January 8, 2010

• Want to lose weight? Watch people starving.

  It's working for me so far; for lunch
  today I am eating such things as mashed lentils and fluorinated tap
  water with a feeling of privilege. Usually a chore, the salad bar now
  feels like an honor. The
  Pepsi I would normally enjoy with lunch now feels criminal.

  Consider
  my consciousness raised.

  I
  think I'll call this the “perspective diet”. It is the diet one
  begins to eat when one finally internalizes the knowledge that
  millions of people around the world are facing starvation. It is the
  diet that happens when you realize that the food you had been taking
  for granted is in fact a survival need that many people have trouble
  meeting. It is the diet one eats when food becomes once again
  biological instead of
  recreational.

  What
  brought this on? Well, I'm taking a course called “Global Justice:
  Social Theory and Practice” (currently listed as RCSSCI 360-005,
  though I'm told next year it will be either PHIL 224 or ECON 224);
  nothing like reading Peter Singer's “Famine, Affluence, and
  Morality” and watching Eduardo Coutinho's Boca de Lixo to
  change your perspective on economics, politics, and, yes, food.

  What
  is Boca de Lixo? It's
  a little hard to find online, since it shares its name with many
  other things, probably as an intentional remark on those other
  things. It is a documentary telling the story of garbage-scavengers
  in Brazil, people who literally work 16-hour days digging through
  garbage searching for scraps of metal to sell and scraps of food to
  feed their children. A whole subculture has grown up around these
  garbage scavengers; people live and marry and die never leaving the
  community of garbage-scavenging. Others have begun living this way
  after losing their jobs in other industries, like fishing and auto
  repair.

  For
  me, the first change has been to realize just how much I take food
  for granted, and how much of my slightly-overweight condition is due
  to this fact. Living middle class in the world's richest nation, I
  simply presume that there will always be fresh food and clean water.
  My nutrition is not in jeopardy, so I am free to choose foods that
  will maximize my pleasure—usually fattening corn syrup products. I
  don't actually have to work to survive, so I can get by with minimal
  exercise. I have access to high-tech medical care, so the risk of
  diabetes I'm incurring doesn't frighten me.

  Meanwhile,
  my own frustrations about swine flu and the University of Michigan
  bureaucracy suddenly seem... beside the point.

  • 12:57 pm
  • 6 Comments