Why Dont You Blog?

Another pointless post about food. And morality.

I bought a bag of impeccably “fair trade” chocolate-covered chunks of ginger from a charity stall. (A long-established and legit Fair Trade brand, sold at cost, on a voluntary basis.)

I’m less than completely convinced by many “fair trade” goods, but I’ll spare you the social analysis of international terms of trade and production relations in the developing world. For now…

People in work bring back communal sweets and biscuits (trans. candy and cookies) from wherever they’ve been on holiday (trans. vacation.) I never do this myself, although I tend to eat the lion’s share of any of these treats. It’s possible to go for days, in the main holiday season, without actually buying any food.

I have even been known to have subtly badgered one co-worker into making a 300 mile return journey to the place from which he’d brought comically expensive handmade real (70% cocoa solids) chocolates to get more. At a total chocolate cost of over £50 (trans, about $80 now, I think.) And not even Fair Trade. (Look, I didn’t know how bloody expensive they were. Nor how far away the shop was. OK?)

I even add insult to injury by using the packaging for an ironic “art installation” and by insulting any over-hyped but disappointing chocolates, like the French ones from the Ritz.

So, to appease my vague feelings of guilt about being just a taker of confectionery and never a confectionery provider, I bought some Fair Trade biscuits, as a baseline contribution to office goodwill, and chocolate gingers, as a purely indulgent treat.

And made a song and dance out of sharing them out, in the hope that anyone keeping a conceptual chocolate altruism ledger would notice that they finally had something to put on my credit side.

Hmm. Chunks of ginger, covered in chocolate. I assume that anyone would think that is great, by definition. The first person I offer them to says “What’s ginger?” Duh? “What’s ginger?” Is this a trick question? I am too confused to offer an answer that is either educational or sarcastic. I can only say “Well, it’s ginger. You know, ginger. Everyone knows what ginger is.”

Two people are now too embarrassed to admit they don’t know what ginger is and each takes an offered sweet. Dare I say it, gingerly.

They insert sweets into mouths. Omigod! Have they been poisoned?

Unbelievable facial contortions. They pretend to be eating, but their faces are betraying them. They are clearly trying to swallow - to get the taste away from their mouths - in the face of a natural reflex to gag. But the chunks are too big so they are forced to chew, fighting their jaws every inch of the way.

I stare in fascination for about three minutes until I remember to do the decent thing and say “Look, just spit it out if you don’t like it.” Explosively emitted ginger chocolate turns the waste paper bins into ad hoc spitoons.

An other worker just says “You have got to be joking,” when I try to offer him a chocolate.

I say :”I don’t believe this. Everybody likes ginger.” (I am clearly speaking in the face of the evidence.) “I will do a survey then.”

I approach every single person in the pretty sizable office, offering a handful of chocolates. One man says “I love ginger” but won’t accept more than one. And I don’t actually see him eating it, so it may have been a polite bluff.

Everybody else, without exception, refuses. And these are people who will polish off a packet of Dorritos or All-butter Shortbread almost before you can blink.

Three refusants produce variations of “I’m being good today”

I know it’s a polite way of saying “No, I don’t want to try those outlandish sweets” but it still really irritates me.

Firstly because of my own serious shortcomings in the “polite” department, I have grown a protective self-justifying moral coating - the view that “polite dishonesty is more insulting than impolite honesty” (Yes, I know it isn’t true. I did say self-justifying.)

Secondly, because I find something offensive in the idea that being “good” means “on a diet.”

The underlying assumption is straight from a life-denying religious worldview. “I enjoy food X (Not the case here, obviously) so not having it makes me morally superior.”

Are people doing some bizarre penance for their physical existence. The body is evil so letting it have what it wants is “bad”. Mastering one’s bodily desires for food is “good.”

Now, in this case, the Fair Trade sweets were probably “better” in genuinely moral terms than any other food on offer. You can argue the toss over the theory and practice of Fair Trade initiatives, but they do have a “moral” basis in aiming to improve the lives of the producers, to provide schools and medical treatments and a living wage. However, they were seen as “bad”, as food containing sugar and fat.

Our sense of “morality”, in food terms, isn’t reached through a rational process of thinking about where food is produced, how it’s distributed, and so on. It’s some sort of kneejerk response, a dilution of monotheistic moralities that see “goodness” in terms of appeasing some arbitrary set of external rules. Organised religion is really effective at instilling ideas of “good” and “bad” conceived of in terms of obedience to rules. This seems to survive even when people have no actual religious beliefs.

Except, in the case of food, it’s not just priests or gods that we are obeying. It’s the food police in our heads - the government health warnings; the anecdotal nutritionists; the claims on the sides of products; the magazine articles; the slimming magazines, and so on.

Of course, there is a religious element in food choices. Every culture or religion has food rules. What we eat is part of our identity. It’s hard to disentangle the “morality” that consists of “following rules set by some authority” from an autonomous “morality” that involves making endless contingent choices.

But then, it’s a waste of our puny human lives if we don’t even bother to try.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Popularity: 9% [?]

More from Ted. Following my triumph at posting the Dawkins video link, I’m following up with another. I’m posting this video link because I’ve never seen anyone express such perfect good sense about food. It’s Mark Bittman on what’s wrong with what we eat.

This is something on the blog for those people who come here looking for “5 fruit and veg” posts.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Popularity: 9% [?]

The UK of 2008 is an interesting, if odd, place to live. Today our esteemed Prime Minister has decided the way to reduce the cost of living is to tell people to stop wasting food.

Blimey. This is the person who used to be the chancelor of the exchequer…. Scary.

It is an interesting idea that people are simultaneously eating too much food and wasting too much food but both seem like a sneaky attempt by a weasle government to pass the blame for another one of societies problems on the general public. Now, I am borderline in support of blaming the population for everything, although this time I think the PM has got it wrong. (Well, he routinely gets it wrong which is why I am devastated to think I will welcome a conservative government).

This outburst is another one of Labours attempts to demonise and punish the poor and the working class. According to the BBC:

A government study says the UK wastes 4m tonnes of food every year, adding £420 to a family’s shopping bills. (…) The food policy study also says the average UK household throws away £8 of leftovers a week, yet spends 9% of its income on food.

Now the slight disparity in the numbers aside, this is an interesting set of figures to throw your hat on. If you are a poor, low income family then £420 a year will be very significant. I refuse for one second to believe that people on the median UK income or lower are actually wasting this much money per year.

Flipping it around, if you are above the median income this becomes a trivial sum of money. For someone on £30k per year (a shell lorry driver for instance), this represents about two days wages spread over the course of a year. Not really something that is going to make them sit up and take notice. I am not a “rich” person but today I applied for a job that pays one and a half times that sum of money per day. If I get the job, worrying that a few bits and pieces I have left over will amount to under six hours work per year is the last thing on my mind.

Now, the second sentence is slightly more interesting. Interesting in that it uses two different types of figures. This implies that a family on £16,000 per year is spending £1440 a year on food. Out of this £27 per week, they are “wasting” £8 so, in reality are living on £19 per week for food. I refuse to accept that for a nanosecond. I would like to see you get your “five a day” for that paltry sum. On the flipside, the £30,000 a year family spend a massive £2700 a year on food, or £52 per week. They are significantly more efficient however, as they actually manage to eat £44 of food.

Are we, as a nation, to accept that the poor family who are basically struggling to eat still manage to throw away nearly 1/3rd of their food, however the indulgent rich are protecting the economy by eating it all. In all honesty, it confuses me a touch.

A second, and possibly more important line of thought is about why people throw food away. Sometimes it is food people have cooked and no longer want and I assume some of it will be the result of people chosing to not eat certain parts of the foodstuff (I will never eat a pigs brains for example…). However, looking at the list of biggest waste sources it seems the problem is throwing away food that has gone past its sell by date.

There is the usual call for people to stop going to supermarket, stop buying their goods in bulk (then allowing it to spoil) etc. This has a seductive ring of truth around it, however it doesn’t stand up to close examination.

Take for example the two different shopping methods. I can use a supermarkets online shop to order my goods (pre-selected based on previous purchases) in about 20 minutes. Add in the delivery and this whole deal takes up about 40 minutes a week.

Compare that with going to the shops every day to buy fresh, small portioned, perishable goods. The journey alone to the nearest “corner shop” will take me 5 mins to drive (but is massively uneconomical with the fuel) or about 15 mins each way to walk. Add in 10 mins walking around the shop (and ignoring any impulse buying) and paying for my small loaf, banana and orange. All told, this would occupy around 40 minutes a day or over 3 hours a week (ignoring weekends). If I was on minimum wage, this would be the equivalent of £16 per week spent simply collecting the food. If I get the £600 a day job I want that is, in effect £225 a week…

It seems that £8 wasted is money well spent.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Popularity: 22% [?]

Ben Goldacre (BadScience columnist from the Guardian) presented a programme about nutrition fads, on BBC Radio 4 today. It’s the first of a two-part series, The Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists. You can hear a podcast on the Radio 4 site. (Pick Monday’s choice.) It’s quite entertaining. In this part, Goldacre talks about the history of some classic quackery.

In contrast, today’s Guardian prints a piece by Madeleine Bunting in favour of unscientific medicine. Referring to several anti-alternative medicine books, as well as Dawkins’ 2007 TV series The Enemies of Reason. Bunting says:

It seems the aim of some of these authors is to finish off a burgeoning health industry that they believe is based on charlatans and quacks preying on the gullible and desperate.

This is one of the most common charges made against complementary medicine - that most of it is no better than placebo. But there is a way of turning that accusation around: perhaps complementary medicine is an effective way to harness placebo as one of the most powerful - and cheapest - of healing processes.

Mind and body can’t be conceptually separated. We know relatively little about how they interact. There’s plenty of room for research into how we can use the mind to fight illness. But I still can’t see how this can justifies encouraging the sick to believe in lies.

Why bother with scientific medicine at all, if you can just carry out a ritual or hand out a sugar pill?

Reason number 1 comes down to a similar point to that expressed in the question “Why won’t god heal amputees?” Can you cure cholera by reflexology? That is, alternative medicine “works” where symptoms are ill-defined and at least partly emotional in nature. Or as Bunting says, putting a positive spin on it:

Complementary medicine is most popular where conventional medicine fails, such as with musculoskeletal conditions and mental health - stress, depression, anxiety

Well, if some people’s mental conditions can be cured by ritual, surely these are revealed to be states of mind rather than organic disease. I bet the rituals don’t work so well with brain damage, dementia or full blown psychosis. So isn’t that like saying, lies aren’t powerful enough to cure real diseases.

Reason number 2. There are plenty of things that can make you feel happier/more relaxed/more cared for. These can be your own ritual practices or substances. (In the Asterisk books, the Brits’ magic potion is a cup of tea.)

You don’t necessarily have to pay for them. You do have to pay for alternative medicine.

In its raw form, a placebo may indeed be one of the cheapest healing process (as Bunting says). However, once you pay for the time of the “understanding” practitioner who prescribes you a 30 ml bottle of water, you enter into a commercial transaction that compares very badly with the cost of visiting a doctor, if you live anywhere with a public health service.

Reason 3: Alternative therapies are “alternative” because they haven’t been proved to work. End of story. Yes, medical research is pretty flawed in many ways. But, the very fact that new drugs are immensely profitable for drug companies and expensive for healthcare funders indicates why promising new treatments are unlikely to be ignored. If an alternative medicine or treatment worked, there would be an unseemly scramble to patent it or to use it to replace expensive drugs.

There must be hundreds of traditional medicines and bizarre treatments that would be effective against various illnesses. The only way to find this out is to test them. Why would the discoverer or inventor of an unusual cure not want to test it? Fear it doesn’t work. Fear of loss of profit.

Reason 4: Alternative medicine is generally the exact reverse of “empowering” despite the claims of its supporters. When you give up your power to evaluate solutions to your physical and mental illnesses, you must take the practitioner’s rituals as authoritative, with no basis for doing so except their claims.

Most of us would feel ripped off if we went to buy a toaster, paid for a toaster and were told - in a caring way - that we had got a toaster, when all we took home was an empty box. So, why is it OK to sell people treatments that don’t work? Indeed, not just morally acceptable but apparently desirable, according to Bunting?

Popularity: 30% [?]

Popularity: 30% [?]

Sorry. Move to another post if you expect this to be about absurdities that the US military feeds its troops.

The BBC reports that that “High GI foods are associated with liver disease”

Boston-based researchers, writing in the journal Obesity, found mice fed starchy foods developed the disease

With an appropriately slim - nay starved - knowledge of food science, I assume that “starchy” means that carbohydrate-based foods are responsible. But a table on the BBC page shows this list of BAD “starchy” and GOOD, presumably “non-starchy” foods:

High GI foods:
Mashed potato
White bread
Chips
Some breakfast cereals (eg Cornflakes, Rice Krispies, Coco Pops)
Steamed white rice
Moderate GI foods:
Muesli (non-toasted)
Boiled potatoes
Pitta bread
Basmati rice
Honey
Wholemeal bread
Low GI foods:
Roasted salted peanuts
Rye and granary bread
Whole and skimmed milk
Spaghetti
Boiled carrots
Baked beans

These foods are nearly all carbs, apart from milk, peanuts and (possibly) beans. So what distinguishes the groupings and how could you tell where other carbs would fit into the groups? After all, if this is all true, and you want to avoid liver disease, especially for your kids, (it posits fatty liver disease as a serious future danger for today’s kids) you need to know the difference.

But “mashed” and “boiled” potatoes are in separate groups? Has the BBC never cooked food? It has enough food programmes and celeb chefs on its staff. Well let me explain.

Mashed potatoes are boiled potatoes. Mashed up. A bit like the effect of chewing up boiled potatoes. I think you could reasonably assume that a chewed portion of mashed potatoes and a chewed portion of boiled potatoes hit your stomach in the exact same condition. Chips (”French fries” to non-Brits) are slightly different, given the addition of fat, but the carb part of a chip is still pretty much what you’d get if you boiled a potato.

Steamed white rice is different from Basmati white rice? Why? Because it’s less tasty? Because it’s cheaper? Does the steaming make a difference?

Wheat breads and spaghetti are made from the same natural product. Unsurprisingly, that’s wheat. Which is mainly starch, whether or not you take the bran out. It’s certainly just the same starch if you shape it into a standard loaf or pitta shape. It even remains wheat if you throw in a few bits of grit from other grains (granary) or add a bit of semolina (spaghetti).

I can accept that the body may respond to wholemeal flour differently than to refined flour. Wholemal flour has more nutrients and roughage. However, it’s not a completely different substance. It may indeed be the case that semolina and bran and wheatgerm or chunks of other grains change the way that the body absorbs starch, possibly by slowing the rate of absorption. Or maybe by making you eat fewer carbs because you feel full with less carbs in your stomach.

So far, this would suggest that avoiding liver disease means eating fewer carbs and/or eating carb foods closer to their natural condition. These suggestions may or may not be true, but they are at least reasonable and don’t depend on a spurious carb classification.

The GI index is an odd way to categorise foods, which seems to be gaining ever more authority. I looked at these groups and could think of several alternative ways to categorise them. E.g.

Social/cultural: Group one is the carbohydrate food of the urban western poor. Group two contains the diet fillers more likely to be eaten by the better-off. (Just ignore the boiled potatoes nonsense.) Hmm, let me think. Does social class have anything to do with health?

Colour: Group one is mainly white or false-coloured (coco pops). Group 2 is generally a bit darker. Group 3 has some brightly coloured foods, if you ignore milk.

Number of vowels in their names: Gave up there, sorry. I was too idle to count them all. Feel free to take up the slack.

In any case, there’s another question hanging around. Group 2 contains muesli (non-toasted) Would toasting muesli push it up or down the food group chain?

Popularity: 38% [?]

Popularity: 38% [?]

Research from the Food Standards Agency was reported as showing that the poor do not have worse diets than the rest of the population. I am all for truths that fly in the face of “common sense” but I am finding this quite hard to swallow.

As soon as you look at the specifics, this whole argument starts to fall apart for me.

The Food Standards Agency found that contrary to popular belief, nutrition, access to food and cooking skills are not much different in poorer families.

• Nutrition. Given that so much of nutritional science is founded on guesswork and can often barely be distinguished from the Gillian McKeith schools of science, I’m not going to do this one to death, except to say that the points that they notice any difference in - such as consumption of fruit and vegetables - are the very things the nutritionists keep saying are important for our health
• “Cooking skills?” Why would anyone asume that poor people are less able to cook. Well, it seems that the survey does suggest that the British poor are indeed too stupid to know how to eat food, apparently unlike poor people in the rest of the world.
  

  Men and women with a lower level of educational achievement tended to have a ‘less healthy’ diet than men and women with more education. Men and women with less education ate fewer vegetables and more chips, fried and roast potatoes. Less educated women also consumed less fruit and fruit juice.

  If educational level has any correlation with income (as we are told by other parts of government), doesn’t this suggest that the poor do have a worse diet? So it might be poverty rather than lack of education that leads to the duff feeding?

• “Access to food? ” What on earth does that mean? It appears from the FSA website that it means where we shop and how we get it home.
  

  About 80% of this group did their main shopping at a large supermarket. About 50% had access to a private car for shopping

  Hmm - car? Not markedly poor then, you would think.

But then:

Mean weekly spending on food and drink (including eating out, but excluding alcoholic drinks) was just under £30 for one-adult households, just over £50 for households containing two or more adults, £55–£65 for households with one adult and one or more children, and £80–£90 for households with two or more adults and one or more children.

(You have feel particularly sorry for the adults in a 2 or more adult household, scraping by on £25 or less per person.)

Popularity: 31% [?]

Popularity: 31% [?]

Reading through the comment is free part of the Guardian is enlightening, entertaining and a bit saddening. It is enlightening because it shows how confused people become when they want to find a target to attack, it is entertaining because the commenters are, basically, crazy and saddening because once upon a time you would have thought people who read the Guardian were reasonably educated. Obviously in the internet age, this is no longer the case…

Anyway, a rant against the HSE by Simon Jenkins, titled “The zombie health inspectors should be replaced with a risk commission” drew my attention today. As I have mentioned in the past, I am often drawn into the murky world of health and safety much more than I would normally like, so this intrigued me.

The title of the article seems to draw on this part of Mr Jenkins long, repetitive, rant:

Popularity: 28% [?]

Popularity: 28% [?]

This is not normally a topic I would stray into, but as Heather is hors de combat for a while, I thought I would give it a shot. It certainly strikes me as “bad science” but I may be wrong…

Given the way the UK has got on board this “healthy eating” campaign, it is not surprising that the supermarkets have pulled out all the plugs to use this woo to sell more products. On a fairly regular basis there are adverts on TV how this product or that product is “one of your five a day” with minimal reason behind the claims. It seems Sainsbury’s (supermarket chain) has joined in and in their infinite wisdom have decided that telling their customers how many grams of fat, carbohydrates/sugar, protein etc., are in their food is not effective. As part of the great dumbing down of the UK they now use a “traffic light” system. It is pretty embarrassing.

What intrigues me the most, is the apparently arbitrary nature of what gets a “green” compared to what gets an “amber” or “red” (I am assuming Green = Good and Red = Bad by the way, can food be “Bad?”). As a recent example, I bought a Sainsbury’s Cheese Ploughmans ready made sandwich which comes on malted bread with “seeds.” The packaging calls it “reduced fat, a healthier option.” In the picture, you can see what the traffic light system looks like, but please note, the fat and salt are supposed to be “amber” rather than red.

Popularity: 35% [?]

Popularity: 35% [?]

Heather wrote yesterday about some woo-like nonsense published in the opinion piece of the Nursing Times. Basically, the article said that obese patients were the cause of nurses back injuries. It was one of those wonderful articles that the print media so love. It had the air of self evident logic and attacked the current social demons (fat people). I am surprised it hasn’t been syndicated out to the Daily Mail (etc).

I had two main problems with the article (obviously lots of minor ones…). First, and most basic, the author of the article makes many, unsupported, assumptions. Statistical correlations supporting their claims are not shown (if they exist) so I have no idea where they drew the data for the claim made. It is shocking that being told “there is no evidence to suggest a link” was viewed as simply meaning more research is required. While continued research into every field of human endeavour would be fantastic, the line has to be drawn every now and then.

Popularity: 46% [?]

Popularity: 46% [?]

This week’s guest publication is Nursing Times.
It has a Comment article with the heading “It is fair to assume a link between back injury and nurses and patient obesity.” Well, after reading it, you would have to say “it isn’t fair to assume ..etc” There is no evidence in the article to support that conclusion.

It’s getting blogged here just because the argument typifies the increasingly common demonisation of fat people on spurious medical grounds, but from a new direction- obesity isn’t just dangerous to oneself- it threatens others.

The writer refers to HSE statistics on rates of back disorders suffered by nurses and nursing auxiliaries. If one actually examines the HSE data, the rates (31 per 100,000 for nurses and 44 per 100,000 for nursing auxiliaries, in the period from 2003/2005) come with such huge confidence intervals as to be little more than generally indicative of the comparative risks of different jobs. There is no evidence presented here to suggest that these rates are notably higher than those in previous years but this would surely be the first requirement, if the figures are to support an argument that patients are getting heavier and, therefore, healthcare workers are getting injured more.

Popularity: 44% [?]

Popularity: 44% [?]