The World Beyond BetterMost > Women Today
As women get bigger, models get smaller
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Marge_Innavera on June 21, 2012, 09:05:25 am ---Levels of irony detection, however, have fallen below the ability of even the most expensive and status-worthy equipment to cope with.
--- End quote ---
Irony and the appreciation thereof are acquired skills, and they do seem to be in short supply these days. :-\
milomorris:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on June 21, 2012, 10:39:18 am ---I'm not going to bother to google which gender did more of the providing "in our hunter-gatherer past," though I'd be willing to bet the tribes relied on gathered foods about as much as they did hunted ones -- hence the presence of both in the name.
--- End quote ---
Humans need protein and fat in order to survive. Both can be found in vegetables, but without farming there is no reliable vegetable source for these needs. Besides, farming takes time. Killing a large animal can provide protein and fat for many days, and for many people at once rather quickly. The problem with large animals is that they are stronger, faster, and more dangerous than humans. That means that the strongest, fastest, most dangerous humans needed to form cooperative groups in order to kill large animals on a regular basis.
milomorris:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on June 21, 2012, 10:39:18 am ---But who is best able to avoid the health hazards of excess food and obesity? Once again, it's the rich. They have both more money and leisure time -- they can afford the gym memberships, the private trainers, the neighborhoods with running and biking trails, the fresh vegetables, the cooked-from-scratch meals. The poor often can't move about freely in their neighborhoods and have a harder time accessing healthy foods. And compared to the poor of the past, they are far more likely to work in sedentary jobs.
--- End quote ---
I would like to point out that my great grandparents, grandparents, and parents were all poor folks. In their day, it was easy to find fresh meats and vegetables in their neighborhoods at low cost. Cooking a meal from scratch was far less expensive than purchasing prepared meals, or prepared ingredients. A 10lb bag of chicken wings from the local butcher used to cost way less back in the day than a 2lb bag of Stouffer's Honey Barbecue Wings in the frozen food section costs today.
With this in mind, a few years ago, I started to shop the way my grandmother taught me. Meat from the butcher. Fish from the seafood store. Vegetables from the farmers' market. Bread from the bakery. Toilet paper, toothpaste, flour, and sugar from the grocery store. What I discovered is that such habits are not at all easy to follow in urban areas. Corporate grocery stores have long ago put local food merchants out of business in most American cities. Some cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington DC have markets where people bring the fresh goods in from both the land and the sea on a daily or weekly basis.
Now that David and I are living out in the country, its easy to shop at each local provider in turn because they are all located within a 10-mile radius, and we have 2 cars. But what if we were still living in downtown Philadelphia, and had to rely on public transportation? Yes, it would be more difficult to get at fresh food. We would have to plan our weekend activities to make sure we could get to the farmers' markets before they close. We would have to think about what we purchase, how much we purchase, what is in season, what we can carry, etc. But it would indeed be possible for us to eat fresh and healthy if we still lived in Philadelphia. So can the rest of Philadelphia's residents whether they be rich or poor.
When I was a child, nobody I knew went to a gym. We didn't know what a personal trainer was. We didn't have any running or biking trails in da 'hood. Yet somehow, we managed to get out and stay active. Truth be told: I didn't start putting on weight until I got a nice, cushy job at Verizon. When I started in 1994 (it was Bell Atlantic then) I was 29 years old, and weighed 185lbs. When I left in 2003, I weighed 240lbs. I made more than enough money to stay fit via all the modern methods, but I didn't put in the effort. I was healthier when I made $26,000/year than I was when I made $68,000/year.
As far as I'm concerned, economics have absolutely nothing to do with staying healthy for most Americans. I think it s a matter of making the right choices, and being willing to get out there and do what you can do at your income level.
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: milomorris on June 21, 2012, 01:22:56 pm ---Humans need protein and fat in order to survive. Both can be found in vegetables, but without farming there is no reliable vegetable source for these needs. Besides, farming takes time. Killing a large animal can provide protein and fat for many days, and for many people at once rather quickly. The problem with large animals is that they are stronger, faster, and more dangerous than humans. That means that the strongest, fastest, most dangerous humans needed to form cooperative groups in order to kill large animals on a regular basis.
--- End quote ---
The amount of protein, let alone fat, in most vegetables is minimal (with the exception of the protein in legumes and the fat in avocados). Vegetables are good for you, obviously, but are not sufficient for a healthy diet. Animal flesh contains lots of protein and fat, and the ability of one's body to turn those calories into stored fat is one factor in Darwin's "fittest" definition -- fat was, throughout most of history, a survival mechanism.
As for large animals, yes, they would provide a fat and protein windfall. But our prehistoric ancestors ate a lot more rabbit and squirrel and maybe even smaller rodents than they did mastadon or saber-tooth tiger.
Farming, of course, came many many millinnea later. Hunter-gather societies, by definition, did little to no farming. They hunted and gathered.
In any case, I don't know what this has to do with the point I was making.
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: milomorris on June 21, 2012, 02:07:28 pm ---I would like to point out that my great grandparents, grandparents, and parents were all poor folks. In their day, it was easy to find fresh meats and vegetables in their neighborhoods at low cost. Cooking a meal from scratch was far less expensive than purchasing prepared meals, or prepared ingredients. A 10lb bag of chicken wings from the local butcher used to cost way less back in the day than a 2lb bag of Stouffer's Honey Barbecue Wings in the frozen food section costs today.
With this in mind, a few years ago, I started to shop the way my grandmother taught me. Meat from the butcher. Fish from the seafood store. Vegetables from the farmers' market. Bread from the bakery. Toilet paper, toothpaste, flour, and sugar from the grocery store. What I discovered is that such habits are not at all easy to follow in urban areas. Corporate grocery stores have long ago put local food merchants out of business in most American cities. Some cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington DC have markets where people bring the fresh goods in from both the land and the sea on a daily or weekly basis.
Now that David and I are living out in the country, its easy to shop at each local provider in turn because they are all located within a 10-mile radius, and we have 2 cars. But what if we were still living in downtown Philadelphia, and had to rely on public transportation? Yes, it would be more difficult to get at fresh food. We would have to plan our weekend activities to make sure we could get to the farmers' markets before they close. We would have to think about what we purchase, how much we purchase, what is in season, what we can carry, etc. But it would indeed be possible for us to eat fresh and healthy if we still lived in Philadelphia. So can the rest of Philadelphia's residents whether they be rich or poor.
When I was a child, nobody I knew went to a gym. We didn't know what a personal trainer was. We didn't have any running or biking trails in da 'hood. Yet somehow, we managed to get out and stay active. Truth be told: I didn't start putting on weight until I got a nice, cushy job at Verizon. When I started in 1994 (it was Bell Atlantic then) I was 29 years old, and weighed 185lbs. When I left in 2003, I weighed 240lbs. I made more than enough money to stay fit via all the modern methods, but I didn't put in the effort. I was healthier when I made $26,000/year than I was when I made $68,000/year.
As far as I'm concerned, economics have absolutely nothing to do with staying healthy for most Americans. I think it s a matter of making the right choices, and being willing to get out there and do what you can do at your income level.
--- End quote ---
Yes, these are among the factors I was referring to when I mentioned "a bunch of other trends in postwar society." Those trends affect not just our eating habits but the content of our foods, the size of our portions, our levels of activity, etc. It's very complex.
I lived in Manhattan for a year, no car. Shopping and carrying home the groceries was a hassle, but I was only shopping for two. I live in a city now, and have a car. With two teenage boys, I'm at the grocery store twice a week, filling my trunk with food -- way more than I could carry on a subway or bus. I'm not sure what I would do if I had to rely on public transportation to feed a whole family. Especially after a long day at work, the McDonald's near the bus stop would start to look pretty appealing.
In your great-grandparents', grandparents' and maybe even parents' day, da 'hood was much more filled with middle-class merchants. After the 1960s, many of those folks started moving into middle-class neighborhoods from which they'd previously been barred. Which left a hole in the supply of neighborhood butchers, greengrocers, fish mongers, etc.
Also, you realize that the difference between poor people's nutrition and rich people's nutrition has to do partly with culture and education, right? As someone who has read and written about food all my life, I can tell you how to make inexpensive meals out of legumes and cheaper vegetables and cheaper cuts of meat. But how many poor people sit around reading Cooking Light? And Jennifer Hudson, a spokeswoman for Weight Watchers, has said that growing up poor (before she got famous and lost weight), she never "knew" she was heavy because nobody would have ever considered her such. Yes, of course, a resourceful and determined and knowledgable ghetto-dweller can certainly find ways to cook healthy and exercise; sociologically speaking, that's just less likely to happen.
I'm not saying you can't get healthy if you're poor, or that you automatically do get healthy if you're rich. Rich and poor are subject to some of the same cultural influences, as well as human nature.
What I'm saying is that economic level makes a difference in the likelihood of your being overweight, and that has been a cultural transformation over the past 50 years or so. If you don't think so, I'm sorry, but you're just incorrect.
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