are great. Trust me. If you buy a bottle and don't like it, I'll even drink it for you because that's the kind of friend I am.

My thinking about this had become very uptight

2007-10-19T10:54:00.000-07:00

(To paraphrase The Dude.)

This week I got to hear a talk by Katie LeBesco, author of an excellent book called Revolting Bodies? The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity. She came to campus to give a lecture for the Media Studies senior seminar, entitled "Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression" (which is also the title of a book that she co-edited with Jana Evans Braziel. I won't try to summarize the whole thing here, but I just wanted to point out one thing about it that has changed my thinking about fat. In the talk and also in Revolting Bodies, LeBesco made the point that the fat acceptance movement is probably better served in the long term if we quit claiming "innocence" all the time. A lot of pro-fat writing (including mine, I'm afraid) centers around the idea that fat people are not to blame for being fat. It's genetic, it's developmental, it's environmental, it's caused by a virus, it's caused by having fat friends (ha), it's a result of suburban sprawl, it's because we work too much, it's because junk food is cheaper than healthy food, it's a big mystery, etc. And hey, look at me, I eat like a rabbit and I work out all the time, but I'm still fat.

It's not to say that there isn't some truth to all this -- by now it should be obvious that not all fat people are lazy gluttons, and clearly different people have different metabolisms, giving the lie to the standard "calories in-calories out" model of weight loss. But what LeBesco is saying is that we should not act like we are totally helpless in all this. For one thing, it's easily falsified. Of course there are fat people who eat a lot of junk food and don't exercise, so we shouldn't pretend like every fat person is a health nut. Also, even those of us who feel like we don't "deserve" to be fat based on our eating and exercise habits are still not "perfect" (whatever that might mean), nor should we have to be. I don't think I eat more than the average person and I think I may exercise more than the average person, but I do have a sweet tooth and I also drink a fair amount of alcohol. So it's not as if there's absolutely nothing that I could cut out of my lifestyle if losing weight were a big priority for me. The point is that even though I may be predisposed to being fat, I am still choosing not to do everything I possibly could in order to get thin. But by acting like I am doing everything I can, I am just reinforcing the idea that being fat is something you should do everything possible to avoid. And I am also contributing to the idea that fat people don't control their own lives, they are just passive victims of whatever causes fatness.

So I have decided I am going to stop doing that. I still take pride in my identity as a runner and a vegetarian, but I am not going to act like I as a runner and a vegetarian lead some kind of ideal lifestyle that everyone else should aspire to. Rather, I am a runner and a vegetarian who is also a foodie and an enjoyer of fine beverages. And I can also be lazy sometimes, just like everybody else, and that is OK.

I am very grateful to Katie LeBesco (who in addition to being a great writer and an entertaining lecturer is also a very cool person who I was fortunate to have a chance to hang out with a bit when she was in town) for opening my eyes to this defect in my thinking which I should have recognized a long time ago.

Cupcakes

2007-10-15T15:21:00.000-07:00

It was another great weekend. The Buckeyes are #1, thanks to LSU's loss to Kentucky and Cal's (unfortunate) loss to Oregon State. And we had a nice dinner with our friends last night. And we went to the Lebowskifest, where the main highlight (for me, anyway) was the costume contest -- there was a Dude that looked just like the Dude, and a Walter that looked just like Walter. It was eerie. But I have to admit that the best part of my weekend was our trip to Canter's after the Lebowskifest on Friday night, and in particular, the cupcake that I got there.

We're usually too full for dessert when we eat there, but on Friday I just wanted dessert. So I asked the waiter what was their best dessert, and he mentioned a few things including 'hi hats'. My ears perked up at this because I have a cupcake cookbook that includes a kind of complicated recipe for hi-hats in which the author goes on and on about how great they are. So I figured I should have one and see what all the fuss is about, and oh my god. You have not lived until you have eaten a hi hat. Basically they are chocolate cupcakes with white frosting on top and then they're dipped in a coating of chocolate (the photo above shows one that has been dissected). I am going to have to try making these. I found a version of the recipe here that looks promising. I have a feeling that the white frosting in this recipe can't be as good as what they use at Canter's, which is just the most delicious bakery cake-type frosting, but who knows.

OK, back to some more negative shit

2007-10-09T23:54:00.000-07:00

Who in the hell is Michael Tarm to decide who looks "...like a starting line is, well, the last place they should be"? In this article on the growing number of participants in big-city marathons, Tarm points out that nowadays you will see people at marathons who are old, fat, wearing chicken suits, and/or wearing g-strings. So far, this all sounds fine to me. But a large number of people collapsed from heat stroke and exhaustion at last weekend's Chicago Marathon (possibly due to the water running out at some of the water stations along the course, though the organizers are denying that this happened), and in response to this, some unnamed "marathon purists" to say that races are "too all-inclusive" and are being overrun by "novices" who "crowd courses for more serious runners".

OK. Marathons may be getting bigger, but if race organizers seriously wanted to cut down on the number of entrants (which evidently they don't, since they like collecting entry fees and the host cities like collecting the revenues from all the people who come to the marathons from out of town), there are plenty of ways to do this. For example, they could require entrants to achieve a certain qualifying time in another marathon, like they do in Boston. Or for those races that don't wish to be exclusive to fast runners, they could just put smaller caps on the total number of entries and register people on a first-come, first-served basis. Or for races that really don't want the "novices", they could require participants to qualify by completing a shorter distance race, e.g., a half marathon, before entering. Or, hell, they could just allow entries by invitation only if they wanted a purely elite field. But none of these possibilities is explored in the article. The only identifier that is suggested for weeding out the "not-so-serious" runners is appearance. If you are old or fat or not wearing socially acceptable attire, it is implied that you are not serious enough. That is wrong and crappy. There are plenty of "serious" participants in events like this who don't necessarily "look" like elite athletes. Just to pick a totally random example, there are people weighing 200 pounds and even more who successfully run marathons. And hell, this woman is a fucking triathlete! So really, I think your seriousness as an athlete has a lot more to do with your attitude than your looks. And I hope that things like this crappy article don't contribute to prejudice against participants who lack the runner's traditional "look". Especially since, as I've said elsewhere, I personally have always found the running communities I've been a part of to be very accepting of different body types.

An antidote to the negative shit

2007-10-08T14:02:00.001-07:00

I said I was going to try to post positive things on this blog, didn't I? Well, sometimes it's hard. I think my last post was pretty negative. So, here is a photo of my cat to brighten your day. Is he not the most adorable thing you've ever seen?

Reason #872 why men don't want to date fat chicks*

2007-10-04T11:48:00.000-07:00

Apparently being in the company of a fat person means you are fat too.

Case in point: Last night Admiral Seamus and I were walking out of the gym (yes, the same gym) after working out, and some high school kids drove by and one of them yelled, "You guys should hit the gym more often!"

By now I am not particularly sensitive about incidents like this, so I won't necessarily blog about it every time someone looks at me funny for being fat. But the reason I thought this was interesting is that somehow Seamus was perceived as a fatty (or at least as someone needing to go to the gym) just by virtue of walking next to me. I would say the remark could have referred to our sweaty and disheveled appearance (I in particular get pretty red-faced when I exercise), but this happened at about 10:30pm and it was way too dark for them to see anything but our body shapes, especially since they were driving by. For those who don't know him, Seamus does not look at all like a fat person. I just calculated our BMI's, and his is in the "Healthy Weight" category. (Mine, on the other hand, is in the "Severely Obese" category.) So basically he got pegged as a fat person by association. And that, my friends, is another in a long list of reasons to avoid fat people at all costs.

*And yes, I know that a lot of men want to be with fat chicks, but let's not deny the fact that many of them do not.

Like owner, like cat

2007-10-01T00:40:00.000-07:00

Our cat Bunpote loves to eat. No matter how much food you give him, he inhales it immediately and then wants more. I sympathize with him, and we give him a lot more food than the bag says you are supposed to give a cat his size (10 pounds!), but in the back of my mind I worry about him getting really fat. And then I wonder if I am a hypocrite. My main reason for not wanting him to grow into one of those giant 25-pounders is that cats that size have trouble reaching their butts to clean, which is yucky and can cause irritation and health problems like anal prolapse. But I wonder if maybe that's really not a big risk, and if I have just bought into it because I have already bought into the cat version of our society's anti-fat hysteria. Maybe this is parallel to the claim that fat (in humans) raises a person's risk for esophageal cancer. Apparently this is true, and I don't mean to downplay or trivialize what must be a really horrible kind of cancer to have, but the disease is so rare even for people with an "elevated" risk that it seems like a pretty lame reason to give someone for why they should lose weight. I think the only reason it gets mentioned is that the other supposed "risks" of being fat like diabetes and heart disease have not actually been shown to be caused by fat.

Anyway, so we're trying to be laid back about Bunpote's chubbiness (and are even pondering the question of whether we should just give him as much food as he wants -- though for now we're avoiding that because overfeeding can cause gas, which B already emits a fair amount of), but we also can't help making fun of his body and eating habits. We even coined a new verb, to bunpote (tr.), which means to inhale your food as fast as possible. As in: Gosh, Fred, you really bunpoted those tater tots! And I also could not help making the LOLcat above. I meant to get a shot of him sitting next to his empty food dish, but by the time I got the shot, he had gotten up and was walking towards me, and I actually think it ended up being funnier that way.

Does exercise make you thinner?

2007-09-28T23:15:00.000-07:00

Meg sent me this article about studies showing that exercise doesn't really make you thinner. I like the article because it rings true for me impressionistically in addition to being well argued. Every time I have trained for a marathon, for example (which has been lots more times than I've actually gotten through the training and actually run a marathon), I've gained weight over those few months when I was training. Whether this was because I ate more because running made me hungry (or because I felt justified eating more when I was running more) or because I was gaining muscle, or some combination of the two, I don't know. But I didn't really care, because I knew I was getting in shape regardless of the number on the scale. And I also knew there were plenty of good reasons to keep up the running besides the (nonexistent) weight loss.

Are you drinking yourself fat?

2007-09-19T15:14:00.000-07:00

That was the title of the link on CNN's front page that takes you to this article. When I first saw the title, I thought, "Perhaps..." so I clicked on it. But then I realized the article is actually about drinking *soda* (er, "pop" to my readers back east). OK, so maybe not. I stopped drinking soda probably ten years ago, and now I only have maybe 4 of them a year, max. I don't think those 4 per year are making me fat. And I can think of plenty of other fat people who drink very little soda.

I think the article is interesting and no doubt a lot of people gain weight from drinking soda, but I love how they're trying to make it out like the "obesity epidemic" reduces to a single cause, and if we just quit drinking soda then we'll all get thin. It reminds me of crap like the Atkins Diet, Zone Diet, Blood Type Diet, Carbohydrate Addicts' Diet, the anti-dairy stuff, and basically every fad diet that has ever come along and convinced people that if they just stop eating X, then they'll get thin. While it's true that soda has got to be worse for you than carbohydrates or dairy or any of those other unfairly demonized foods, this doesn't mean that "obesity" can be cured by cutting out soda. If it could, then hell, I'd start drinking that shit again, just so that I could quit and lose a bunch of weight as promised!

Um, ICK?

2007-09-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

The other day, we were out to dinner at the Buffalo Inn and we overheard two guys at the next table saying something about "hot chicks with bad vaginas". We were driving down Arrow Highway not long afterwards and saw a huge billboard advertising "VAGINAL REJUVENATION" and "LASER VAGINOPLASTY". I must have been living under a rock for the last several years, because I had never heard of all this stuff, and yet if you google it, you'll find it all over the web. I think that www.labiadoctor.com is probably the funniest site I found, not only because of the name but because of the picture of the woman on the front page, which I have ripped off and posted here in case you're at work and don't want to visit www.labiadoctor.com in order to see it.

I am imagining that at the photo shoot, the photographer instructed this model to try and look shy, a little coy, innocent, but also seductive. Like A Virgin, you might say. I guess that's part of why this grosses me out -- doesn't having your vagina "rejuvenated" sound a lot like getting yourself a child's vagina? And apparently it's a lot like that. You get it "tightened" and "reinforced" so that it feels young again. And then there is vaginoplasty, labiaplasty, and hymen repair surgery. So if your lips are "enlarged" or "asymmetrical" (really?), or if you got your cherry popped but you want your new jealous boyfriend (or boyfriend with a virgin fetish) to be able to do it again for the first time, then you can get all that taken care of by the Labia Doctor. From what I understand, some of these procedures started out as remedies for real problems that people had, e.g. incontinence, severe deformities, etc. But I don't get why women with no real gynecological problems would do this to themselves (and if someone wants to explain it to me, I am all ears). Yes, I understand that it supposedly increases sexual pleasure. But labial reduction is just vanity. And vaginoplasty? Sounds gross. I know what it means, but when I hear the word, it still sounds like plastering your vagina. Like the walls are falling down and you hired a handyman to shore them up.

Good piece by Paul Campos

2007-09-11T20:40:00.000-07:00

My friend Meg tipped me off to this a nice, short article by Paul Campos where he reiterates part of the argument that he made in The Obesity Myth. This is good reading, and if you like it then I highly recommend the book.

Our house is now a home

2007-09-10T11:28:00.000-07:00

Here is a picture of our new cat, Bunpote!

Walkable neighborhoods and you

2007-09-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lull this week -- it was the first week of classes, yadda yadda yadda, [insert more excuses here].

Anyhoo, I found this article on CNN today, which seems to be saying that living in a walkable neighborhood makes you less likely to be 'obese' (or to 'weigh less' -- the two are sort of conflated here). The conclusion is very interesting and makes a lot of sense intuitively, though I had a little trouble following the argument as it was made in this particular summary of the original research. The CNN article says there is no statistical difference among (self-identified?) 'exercisers' or among 'non-excercisers' based on whether or not they live in walkable neighborhoods, so this seems to contradict the point of the article -- but I think it is just poorly written, because this more in-depth article from Science News Magazine online does make a statistical connection. Maybe what's going on is that there are more 'exercisers' in walkable areas. Actually that would make sense given the discussion towards the end of the Science News article, where it is pointed out that maybe people who are naturally sedentary prefer to live in non-walkable neighborhoods since they prefer to drive everywhere anyway. So maybe there is actually more of a 'sorting' going on than a causal relationship between walkable cities and lower rates of 'obesity' (however they measured that -- probably BMI). But the Science News article goes on to draw what I think is a pretty reasonable conclusion based on the studies they describe, and that is that even if there is some sorting going on, people who live in walkable neighborhoods will do more walking even if they're not big fans of walking generally. So there is still a health benefit to living in a walkable neighborhood, and regardless of whether this leads to weight loss or not, it's a good thing. One researcher, an economist, is quoted in the Science News article as saying that the people drawing a connection between non-walkable cities and fat are just smart-growth proponents trying to 'hijack the obesity epidemic' to advance their agenda. As far as I'm concerned, the 'obesity epidemic' hysteria is so ridiculous and overblown that I don't mind if all that energy gets shifted to a more reasonable and productive purpose like convincing people that our neighborhoods need to be more walkable.

In other news, we are going to get a cat! Photos to follow...

Also, Michigan lost again this week. Or, I should say, they were humiliated. By Oregon. 39-7. At home. Life is good.

Awesome weekend

2007-09-03T11:42:00.000-07:00

On Sunday a (Kenyan-)American, Bernard Lagat, won the world 5K championship in Osaka in 13:45.87 after winning the 1500 last week. Awesome! I ran in a 5K with my pals Anne and Brad that day too. I might have have run faster if I weren't tired from marching with the alumni band the day before (more on that below), but I was pleased with my 38:45 anyway, especially since I had not gone running at all for the previous three weeks because of being sick, going on vacation, and a variety of other excuses. The winner of our 5K, Rob Moore, finished in 17:22. Man, I was so close (to being halfway done when he finished), but he just outkicked me in the end. Despite my loss to Rob Moore, it was a beautiful day for a run and it was so much fun to hang out with my buddies.

In other news, how about those Buckeyes? Such a beautiful day for a football opener (and Buckeye victory), and marching with the alumni band was a blast. Even better, how about those Mountaineers?! For those who missed it, Michigan got beat by Appalachian State on Saturday. This is the first time in college football history that a ranked I-A team lost to a I-AA team. People are calling it possibly the greatest upset in the history of college football. I am calling it AWESOME!!! This was the scene at Ohio Stadium after our game had ended and they switched all the TV's under the stadium to the end of the Michigan game. My parents and I were there, but we were in a different part of the stadium from the band, so we were just in the middle of a ton of screaming fans jumping up and down.

As if this wasn't great enough, how about those Yellow Jackets? Wow, Notre Dame never had a prayer (ha). And Cal manhandled Tennessee, thanks in part to a totally sweet punt return by DeSean Jackson (who went to Admiral Seamus' high school, FYI). So all in all it was an outstanding weekend... on the way home from the OSU game, we heard a talk radio guy saying that because of the OSU and Michigan games and the fact that ND was in the process of losing, this could be the greatest day in the history of mankind. A slight exaggeration, perhaps, but I'm having trouble coming up with a better one offhand.

Home sweet home

2007-08-27T18:47:00.000-07:00

OK, we're back from our little vacation, and as promised I feel more cheery now and I'm not going to post about anything crappy today. Even though I'd love to rip into this article that appeared on CNN today. OK, just one little comment about it: if the US gets its own "obesity czar," how do I apply for that position? Because that would be awesome...

Anyhoo, our garden produced its first tomato, so I thought I'd post a photo of it. Mmm, juicy, yummy, roma tomato goodness. Fresh tomatoes from the garden make you never want to buy those waxy orange tomatoes from the grocery store ever again.

Fat cooties!

2007-08-20T23:57:00.000-07:00

This article appeared on CNN.com today, reporting on a study that shows that a common virus known as adenovirus-36 may contribute to weight gain. Researchers found that stem cells exposed to the virus differentiated into fat cells and more readily stored fat than did stem cells not exposed to the virus. They also found that 30% of "obese" people have antibodies to the virus (indicating previous exposure) while only 11% of the rest of the population has the antibodies. So this may mean that the virus causes or contributes to people gaining weight.

The CNN article is interesting, but it also kind of sucks because it keeps pointing out (in case any of us fatties might get the wrong idea) that being fat is still your own damn fault even if you were exposed to the virus. For example, Dr. Samuel Klein is quoted in the article as follows: "We don't want obese people to feel that it's all their fault because it is not all their fault ... but clearly the buck finally lies with the person." Oh, let me get this straight: we don't want fat people to feel like it's all their fault since it's not all their fault, but ultimately it's all their fault. Yes, that's very clear. And a helpful bullet point at the top of the article boldly asserts: "Bottom line cause of all obesity: Eating more calories than you burn". Of course this is not true if you define "obesity" according to BMI, since as we know, BMI only looks at height and weight, so a muscular person like Brad Pitt can be "obese" based on BMI, and probably not because he eats more calories than he burns. And furthermore, even if we restrict the term "obesity" to refer a high percentage of body fat, the "calories in - calories out" model (which the same Dr. Klein quoted above also puts in a plug for) is still not a very practical concept even if technically correct. This is because, as has been demonstrated time and time again, not every person burns calories at the same rate, and some people are more efficient than others at extracting and storing calories from food. So it's not as if you can just read the number of calories on the food label or the number of calories on the digital display on your treadmill and be confident that those are the actual amounts of energy that you are taking in or expending.

I guess I just think that this finding, while interesting from an intellectual point of view, isn't really going to have much impact on fat people -- we don't know how much effect the virus has, there's no vaccine for it currently, and "curing" people of the virus will probably not make them thinner. So I don't really think fat people are going to look at this and think, oh, I guess I will stop exercising and start eating a less healthy diet now that it turns out it's not my fault that I'm fat. And so I don't know why the author of this article was so hung up on trying to prevent people from seizing on it and using it as an excuse for being fat. Well, OK, I guess I do -- it's because if anything other than laziness and gluttony contributed to fat, then maybe it wouldn't be quite as awesome to discriminate against fat people. And that would sort of take away all our fun as a society, wouldn't it?

I (and therefore the Fatosphere) will be on vacation for a few days, so try not to miss me too much. I bet my posts will be more fun and lighthearted after I get back!

Top Ten Reasons Why I Will Never Read VegNews Magazine Again

2007-08-17T14:02:00.000-07:00

(Except To See If They Print My Letter To The Editor In Next Month's Issue)

I used to subscribe to VegNews (subtitle "VegetarianNEWSPOLITICSFOODTRAVELBUZZ"). I stopped my subscription about a year ago because (a) it's not really a vegetarian magazine, it's a vegan magazine, and if you're "just" vegetarian (or if, god forbid, you eat fish), you get insulted at least once per issue; (b) they promote conspicuous consumption, running an annual "Vegan Weddings!" issue and always doing tons of product features and advertising; and (c) I got tired of how they are always promoting the cult of celebrity, doing all these features like "Hottest Vegetarian!" or "Most Fascinating Vegetarian" and it's always some actor or singer like Pamela Anderson or Moby. They also always have this nauseating two-page spread with photos of the VegNews publisher and staff hobnobbing with various (vegetarian) high society types at glitzy gala events.

But anyway, I do occasionally still buy a copy off the newsstand because I like some of their recipes and their features on vegetarian restaurants in various cities. Well, no more. The August issue was so offensive in so many ways that I have decided to permanently cut VegNews out of my reading diet. Here are ten choice items:

1. In the Publisher's Note at the beginning, Joseph Connelly takes aim at the Slow Food movement for not promoting vegetarianism and not "setting a place at the table" for a prominent vegetarian. It's not made clear that Slow Food actually excluded any vegetarians who wanted to get involved -- Connelly is calling on them to make an explicit invitation. OK, but there might be a nicer way to do this than to publish a piece entitled "The ~~Slow~~ Developmentally Disabled Food Movement". I'm not big on political correctness, but is it absolutely necessary to use "developmentally disabled" as an insult? And do they have to insult Slow Foods anyway? It's a pretty great organization from what I know about it.

2. On p. 24, a blurb called "Go Veg, Al Gore!" This piece congratulates PETA for hassling Al Gore about not discussing the contribution of animal farming to global warming in his movie, and for not being vegetarian himself. The reader is referred to an earlier issue of VegNews where they already hassled him about it in a nasty Publisher's Note by Joseph Connelly, that one entitled "You Know It's Hot Out Here for a Wimp" (the 'wimp' being Al Gore). I guess if you make a documentary, your lifestyle has to be acceptable to everyone who might possibly watch it. PETA seems to think so, anyway, since they also openly hassled Michael Moore for being fat when Sicko came out.

3. Another blurb on the next page called "Trimming the Trans Fat" comments on New York City's law that will phase out trans fats in restaurants, with an end goal of eliminating all artificial trans fats by July 2008. OK, so far so good, except that the blurb actually puts a negative spin on it! The blurb ends with a quote from someone named Freedom Tripodi, who owns a vegan fast food restaurant in Brooklyn and is "concerned about paying more for non-hydrogenated margarines and passing the costs on to customers." Tripodi says, "If that happens, it will reinforce the argument that being vegan is more expensive, which is something that we have worked very hard to debunk." Cry me a river!

4. On page 31, a collection of quotes (clearly intended as things You Should Agree With) from a South Florida Sun-Sentinel article on Dr. Neal Barnard's "Vegan Plan for Diabetes". The most irritating: "Barnard, who has long advocated a diet free of dairy products, eggs, fish and meat of any kind, said the obesity epidemic in this country is fueling a secondary epidemic of type 2 diabetes..." So this guy buys into the "obesity causes diabetes" theory so fully that he states it as a fact, and we're supposed to believe anything else he says? I don't know, I bet you can be a diabetic vegan if you try real hard...

5. Pages 32-33, "VegScene," that thing I already mentioned with all the celebrity photos. This month features gems with captions like "Actresses Amy Smart and Wendie Malick smile for the flash-bulb frenzy" and "Alexandra Paul and husband Ian Murray nuzzle together for the camera." The spread includes a photo of Rory Freedman, author of Skinny Bitch, a "tough love" (i.e. mean and anti-fat) diet book that VegNews has been promoting the hell out of.

6. Page 42, John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, is one of the "25 Most Fascinating Vegetarians" and gets high praise for recently switching from vegetarian to vegan, and because Whole Foods has implemented a "humane production system" for food animals. Wait, what? Al Gore gets berated for not being vegetarian and not pointing out why animal farming sucks, but then Mackey is a great guy because he went vegan, even though he and his company make a shitload of profits off of killing animals and selling their dead bodies for food? Just because they do it "humanely"? I don't know, this seems like kind of a double standard...

7. A vapid piece called "Veg on Every Budget" that features caricatures of vegetarian women from three different economic classes and suggests what fun vegetarian stuff they should spend their extra money on. The "High-Rolling Herbivore" has $30K of disposable income per year and spends it on, among (many) other things, "truffle-infused olive oil, Prius with hemp interior, solar-paneled summer house in the Hamptons"... and don't forget "one smokin' pair of Raffia Stiletto sandals". Wow, she sounds like a great person.

8. The very most egregious thing in this issue: an article by cartoonist Dan Piraro, who has discovered that dairy is the root of all evil. Apparently dairy is the reason why people are fat and why they have heart disease, so we should all go vegan. Here's a sample of the nice things he says: "...we all know obese vegetarians whose hearts think they are trying to pull a locomotive out of a swamp every time they attempt to get out of a chair." Charming. Later on he lists some "facts". "Fact: The calcium you get from milk comes with artery-clogging saturated fat, cholesterol, hormones, and pus." (Really? Even if it's nonfat organic milk from cows not treated with growth hormones?) But here's the best fact -- "Fact: Anyone following your sizeable posterior down the street knows you're addicted to dairy." Hey Dan, here's another fact: Anyone taking the time to read your insipid article knows you're just a dumbass cartoonist with some kind of stick up your ass, pretending to be an expert on something you know nothing about.

9. "No Kidding," by Kristine Genovese, about her struggle to adopt a child. Apparently once the social workers found out she was vegetarian, this started coming up every time she talked to them about an adoption, and now they keep trying to hook her up with kids who love salad. Mind you, Genovese acknowledges that her vegetarianism has not actually held up the adoption process, but she still complains about it coming up at all. And in the process, she finds it necessary to spew out prejudice against fat people, who must all feed their kids "fried foods and sugary desserts". Genovese doubts that "overweight or obese" people would have as much trouble adopting as she did -- apparently she has missed the numerous recent cases of fat people being prohibited by the courts from adopting. She's mad because some of the other people trying to adopt were fat, and yet she doesn't think they got hassled at all because "...questioning the eating habits of an overweight person would be considered, at the very least, politically incorrect and at worst, downright cruel." Ha! Hahahahahahaha!

10. A regular feature on the last page called "What's In Your Fridge?" with a picture of a self-satisfied reader and his/her open refrigerator filled with vegan food. This month's fridge owner, Carol Banning of Los Angeles, has a lot of processed, packaged food. But hey, it's vegan! Admittedly, Carol's fridge isn't nearly as bad as the one in the last issue I saw, where this guy had a fridge that was completely full of junk food and not a single fresh fruit or vegetable in sight. But still, I'm sure we can do better than Boca Burgers, Gardenburgers, Sunshine Burgers, Silk, etc. And these companies are all getting free advertising out of it! (In case you didn't know, Boca Burger is owned by Philip Morris.)