In the New Yorker...

[Front-Ranger]

I'm in between books so I'm going back to read articles I've missed. I reread "Still Processing" in the January 13th issue. It was a bit of a letdown to wade through all the research on ultra-processed foods to find that the studies showed people who ate an ultra-processed diet gained weight and had health problems, but the ones who ate a mildly processed or not processed didn't. These results don't do enough to explain the crisis of obesity in the US, Brazil, and some other countries. Ultra-processed foods are available in all of the developed countries and, because of exports of GMO and commodity foods, many of the less developed countries.

There were clues scattered through the article. A chef at the N.I.H. Clinical Center, said, "Preparing a days' worth of ultra-processed foods might take an hour. Unprocessed meals could take three or four times that long." I've found this to be true in my own life. Sometimes I'll be so hungry that I'll opt for the meal that takes the shortest time to prepare, whether it be a frozen dinner or a ramen bowl. But lately what I've done is to prepare a healthy snack so I'll have enough energy to prepare a proper meal to eat a short time later, such as a salad or a soup made from scratch.

Another clue is that we can only eat foods that are available to us, and when you're on your lunch break at Subway, you are going to grab a bag of chips and a cookie to add to your doughy sub sandwich. Plus it's hard to find a drink that is not sugary. Few people have time to prepare a lunch from home or go to a restaurant that serves healthy food.

Late in the article, the author, Dhruv Khullar, quoted an ironically named woman, Marion Nestle, who started the first food-studies program at NYU, comparing a whole-fat yogurt with a low-fat one and found the former to be less likely to lead to overeating. The "industrial" ingredients in processed foods are suspect, she pointed out.

So, lack of time, calorie density, and industrial ingredients, these are the culprits. I'm not sure we've gotten to the bottom of this and how it can be fixed. Overhauling the school lunch system is key, I think. It's run by the Dept. of Agriculture and is thought of as a dumping ground for surplus commodities. I hope I'm not sounding too much like RFK, Jr. He has some outright dangerous ideas, IMO, but there are some grains of truth behind some of them.

[Jeff Wrangler]

This would have been nice to see.

There was a full-page ad in the March 3 issue (I'm that far behind    ) for a film festival that was held Feb. 21--March 6 of movies based on New Yorker stories. There were four photos indicating four of the films to be shown: One, of course, is Ennis and Jack in the Dozy Embrace, one is Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis, and one is Julianne Moore in The Hours. The fourth photo I don't know, except it looks like Daniel Day-Lewis in the picture.

The text of the ad indicates that "many more" films would be shown.

[Front-Ranger]

I'm not sure we've gotten to the bottom of this and how it can be fixed. Overhauling the school lunch system is key, I think. It's run by the Dept. of Agriculture and is thought of as a dumping ground for surplus commodities. I hope I'm not sounding too much like RFK, Jr. He has some outright dangerous ideas, IMO, but there are some grains of truth behind some of them.

So, today I wake to find that the USDA has cut a $1 billion program to provide schoolchildren with fresh, local foods. It's back to the commodities, and US public schools are now in the same boat as beleaguered famine-plagued nations. Talk about ultra-processed, these foods are imperishable in the worst sense. About 40% of the calories are from corn-based products and another 40% from soy-based products. 

I also read in a recent issue (although I can't find it at the moment) about the decrease and eventual decline of the population. I believe that the world's population is at or below the replacement rate (2.1%) for all but two of the countries that report such things. Again, it was an overly long article that painstakingly went through all the reasons why women aren't having babies to arrive at the fact that most people are so busy trying to build a good foundation for their families, and it takes so long, that they literally run out of time and age out of the opportunity to be parents.

So, again, the issue is time and the lack thereof. In the former agrarian societies of old, people lived according to the seasons, the lunar cycles, the inner clocks. When the industrial revolution came about, people were called into cities to work according to calendars, clocks, alarms. Reengineering came along in the 1980s--remember that? Then, people were required to work in teams for greater productivity, and corporate loyalty and seniority were thrown out. People were just "human resources" to be used up and replaced with a younger, cheaper model.

Now, there's a new chapter. People are working at top productivity, but by eliminating the time spent feeding themselves, a little bit more can be squeezed out. Dining is turned into refueling. And what of the time- and labor-intensive practice of raising children? Let's do away with it, and replace the labor force with robots and poor children of the marginalized women who can't have abortions anymore. A guaranteed source of cheap labor!

[Jeff Wrangler]

So, again, the issue is time and the lack thereof. In the former agrarian societies of old, people lived according to the seasons, the lunar cycles, the inner clocks. When the industrial revolution came about, people were called into cities to work according to calendars, clocks, alarms.

This is what I think of when I hear the arguments for ending DST. We live by clocks now, not by the sun; do people want the sun to come up at 4:30 a.m. (summer solstice)? Do they want it to come up at 8:30 a.m. (winter solstice)?

But anyway. ... So overpopulation/having too many babies is no longer a problem? Instead not enough population/not having enough babies is a problem? 

[serious crayons]

So overpopulation/having too many babies is no longer a problem? Instead not enough population/not having enough babies is a problem? 

Yes and no. I got a freelance assignment to research this a few years ago. Lee is right that 2.1 per woman is the replacement rate and most industrialized countries (Europe, Japan, China) have fallen far below that. Within some years, the population of European countries is expected to drop by about a third -- it's like the Black Plague. The United States, however, was relatively close to the replacement rate -- but that was largely thanks to immigrants, who we're now in the process of kicking out.

Overall for the health of the planet and so on, it's probably a good thing. But for the economies of those countries it's disastrous because they'll have an insufficient workforce supporting an aging population. Ironically, underdeveloped countries still have healthy birthrates, so as one thing I read pointed out, the formerly colonized will to some extent be economically healthier than their former colonizers.

[Jeff Wrangler]

Overall for the health of the planet and so on, it's probably a good thing. But for the economies of those countries it's disastrous because they'll have an insufficient workforce supporting an aging population. Ironically, underdeveloped countries still have healthy birthrates, so as one thing I read pointed out, the formerly colonized will to some extent be economically healthier than their former colonizers.

This is what we hear with regard to Social Security.

[serious crayons]

This is what we hear with regard to Social Security.

Exactly. Except that in that case, up until now, I've thought of its possible consequence of losing Social Security as a distant problem that might eventually affect me near the end of my life. Now I think of it as something that could happen next week.

[Jeff Wrangler]

Exactly. Except that in that case, up until now, I've thought of its possible consequence of losing Social Security as a distant problem that might eventually affect me near the end of my life. Now I think of it as something that could happen next week.

Right.

And if it doesn't affect us, it could very well affect your sons.

I just saw a headline that the Social Security Administration is going to begin requiring in-person interviews to very the identity of new and current recipients.

[Front-Ranger]

The article is called "The End of Children" and is in the March 3 issue, the one with the firing of Hamilton, Franklin, and Jefferson on the cover.

There's hardly a better way to get people riled up than to suggest you're going to "take away" their Social Security, even for people who haven't started collecting it yet. It has been called a "Ponzi scheme" and that has some truth in it, even though it wasn't designed to be as such. SS was originally a way to create a fund that would serve as peoples' retirement monies, with their contributions augmented by matching funds from their employers. But Congress couldn't keep its hands off this fund; they ended up using it to fund many other things. And now, the money that workers and employers have paid in are gone, and instead the feds depend on current, young workers to fund SS. But there are fewer of them and more retirees so the funds decrease exponentially.

What is needed is to have these funds that young workers pay in invested in economic development, innovation, building new businesses, scientific research, emerging technologies, etc. The money needs to be wisely invested, not just dispersed to a growing pool of oldsters. So, where will we get the funds to make up for what was lost when the SS money was siphoned off? That's easy...just tax the rich at the same rate as we tax the poor. I'm not saying that the rich should be penalized the way they do in Europe...just tax them at the same rate as everybody else. That will bring in all the funds needed to level the playing field, and more.

[Jeff Wrangler]

I slugged my way through the entire demographics article because I wanted to see if the author even mentioned something that occurred to me early on with that emphasis on South Korea. He didn't.

It occurred to me that if North Korea wants to conquer the South, all it has to do is bide its time, since South Korea can't even replace its population.

Of course we don't know what's going on in North Korea, but I bet the government there is urging people to have more children (even if the government can't always feed its own population).