On fake meat and hexane

If you read Food Babies, you probably also read other food-related things, or the news. And boy oh boy has the whole "veggie burgers are filled with toxic chemicals" story been all over the news in the last couple of days. It's great ammo for meat eaters to tell vegetarians to get off their health-conscious high horses. But I don't think everyone should be so quick to panic, and I especially don't think it should be reason to call it quits with soy all together. Yes, fake meat isn't the best for you food in the world (it is after all still a processed food with lots of preservatives, and processed foods are a little removed from being real food even when they aren’t pretending to be a “beef” burger or a “pork” hot dog.

First, the soy that’s in these veggie burgers is isolated soy, which processed in a different way than the soy that’s in soy milk or tofu which is whole soy. Whole soy, btw can actually be very good for you. Also, it’s unclear if hexane cooks off, or if the amounts in the products are large enough to be harmful or not.

I think there needs to be a whole mess of change and regulations in how our food (of the meat and non-meat variety) is produced. But I don’t know that raising the flag of panic around fake meat is necessarily a good way to go. For a lot of people just starting out with vegetarianism, or life-long meat eaters who need to cut their cholesterol after a heart attack or other life-threatening illness (like many in my family), fake meat can be an easy and tasty alternative. Not that we should tolerate anything hazardous in our food, but I’ll still take trace amounts of hexane over life-threatening amounts of e coli any day.

Mother Jones on the topic

Gothamist on the topic

(cross posted on Food Babies)

Food for Change

It’s a topic I’ve been a-blogging about frequently in the last couple of months, so it’s only appropriate that I follow up with these recent more hopeful stories on the topic of making healthy food more available in food desert areas of the city and country.

Yesterday New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand proposed $1 billion in loans and grants Monday to help build 2,100 grocery stores in areas around the nation that lack access to fresh food.

It’s estimated that the proposal would help about four million New Yorkers who live in areas like the Bronx and East New York, where grocery stores are few and far between by providing the funding for more than 350 stores statewide. This proposal has the potential to solve the problem of access to healthy food in low-income areas and that’s the first step, but as I’ve said before, the second (and perhaps most important) step is making those healthy foods affordable—more affordable than junk food. That’s a more complex step that involves our entire industrial food system, but no measure of availability or education/awareness will have complete results until people can afford to buy the food.

There’s been some good news (not necessarily NEW news, but more new-to-me news) in the education/awareness area of healthy eating and cooking. On the heels of the after school cooking program I volunteered at last week, I found this story about a professional chef teaching kids about healthy cooking. I know firsthand how engrained poor eating habits can be in kids, how reluctant they can be to try foods they think are “weird” or “gross” but I’ve also seen how much (boy and girls, small kids, teens) really get into cooking, creating, and learning about new foods. It’s not going to fix the problem or change the world, but it does give you hope.

The Obesity –Hunger Paradox

Along the same lines as my recent posts about poverty and obesity, is this recent New York Times article, The Obesity-Hunger Paradox which points to poverty riddled South Bronx (the most overweight and least healthy part of New York City) as one of the areas in America with the biggest hunger problems. Hunger defined not by starving, but by the lack of access to nutritious food, and an inability to afford the basics, being referred to as “food insecure.”

Families with not enough money to get an actual meal, and no grocery stores to buy real food at anyways, so they fill up on calorie-filled food from bodegas (check out this video)

In fact a recent survey by the Food Research and Action Center, found that nearly 37 percent of residents in the South Bronx, said they lacked money to buy food at some point in the past 12 months. The article points to some incentives that sound like really good ideas (encouraging farmers’ market patronage through food stamps incentives and attempts to lure grocery stores to poor areas with tax breaks.

The figures are showing that the programs aren’t working, most likely because they aren’t wide spread enough, and the healthy options still aren’t cheap enough. Even if it’s the difference of a dollar between a filling and tasty healthy meal that you have to prepare and a filling and tasty junk food meal that you don’t have to cook, the choice is obvious when you’re poor, stressed, and busy. These programs are good steps but their clearly not enough, the structure of the neighborhood, the structure of minimum wage, and the structure of the industrial food system all need to be changed.

Fizzing Out

Related to my previous posts on the misguided fight against fatties, The New York soda tax has “fallen flat” and “fizzled out” some may even say it’s “evaporated.” Aside from being ripe for puns for headlines, the soda tax was another government idea that seems to have been thought up by a 7^th grader (an oversimplified, not thoroughly thought through solution to a complex problem). Sure the money from adding a penny onto the price of every ounce of soda would get a lot of money and that money could be used for health care.

But therein lies the first major failing of the idea: you are taxing soda to discourage people from drinking it because it’s bad for them, but you’re making it low enough that you can still count on people drinking it. Adding a one cent tax to soda doesn’t make healthier options any more affordable, it doesn’t even close the gap in any noticeable way between a 99 cent two litter of soda and a $5 bottle of organic juice.

The other major problem with these and other similar “sin taxes” is the people that you are taking the money from are usually those who can least afford to pay it. Smoking, drinking and eating crappy food are vices enjoyed by all classes but are about the only luxuries the poor can afford. Similarly, if you are admitting that a product is bad for it’s consumers, simply charging them more money to kill themselves seems more like a way to capitalize on it rather than help fix the problem. In short, the argument just falls flat.

Soda Tax Plan Evaporates

Three Things I'm Obsessed with Right Now

It's time for the next installment of three things I'm Obsessed with Right Now:

1. Hawai'i: I just got back from an amazing trip to Maui (tsunami scare notwithstanding). The sun, the fresh fruit, the tasty drinks, the flowers and beauty of nature, the Aloha spirit. I've only been back for a day and I already want to go back. New York has never seemed so gloomy and depressing.

2. Freaks and Geeks: Now that I'm home at lunch time everyday I let myself take a more leisurely lunch once in a while, and I've been watching the series regularly and I had forgotten just how well done it was. By far the best thing Aptow has ever done.

3. Mac and Cheese: This has been my go-to winter comfort food for the past couple of months, and I've been trying it in many different versions at various restruants all over NYC. The best of which is at Cafe Moto in Brooklyn (it has potatoes in it!)

BMI BS

In light of my recent post on fat people and America’s misguided attempts to “fix” the obesity problem, I’ve been thinking about one of the measures of being overweight, the Body Mass Index. It’s one of the most widely used and quickest/easiest ways to determine where someone falls on the fat to skinny spectrum. BMI is measured by calculating your weight against your height. The problem is, that’s all it measures- it is a very imperfect system that’s too widely used. In fact, Michelle Obama, in talking about her childhood obesity plan, cited that her family doctor cautioned that her daughter was overweight based on her BMI.

To give you a sense, I am 5ft 1in tall and weigh 110 pounds, my BMI is 20.8 (right in the middle of “normal” weight), but I could be as skinny as 98 pounds and still be considered “normal” (not underweight). If I was tipping the scales at a whopping 133, however I’d be considered “overweight.” Many take offence to the fact that there are two classifications for fat and only one for skinny. I take offence to the following:

BMI doesn’t take into account body fat or muscle. It also doesn’t take into account diet and exercise, or family history. There are plenty of unhealthy sedentary skinny people who eat nothing but junk food. While conversely there are plenty of healthy people with a predisposition to be larger than “normal” who are active and eat well.

Which is why it’s surprising the a company like Whole Foods would use employees BMI (along with better measurements such as low blood pressure, and not smoking) as a measure of healthiness and subsequently size of employee discount. The idea program of course is to encourage the employees to be healthier thus costing the company less in insurance costs. But shouldn’t a Giant Health Food Store give larger discounts to those that are the least healthy? Making those $10 strawberries affordable?

For a great illustration on just how crazy pants BMI classification is, check out Kate Harding’s BMI slideshow of women of various sizes with their BMI classification next to their pictures.

No Fatties

Every body hates a fatty. Because really, why can’t they control themselves? They’re so lazy. Same reason why every one hates a poor person, it’s their fault, why won’t they just work harder?

Disparaging the fat and the poor (groups that overlap in a lot of cases) are some of the few bigoted views that aren’t taboo. Because after all, you can never be too thin or too rich and if you are thin and rich then it’s your moral obligation to point out the failings of those who aren’t. As highlighted in this pun-filled LA Times Health article, “Slim society's tolerance is wearing thin”, it’s a…wait for it…growing issue. Hi-Yo!

The idea behind the article is thin people are sick of footing the health care bill for fatties who just sit around watching TV all day and soothe themselves with food. This ludicrous notion exists in a world where:

1. We have national health care and our taxes are contributing to other people’s medical bills. (the article quotes that Obesity-related costs are expected to account for 21% of healthcare spending, but is this the obese individuals’ spending? Is it costs that uninsured individuals burden tax payers with?)

2. All people who are overweight are sedentary and/or eat too much or use food as a comfort/coping method

3. All people who are overweight are unhealthy.

These pissed off skinny people’s anger is misdirected, we market the hell out of junk food, remove consumers completely from the process of how food is produced, where it’s from or what’s in season, we make fast food that’s loaded with chemicals, fat, sugar and calories jumbo sized and one dollar and put it on every corner, especially in the poorest neighborhoods while fruits, vegetables and organics are sanctioned to farmers markets and posh grocery stores. If someone on a limited income can even find healthy food and the time to cook it, chances are they can’t afford it, because a bag of carrots costs at least twice as much as a fast food cheeseburger.

This is done of course because of the huge corporate and government interests in factory farming and commodity crops like corn and soybeans (which are then engineered into delicious things like high fructuous corn syrup)

Put more succinctly, “All those snack food calories are the ones that come from the commodity crops, from the wheat, from the corn, and from the soybeans. By making those calories really cheap, it’s one of the reasons that the biggest predictor of obesity is income level.”—Michael Pollan, author of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto”

The government is bought by the corporations that manufacture food to make us fat and sick and then the government tells us to stop being fat and won’t give us health care when we get sick. Our awful yet or so yummy diet of genetically modified food is the major reason that 1 in 3 Americans born after 2000 will contract early onset diabetes. And the food deserts in areas like the Bronx in NYC are a main contributing factor to the fact that among minorities, the rate will be 1 in 2.

Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity is another good idea that I’m skeptical will achieve its intended goal. It’s important to encourage and educate about finding making healthier choices, being more active, controlling your portions, etc. But If you don’t have access to and can’t afford health foods, don’t have safe places to exercise, and have to rely on thing like free school lunches and dollar menus that are laden with calories, salt and fat, “awareness” does you little to no good.

I’m the last person that would ever take personal responsibly out of the equation. Exercising, and making informed choices about the food you eat and how much of it you eat and not smoking or drinking too much, etc. are all things that individuals are responsible and no one should have to subsidize someone else’s poor decisions. But there’s a bigger picture and a bigger problem than people’s apathy and appetites.

Life Expectancy, Poverty, and the (not so) surprising results

Last Summer New York magazine ran a “look-how-great-we-are” story about how the average life expectancy of New Yorkers had for the first time in history surpassed that of the rest of the country. You see, as the article took exhaustive pains and several thousand words to point out, there used to be crime here but now it’s totally safe.

Plus we walk, unlike all those stupid fat lazy bastards in the rest of the country. And we walk fast, unlike all those stupid fat lazy bastards the come here on vacation (boy, they sure are annoying and we sure are cooler than them aren’t we?). Plus, we go to really fancy doctors that are totally the best in the world, and we shop at expensive organic food stores. All of us. Well…..expect the Bronx, which oddly enough seems to be the only exception to the rule.

After devoting 10,000 words to patting it’s target demographic on the back (and yes that includes me to some extent), they finally got to the point in the last few measly paragraphs. It turns out that there was one part of New York City that bucked the trend, and (shock, gasp!) it was the area with little to no gentrification. They could have saved a lot of space and printed only this part of the article:

“Of course, the built environment wouldn’t have done New Yorkers’ health any good if it hadn’t been catalyzed by the city’s economic bonanza. Gentrification cut both ways. A more cynical—and possibly clear-eyed—explanation for New York’s life-expectancy gains is that gentrification drove many of the city’s poorest people out of town.”

Exactly. The city got healthier because it became filled with rich people who can afford fancy doctors and organic food, the problem didn’t get fixed. It just got pushed out.

And the story of the Bronx, the one borough where the life expectancy actually declined in the last 20 years, is in fact the none-to-shocking story of all of poor America. When you’re poor, you often can’t eat well, even if you wanted to, all the cheap food is the worst for you.

This week the New York Times took notice too, recounting a recent study the revealed that from 1983-1999 life expectancy (for women) in the US did not improve, and in fact, declined in hundreds of places in the country (for men life expectancy rose, but with a difference of 5.4 years between poor and wealthy). The lines along which life expectancy declined or stagnated? One guess: poverty. The shaded areas on the map double as some of the poorest in the country.

The links between poverty, health, and life expectancy are so painfully obvious (from prevention and management of chronic and fatal disease, unhealthy diet, smoking, drugs, alcohol (which are far from problems of poor, but are treated and dealt with differently), and of course stress).

The fact that we need these studies to bring the gaping income inequality to a discussion, or the fact that the more “advanced” we get the worst the situation gets is disgraceful. It’s so terribly embarrassing as a country, to be so rich, to pose as some sort of world leader, and at the same time be so woefully, cluelessly indifferent.

AwesomeK’s Big Adventure

I grew up in a very small town, a town that outsiders call “quaint,” and locals think would be great if only we could get a TGIF. Up to the age of 18 the most exotic location I ever traveled to was Niagara Falls. But in my post-adolescence, I made it a mission of sorts to do a lot of traveling: solo road trips and many other random U.S. destinations, not to mention a plethora of European locations during and since my time living abroad. Yet since I’ve been living in “The World’s Capital” all of my travels have been either to visit a friend or loved one, or an exploration of a new place with a friend or loved one.

So it’s long over due then, that I, AwesomeK, step out into the world on my own again. For the next nine days I will be rainforest-exploring, hot spring lounging, volcano-hiking, and otherwise adventuring in Costa Rica. I hope to come back without too many mosquito and monkey bites, having mastered how to say, “I’m a vegetarian” in Spanish, and who knows, maybe a little changed, or at least tan.

Until then, AwesomeK has left the building…

New York's Sexiest Vegetarian

Let me just preface this with saying I think this whole thing is a bit silly.

First of all how does the fact that you don't eat meat make you more sexy? But most importantly why are only celebrities allowed to compete? What they don't get enough attention?

That said, I think I should totally win "New York's Sexiest Vegetarian" for the following reasons:
1) I am a lot less annoying than most other vegetarians and celebrities
2) I live in New York
3) I have been a vegetarian for 14 years and have never had a piece of KFC on the sly
4) As evidenced by the photo above I am totally sexy

Also, so much for being the capital of the world, turns out New York is only the number four best city to live in as a vegetarian in 'merica (damn you West Coast hippies!)

UPDATE: So PETA has named the Sexiest Vegetarian for 2007: Carrie Underwood (I don't know I think she won 'merican idol or something), all I can say is: LAME!