When food becomes the enemy
Do you remember when 'skinny' used to be an insult?
From The Guardian, Friday, 10 March 2006
Calories are not immoral
Susie Orbach
Poor old Waitrose. The supermarket really must think it is doing right by its consumers, helping them to discern the good, the bad and the ugly sandwich.
After consultations with its customers, and following well-meaning but idiotic recommendations from the Food Standards Agency, traffic light signposting will be affixed to Waitrose’s sandwiches from Monday enabling us speedily to identify which sandwiches are low in fats, saturates, sugars, salts and calories.
Sensible, right? Well perhaps at first glance. But not at second or third. Out of the best of motives, Waitrose, and doubtless the other supermarkets, will go down a route which will, almost certainly, raise the level of fats and calories eaten.
Worse, it will reinforce the over-simplistic thinking about food intake that ought to embarrass those charged with understanding a complex issue. It’s a version of the Department of Health’s useless mantra, calories in, calories out.
Shall we have a green sandwich with a chocolate bar or crisps today, but a promise not to have it again tomorrow? Consider the magnetism of that naughty red sandwich. How can one resist.
You don’t need to be a shrink to know that what becomes designated a naughty, or immoral (since fat has now taken on moral proportions) or dangerous treat is then eaten guiltily and thus with decreased, rather than enhanced, pleasure. So decreased, in fact, that one misses the experience and craves another. Such are the dilemmas that turn eating into a considerable and often debilitating problem for millions of women daily.
We know that eating in a guilty or surreptitious manner affects how your food is metabolised. It simply is not a question of calories in, calories out. Adiposity depends upon many factors, including metabolism and set point. Our metabolism is a labile thing. Eating just what you want, when you are hungry for it, and stopping when you are full, is the only way to ensure a stable weight, the weight you are meant to be.
With the government’s declaration of an Obesity Crisis, the food and pharmaceutical industries are revelling in commercial opportunities that await them to scoop up the problem with pills and specialised foods. But, as with the green sandwich, beware. The epidemiological analyses that originally had the US Surgeon General putting obesity-related deaths at around 400,000 have been reanalysed, and we find they’ve dropped to less than 26,000.
Not good by any means, but not enough to drive our own House of Commons committee on obesity and the Department of Health to respond robotically. Reanalysis also shows that the “overweight”, that’s to say people with a body mass index (BMI) of 25 to 29.9, live longer on average than those with a “normal” BMI of between 18.5 and 24.9.
Of course, the facts don’t penetrate, because we’ve bought into a scare and an aesthetic that fat starts the minute you can pinch a bit of flesh. It is a form of local terrorism aimed at our bodies. For most people, the problem is not their fat intake or their actual size, but the torment associated with fat in their minds.
They imagine they are too large, they feel that they must get smaller. They worry about food intake incessantly. An epidemic of eating and body image problems plagues us. Every study shows women and girls of perfectly average and low weights consistently judge themselves to be too large.
We’ve conspired with the idea that obesity is a kind of pandemic-like disease against which we must be ever vigilant. Fat, we’ve come to believe, is a curse on the culture, which we have a moral duty to combat. And Waitrose has inadvertently moved towards aggravating the problem, as it endeavours to sanitise our lunchtime.
Susie Orbach is author of On Eating, Hunger Strike, and Fat is a Feminist Issue
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Food glorious food! Eating is a pleasure but many people today are missing out on this. They worry too much about fats and calories and cholesterol (which rises also when you worry). Our children are also being bombarded with the idea of bad and good food. I believe that you should eat everything – unless it is really harmful to you – but in moderation. The trouble with children (and many adults) is the sedentary life they lead. More PE in schools and more walking to and back from school – where possible of course – will help. I really pity today’s children. Some of them get shunned by other children because they aren’t slim.
And by the way thank you Daphne for Taste. A fantastic magazine with wonderful recipes. Carry on the good work.
Personally, I’ve never understood the world’s obsession with confusing eating with pleasure. Eating is a chore necessary to staying alive which takes up lots of time which could be used for real pleasures such as watching footie or fishing.
Yeah. And sex is a chore necessary to keeping the species alive.
I dunno about you, but that’s not how I see sex. Frankly, I don’t see what sex has to do with food, unless you’re a fetishist…
It’s irony Tim. Good food with good company, and with no great urgency to get up from table, is one of the great pleasures of life. Get it?
And if you want to see what food has to do with sex, replace the word food with sex in the above sentence. Gerrit?
Ahhh! Now we’re talking – good food with good company. I thoroughly agree with you there, but my focus would be on the company, not the food.
Let me explain my philosophy further. This is how I see the necessity to eat: it takes up a lot of time and effort, namely, 1) thinking and choosing what to eat, 2) going to purchase the ingredients, often from different sources, 3) unloading purchases, carting them in to the house, distributing and storing the various ingredients in their locations, 4) assembling ingredients, 5) preparation (trimming, soaking, marinating, whatever), 6) combining and cooking, 7) serving, along with any accompaniments and 8) post-prandial – cleaning and washing up and replacing cutlery, crockery etc in their respective places.
You will notice I don’t mention the eating – that’s the easy and congenial part, I agree, and especially in good company. This is why I love to eat out – you get the good bits and avoid the hard work – but unfortunately I can’t afford to do that more than once or, at a pinch, twice a week, so eating really does involve a lot of work and takes up a lot of time.
I am overweight, and badly so, and on a sort of diet. BUT I am also a self confessed foodie. I love cooking, reading, and eating, in good company. I daresay that a good meal, with a goodbottle of wine, a decent coffee and a cigarette afterwards in one of life’s great pleasures.
If one has no taste for food, then one’s life has very little meaning. You must be a very dull person, Mr Ripard.
John, I like to have sex on the table too, occasionally. I take it that’s your point – ‘good sex with good company, and no urgency to get up from (the) table’. I don’t agree with post-coital lounging on a table (too hard and unyielding for me) but I am in general agreement here.
Mario Debono, I can assure you that the LAST thing I am is dull. I’m well-read, multi-talented, intelligent, multi-lingual and I have a long list of interesting experiences (including sex on tables) which I’ve been through, all of which are more memorable than any of the tens of thousands of meals I’ve had to eat to stay alive. I wouldn’t dare to call you names just because you are, by your own admission, a seriously overweight smoker who’s main interest in life is eating but I’m pretty glad to be a slim non-smoker who can sustain an intelligent conversation on a myriad subjects, including, for what it’s worth, food, so I’d appreciate it if you kept your ill-judged remarks about my personality to yourself. Just because I have a different and extremely light-hearted opinion about food, there’s no need for insults.
Lighten up.
Tim, my point is quite a simple one really. Food and sex are the two basic driving forces of nature, that we share with the rest of our brethren in the animal kingdom. Try to enjoy them both. You complain about and enumerate the hardships involved in getting your food onto the table, and then disposing of the mess. But what about the similar, if not greater, effort involved in the procurement of sex, and the sometimes much messier disposal of a relationship. Footie, religion and the rest of it are our inventions to while away the time in between. And, of course, when you get to the age that even a ton of viagra is ineffective – all you’ll have left is food. Enjoy.
Incidently, I wonder if the non-access of Daphne’s dogs to bitches amounts to animal cruelty?
[Daphne – They’re gay.]
John, let us agree to disagree.
My apologies for the confusion over whom you support – I thought it was you who passed a remark about my going to a Nazareth concert (accompanying Dan MacCafferty’s vocals on ‘This Flight Tonight’ was a much bigger thrill than a plate of pasta, I can assure you all) instead of watching United live. I must have been mistaken.
You also can combine footie and fish:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world-cup-2006/fish-footys-a-big-hit/2006/05/19/1147545489902.html
Thanks for that! Are you the Austrian?
Tim, I am a ‘Piefke’ if you know what I mean. The Austrian equivalent of ‘Fritz’ or ‘Kraut’.
Eine Piefke! I certainly know what you mean (after over three years in Vienna, with an Austrian partner – also called Andrea – how could I not know). I have no such prejudices though, since I’m not Austrian.
The problem started when somebody (probably somewhere in France) equated “fitness” with “being thin”. That’s why you only get football players, swimmers and rugby backs in adverts and calendars. Your typical rugby forward is fit as f***, but would be considered “fat”, so you won’t find them endorsing any products.
The point of my rant is that it’s not just a female problem. Every male is working out and wearing skin-tight shirts to show off his fabled abs these days, but how many of them can haul a 40 kilo bergen up a mountain?
What happens to those fish you catch?
(In my best Robert De Niro/Taxi Driver voice) You talkin’ to me?
Sad to say, I barely go fishing any more. The costs are prohibitive here in Austria. I only go in Malta and not very often. and even then, I rarely catch anything decent. Of the few fish I catch, I throw them all back, except for a couple of tiddlers which I may use as live bait or, if big enough and edible, I’ll give away to someone who likes to eat fish (I can take it or leave it, but I don’t like to cook it).
This is a very interesting article in the New York Times on a recent study that essentially supports the argument in the Guardian:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/business/06drill.html?_r=1
On the whole though, I don’t altogether accept the proposition that the government cannot, and should not, attempt to influence the culture of eating. It is pretty incontrovertible that not only have people become less attentive about the food they shove into their mouths, but also that they are becoming lazier.
The problem with these superficial campaigns that aim purely at some kind of primordial colour-coded interpretation of basic dining choices is that fail to address the underlying issues that enable people to overeat, eat badly and exercise too little. That challenge is far more deep-seated and requires what Pippo Psaila would call a “holistic approach.”
By going for the simplistic warning labels, you target the very same part of the brain that illogically thinks it is acceptable to order fries with your salad.
@ Corinne
He mounts them and displays them on top of his TV.
And then he accuses ME of being a fetishist.
I didn’t do anything of the sort. Now to something far more serious than food – I’m predicting a 2-1 victory tomorrow. You?
I’m a Blackpool supporter myself. But good luck at Old Trafford anyway, which is what I presume you’re referring to.