Joy of crisps and Don't Eat This Book
Jun. 21st, 2005 10:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thebratqueenCrisps! I have crisps! Chicken and Thyme flavored crisps that ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
flaming_muse sent to me because she wuuuuuuuuubs me! They are my very own and I shall love them and hug them and eat them to little bitty pieces! Possibly while doing a happy dance!
On a related note, I bought and finished Morgan Spurlock's Don't Eat This Book. OMG. Short version: you MUST read this book. Long version?
Basically DETB is a more in-depth discussion of Super Size Me. He gets into more details about some things in SSM that he couldn't touch on in the movie due to time or what have you, plus he expands the topic of conversation a bit more.
I know before I saw SSM I was one of the ones who was right there with everybody else going "McDonald's isn't healthy for you? What's next? Water's wet?" but if you've seen the film - and if you haven't you should - you see that it's so much more than that. SSM on its own makes a lot of good points about food in America, and how we approach it, and how we really don't have the right attitudes about it.
DETB takes that point and goes further with it. It's not just about McDonald's. McDonald's is just there as a place to start. It's a part of the whole, and that whole is pretty nuts.
In the beginning of the book Morgan talks about tobacco companies. He talks about how sure, now we can say that anybody who smokes knows it's not good for them and is deciding to do it anyway, but in the past that wasn't true. Everybody smoked in part because they didn't know that the cigarettes were as bad for them as they were, and also because they didn't know things like cigarette companies were making the cigarettes more addictive. We didn't find out stuff like that until the lawsuits.
By extension Morgan's saying he thinks that the fast food industry today is the cigarette companies of yesterday. Sure we might have a vague idea that fast food, much like cigarettes, isn't loaded with vitamin C (as Denis Leary puts it) but the depth to which it really isn't healthy for us is another level entirely.
As for example, apparently something like 70% of people who eat at McDonald's are so-called "Heavy Users" who eat there once a week. Now first off health-wise a nutritionist will tell you that at best you should eat fast food once a month - and that's if you can find a nutritionist who will agree that it's okay to eat fast food at all. So already 70% of people who eat at McDonald's are eating 4 times as much McDonald's as they should.
On top of that, how likely is it that these are people who are making healthy choices during the rest of the week? Yeah, I'm sure there are people who consider this a once a week treat for themselves, but is it really likely that everybody in that 70% is eating tofu and brown rice six days out of the week and still thinks it's okay to eat a Big Mac on the 7th?
And this is where Morgan expands his topic to cover the idea of eating habits in America as a whole. A place where McDonald's (and Burger King, and KFC, and...) is as popular as it is is not a place that has the right idea about what food is supposed to be doing for us.
Every so often I think to myself about how we always look back on the past and get a chuckle out of how dumb people were back then. You know, stuff like "They thought it was okay to give cocaine to everyone?" or "They thought they could cure every single illness by using leeches?" In other words, things that were so common sense back then which are utterly ridiculous now.
I think about that, and then I think about how one hundred years from now people are going to look at us and think the same thing about something we thought was common sense. Reading DETB I get the suspicion that people are going to look back on us and marvel at how horrible our eating habits were.
Which is not to say that eating burgers and fries is evil (in the book Mogan says he doesn't think so either - even though his financee is vegan he himself loves a good burger with fries) and it's certainly not to say that if there is an obesity epidemic in this country it's because every single overweight person is lazy, or has no willpower, or eats nothing but Big Macs and five Sundaes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Nor am I saying that everyone on earth should be a size zero, esp since I can stand here as living proof that you can have an obsese BMI and yet still be perfectly healthy on all other scores.
But it is to say that I can see Morgan's point with the cigarettes. If you want to start smoking now it's because you know smoking is bad for you and you've decided to do it anyway. If you want to eat at McDonald's (or Burger King, or buy some Ring Dings from the supermarket, or...) it should be because you know what you're doing and you want to do it anyway. Heck, since it's food unlike with cigarettes if you're informed enough you can eat it and not suffer the health consequences b/c you can adjust your diet accordingly. You could decide to be the person who does tofu and brown rice for six days and then eats the Big Mac.
The point Morgan makes in his book is that not enough of us are able to make the right decisions about how and what we should eat. Some of this is due to places like McDonald's deliberately misinforming people (such as when they lied about using beef fat on their french fries), some of it is due to economics and culture (such as how poor neighborhoods don't get many, if any, big grocery stores stocked with fresh produce - and moreover fresh produce is more expensive than premade crap to begin with), and some is due to our own problems (how many people know how to cook? how many people have time to cook even if they know how?)
It's not a perfect book. There were a couple of places where Morgan stated a fact where I would've liked a clear cite on it (admittedly there's a big endnotes section, I just didn't make a note of what bits I wanted the references on, so for all I know he does have cites, and good ones), there were some places where the conclusions seemed to be a little "post hoc ergo propter hoc" (which I say only because West Wing taught me what it means), and there's a running gag that gets tiresome after a while.
But conversely Morgan doesn't claim that it's the be-all and end-all. Instead his goal is to simply put the topic out there and hopefully get the reader thinking about it. It's not that he's presenting the entire case for what eating is like in America - I don't think any one person could do that - but he focuses on a facet of it and presents information about that facet that makes you look at it in a new light.
So to that end I think he did fabulously.
flaming_muse sent to me because she wuuuuuuuuubs me! They are my very own and I shall love them and hug them and eat them to little bitty pieces! Possibly while doing a happy dance!On a related note, I bought and finished Morgan Spurlock's Don't Eat This Book. OMG. Short version: you MUST read this book. Long version?
Basically DETB is a more in-depth discussion of Super Size Me. He gets into more details about some things in SSM that he couldn't touch on in the movie due to time or what have you, plus he expands the topic of conversation a bit more.
I know before I saw SSM I was one of the ones who was right there with everybody else going "McDonald's isn't healthy for you? What's next? Water's wet?" but if you've seen the film - and if you haven't you should - you see that it's so much more than that. SSM on its own makes a lot of good points about food in America, and how we approach it, and how we really don't have the right attitudes about it.
DETB takes that point and goes further with it. It's not just about McDonald's. McDonald's is just there as a place to start. It's a part of the whole, and that whole is pretty nuts.
In the beginning of the book Morgan talks about tobacco companies. He talks about how sure, now we can say that anybody who smokes knows it's not good for them and is deciding to do it anyway, but in the past that wasn't true. Everybody smoked in part because they didn't know that the cigarettes were as bad for them as they were, and also because they didn't know things like cigarette companies were making the cigarettes more addictive. We didn't find out stuff like that until the lawsuits.
By extension Morgan's saying he thinks that the fast food industry today is the cigarette companies of yesterday. Sure we might have a vague idea that fast food, much like cigarettes, isn't loaded with vitamin C (as Denis Leary puts it) but the depth to which it really isn't healthy for us is another level entirely.
As for example, apparently something like 70% of people who eat at McDonald's are so-called "Heavy Users" who eat there once a week. Now first off health-wise a nutritionist will tell you that at best you should eat fast food once a month - and that's if you can find a nutritionist who will agree that it's okay to eat fast food at all. So already 70% of people who eat at McDonald's are eating 4 times as much McDonald's as they should.
On top of that, how likely is it that these are people who are making healthy choices during the rest of the week? Yeah, I'm sure there are people who consider this a once a week treat for themselves, but is it really likely that everybody in that 70% is eating tofu and brown rice six days out of the week and still thinks it's okay to eat a Big Mac on the 7th?
And this is where Morgan expands his topic to cover the idea of eating habits in America as a whole. A place where McDonald's (and Burger King, and KFC, and...) is as popular as it is is not a place that has the right idea about what food is supposed to be doing for us.
Every so often I think to myself about how we always look back on the past and get a chuckle out of how dumb people were back then. You know, stuff like "They thought it was okay to give cocaine to everyone?" or "They thought they could cure every single illness by using leeches?" In other words, things that were so common sense back then which are utterly ridiculous now.
I think about that, and then I think about how one hundred years from now people are going to look at us and think the same thing about something we thought was common sense. Reading DETB I get the suspicion that people are going to look back on us and marvel at how horrible our eating habits were.
Which is not to say that eating burgers and fries is evil (in the book Mogan says he doesn't think so either - even though his financee is vegan he himself loves a good burger with fries) and it's certainly not to say that if there is an obesity epidemic in this country it's because every single overweight person is lazy, or has no willpower, or eats nothing but Big Macs and five Sundaes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Nor am I saying that everyone on earth should be a size zero, esp since I can stand here as living proof that you can have an obsese BMI and yet still be perfectly healthy on all other scores.
But it is to say that I can see Morgan's point with the cigarettes. If you want to start smoking now it's because you know smoking is bad for you and you've decided to do it anyway. If you want to eat at McDonald's (or Burger King, or buy some Ring Dings from the supermarket, or...) it should be because you know what you're doing and you want to do it anyway. Heck, since it's food unlike with cigarettes if you're informed enough you can eat it and not suffer the health consequences b/c you can adjust your diet accordingly. You could decide to be the person who does tofu and brown rice for six days and then eats the Big Mac.
The point Morgan makes in his book is that not enough of us are able to make the right decisions about how and what we should eat. Some of this is due to places like McDonald's deliberately misinforming people (such as when they lied about using beef fat on their french fries), some of it is due to economics and culture (such as how poor neighborhoods don't get many, if any, big grocery stores stocked with fresh produce - and moreover fresh produce is more expensive than premade crap to begin with), and some is due to our own problems (how many people know how to cook? how many people have time to cook even if they know how?)
It's not a perfect book. There were a couple of places where Morgan stated a fact where I would've liked a clear cite on it (admittedly there's a big endnotes section, I just didn't make a note of what bits I wanted the references on, so for all I know he does have cites, and good ones), there were some places where the conclusions seemed to be a little "post hoc ergo propter hoc" (which I say only because West Wing taught me what it means), and there's a running gag that gets tiresome after a while.
But conversely Morgan doesn't claim that it's the be-all and end-all. Instead his goal is to simply put the topic out there and hopefully get the reader thinking about it. It's not that he's presenting the entire case for what eating is like in America - I don't think any one person could do that - but he focuses on a facet of it and presents information about that facet that makes you look at it in a new light.
So to that end I think he did fabulously.
