Uncle Kierkegaard Ruined Thanksgiving

Chefs Give Nod to Vegetarian Dishes, Haughtily

Vegetables: scorned and maligned as rabbit food or loved as vessels to get more animal fat into one's mouth.  The cool new thing to give a culinary fuck about says the New York Times.  Chefs for the briefest moment take off their sweat-stained "I love Bacon" t-shirts and place them in the hamper to finally be washed.  Is this a turn for the more ethically-minded foodie?  No, probably not, because most foodie-isms are passionately apolitical though occasionally draped in a mimicry of environmentalism.  Nobody becomes a foodie because they want to consume less,  they want more and more -- they want the best and as much of it.  Their body and minds are passive slaves to whatever new refinement is forced into the orifice of pop-culinary's choosing.  Occasionally, however, they feel guilty for a second, and they explain that somehow their unrestrained pursuit of pleasure at any price is the same force that can stop growing global crises that ironically are caused by unrestrained consumption.

But how can this happen -- squash is cool?  Vegetables are cool when only yesterday the king was hipster-pork where the obesity epidemic's love of pork rinds combined with the hipster-foodie's francophilia, creating charcuterie menus in every restaurant, turning them into orgiastic pork binges.  Wait, really, squash is cool now?  I was into squash way before squash was cool.  I have all of squash's records on vinyl.  I call vegetables veggies for short -- I just have that kind of relationship with vegetables, don't be envious.

Squash just got invited to P. Diddy's white party -- check out the watch!

So where is this going?  I'd love to enjoy this moment to wonder if maybe I won't be the guy ruining everybody's good time because I'm the voyeur at the pork orgy -- my inactivity somehow being a condemnation.  Could Thanksgiving be more than just an awkward exchange for me about why I'm not eating the turkey -- full of answers that strike rage and annoyance through the everyday person's mind.  It's a nice fantasy, but the reality is that the veggie-fad is fleeting, as all pleasure or aesthetic-based movements are.

Oh no, who invited Kierkegaard?

Wiser men have realized much earlier than me that our relationships with the world can be easily categorized.  Kierkegaard, everybody's favorite Danish, Existential theologist/philosopher -- sorry all you Martin Luther fan-boys out there -- theorized about three modes of existence for a human.  In the briefest outline, he divides these modes into the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious/spiritual.  A person would go from the basest level of the aesthetic mode, which is undermined by the ethical, which in turn is undermined by the religious/spiritual mode.  How does this relate to trending food interests?  While Kierkegaard was talking about general psychological modes of existence in humanity, food is a part of the way we choose to live, and as we spend so much time obtaining, preparing and eating food, it is a huge aspect of our lives.

The person of the aesthetic mode of being is lost, turning inward to the reflections of his pleasures.  There is a constant pursuit of attaining more and more pleasure, which ultimately desensitizes pleasure, demanding an endless pursuit of greater novel pleasure.  It's a random play of meaningless sensory data, played with, experimented with as nothing of any real weight or concern.  The focus on pleasure and sense smudges and distorts the reality of the relationships and commitments you have to others; you are trapped in the lie of solipsisms where consequences for a manic pursuit of novel pleasure can be easily ignored.  The reality that your pleasure-seeking, inward-turned consciousness is incomplete, feels incomplete, as the haunting reality that the other, the person outside of yourself, is waiting for you to recognize them.

When one recognizes the other, they see the consequences of their actions; they see their true selves in the eyes of others and to what a profound degree they owe their entire being to others; they feel a profound guilt, and they enter into the ethical mode of being.  Now actions must be weighed for their consequences for others.  All senseless pursuits of pleasure and all trivial play with the senses need to be measured and stymied by the needs of others.  The ethical person follows rules and laws that are in the interest of all, not just himself.

The religious/spiritual dimensions is not as relevant to my point and is more abstracted and complicated in Kierkegaard.  But, in the most basic sense, at various times the ethical will be superseded for an ineffable reality only experienced by a sole individual in relationship to something transcendent.  Kierkegaard goes into the theological issue of Abraham's attempted sacrifice of Isaac which is a Biblical example of the supra-ethical.

In sum, following cool food trends, whether they be offered up on a plate by a chef, or by a corporation, or a dietician, or the state, is the basest relationship we can have to food.  The aesthete's world is profoundly lonely and meaningless, an array of edible colors, constantly shifting, the arbitrary sensation ahead inexplicably cooler than what you have now.  Eating vegetables because it is in vogue is an inferior mode of human existence, though by accident it may have a beneficial environmental or health impact, that is not the pure intent of the action.  To ignore the consequences of your decisions and to pursue food as an apolitical act of sensory pleasure will leave you with a strange aftertaste in your mouth.  That aftertaste is the specter of the immense suffering and destruction thoughtless consumption causes.

5-Hour Energy: Pink Lemonade: Energy Supplement

A fantastical wish to end breast cancer by adorning yourself in the color pink is a woman's political issue that everybody can get behind.  Delightfully deluded, minimal commitment and an excuse to rock that new salmon-toned ensemble you've been shying away from for months, breast-cancer-awareness-ethical-consumerism is the answer to all of our problems.  The options are endless -- breast-cancer awareness chips, breast-cancer awareness soap, breast-cancer awareness energy drinks  -- the caffeine, taurine and b-vitamins surging through our bodies making us uncontrollably aware, ready for action!

Women's issues and political causes often run into an array of problems that hinder their popularity.  How do we avoid the messy bind of those feministic issues that leave us with the inconvenience of acknowledging the personhood of women and their real, substantial well-being?  Because we don't want women to get sick and die from something as horrible as breast cancer -- who would go food shopping and make dinner?  Susan G. Komen For The Cure, the organization behind the pink-tinged charitable efforts like Breast Cancer Awareness Walks, along with the doppelgänger organization The Avon Foundation have the solution for how to make women's issues popular.

Who could assist them in the most unpopular subject of women's political issues?  Seems they take a couple of notes from the most popular purveyor of women: pornography.  Equality, liberation and indelible rights don't have universal appeal and in many ways might hinder the efficiency with which your laundry will get washed.  How do we support women while also actively oppressing them?  Create a dialogue about women's health and political issues by talking about women solely in terms of their bodies, which is how society always deals with the threat of women's unrealized political power and how Avon and Komen's political rhetoric and cause gain such popularity.

Let's do a mini-deconstruction of their most prevalent rhetoric.  Sometimes the basest slogans speak louder than any manifesto.  "I love Boobies" or "Honk For Hooters" are unfortunately common slogans found on bumper stickers that are meant to be tongue-in-cheek but reveal tacitly the kind of dialogue that is allowed to be had about a woman's issue.  The popularity of these slogans speaks volumes.  Women are reduced to breasts, objects that need to be preserved, not persons that need to be given at least the sufficient financial and social status necessary to actively secure their own health.  If you broach how objective financial inequality and gender norms might contribute to illness, all of a sudden you're a crazed militant.  Women can only be brought into the public foray as bodies, to be dissected, to be regulated, to become an object of desire or didactic revulsion.  Nothing sells magazines like Kim Kardashian's butt; nothing sells a political idea about women like breasts.

Justin Bieber, hero of women's political causes

"Hey, stop ruining Avon's and Komen's party with your analysis, we're just talking about saving boobs through charitable efforts, like giving proceeds to breast cancer research by selling carcinogenic products.  I also happen to really enjoy power walking as a swath of pink-clad women!" -- Dumbest Person Ever

Susan G. Komen For The Cure and the Avon Foundation in all their brilliant political wisdom have used everybody's favorite post-modern ploy of "ethical consumerism."  When you hear the word post-modern, you know irony is about to rain down upon you in a torrential form.  Aligning themselves with numerous products, these Komen endorsed products will give a portion of their proceeds to cancer research.  You can feel good about eating an entire box of Cheez-its because a marginal portion of that money went to the nebulous coffers of a charity-machine-complex.  Dove soap too has gotten on board the Komen train at various points.  Now the most recent product has arrive as 5-hour Energy: Pink Lemonade Flavor: a condensed energy drink supplement loaded with caffeine, B-vitamins and mysterious, poorly regulated, untested supplements.

Finally, all of the problems of thoughtless consumerism can be solved by thoughtless consumerism, i.e. ethical consumerism.  Cheez-its are an oily, carb-bomb junk food product that have most definitely contributed to the obesity epidemic in America if their cheesy-greasy fingertips are any evidence; obesity significantly effects the survival rate of breast cancer patients.  I'll give you a hint, the big girls don't make it -- sorry, M4BBW, I know you didn't want to hear that.  Dove soap markets itself as a pure, simple product for daily cosmetic and hygiene needs when it is actually rife with potentially carcinogenic ingredients such as parabens; parabens affect hormones in the human body and could increase the risk of breast cancer.  5-hour energy is a supplement product, putting itself outside of the already lax regulations on food by the FDA.  An arbitrary blend of amino acids, caffeine and B-vitamins, it has been connected to seizures in children, and the large dosage of caffeine can create potential heart complications.  Vitamins supplements, most likely cheap, unregulated vitamins in this product have been correlated with increased risk of death and may very likely be carcinogenic.  Susan G. Komen For the Cure feels great about their connections with these disease causing products.  Looks like they found their cure, and it is at the bottom of a Cheez-it box -- but a pink Cheez-it box mind you.

Post-modern-irony-connection: successfully completed.

Science proves post-zoomba frozen yogurt binge is counterproductive

In the multicultural, technological scape we live in, information scatters like buckshot sounding like something between a freewheeling jazz ensemble doped up on speed and the Tower of Babel.  But, like any good, self-sustaining system, the chord that resonates above it all is the real note maker: the culture of the white, middle-aged bourgeoise and their buying power.  Even cutting-edge science steeped in the greatest theoretician of Modernity, Darwin, is pragmatically picked apart in the New York Times looking for the frantic pay off -- why am I fat?  How do I stop it?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/opinion/sunday/debunking-the-hunter-gatherer-workout.html

The New York Times cobbles together a piece about anthropological and scientific testing which has never been done on such an objective scale.  It goes on to say it revealed that the Hazda, a remaining hunter-gather tribe living a lifestyle perhaps most in tune for how we have evolved, don't expend anymore energy than we do in the West.  So, the natural conclusion to ask: why do the Hazda look sexier in their yoga pants than me?  

"The Hadza live in simple grass huts in the middle of a dry East African savanna. They have no guns, vehicles, crops or livestock. Each day the women comb miles of hilly terrain, foraging for tubers, berries and other wild plant foods, often while carrying infants, firewood and water. Men set out alone most days to collect honey or hunt for game using handmade bows and poison-tipped arrows, often covering 15 to 20 miles.

We found that despite all this physical activity, the number of calories that the Hadza burned per day was indistinguishable from that of typical adults in Europe and the United States. We ran a number of statistical tests, accounting for body mass, lean body mass, age, sex and fat mass, and still found no difference in daily energy expenditure between the Hadza and their Western counterparts.

How can the Hadza be more active than we are without burning more calories? It’s not that their bodies are more efficient, allowing them to do more with less: separate measurements showed that the Hadza burn just as many calories while walking or resting as Westerners do."

This is really something stunning on an informational scale for anthropology and evolutionary biology.  Could the human body have an innate level of energy that regardless of environment will be spent daily on whatever projects are at hand?  "But who cares about that," seems to be the lens this piece was written.  Stooping to the lowest common denominator, the writer gives the Times reader what he wants in the article's conclusion; how is this information relevant to me achieving optimum fitness, so I can hold it over my suburban Spin class rivals?

Is this subject not interesting if it is not written in the scope of why Westerners are fat and what you must do personally to stop it?  Will nobody read about this if it isn't added to the unholy litany of pseudo-scientific implications for "healthy living" from real scientific work.  Good science is always humble and quiet about its conclusions, understanding the nature of scientific truth.  People trying to re-appropriate science to legitimate their ideologies and lifestyles with a specious objectivity are dangerous types.  Apparently whoever is reading the New York Times is expending all their innate levels of energy avoiding intellectual decency (beats walking 17 miles, I guess).

Cheetos Crunchy: Advert Fauna

Food labeling in the United States is horrible. For most people this isn't a problem. As long as they can sound out the word Cheetos, or recognize the Cheetah, their decision making process for what to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner is complete. Sometimes I wonder, lost in thought in a near-catatonic-state, paralyzed by the endless aisle of false decisions, what it all means -- in the heavy sense of the phrase. Marketing and the decades of product development, the senseless narratives and fantasies that float around these products that populate every aspect of our waking lives. Who is Chester? Why is he so obsessed with being cool, or I should say, the cool equivalent of 1991's coolness. Chester, it's 2011, and Zach Morris is no longer the apex of rad.

I'm not normal or at least not typical enough to be a good, proper consumer. Rather than accept Chester as the gracious, giving icon of cheesy, corn-puffed snacks, I take him for the humanity that might be hidden in such a satyr of a post-capitalist wilderness. This is the disease of anthropology, or of an anthropological outlook on meaning. The menagerie of creatures and mythic beasts that populate the foreground of the market begin to slump in their dance and game. The magic is gone, blowing out the Bacchic fire at the center. What remains are the taut strings of human tinkering. You stop taking things as they are; you contextualize everything, even a cartoon character, in the framework of pertinent histories, of psychological necessities and the pulsating baseness of human desires.

You wonder, with a twisted sense of humor, if the guy that invented Chester knew that Cheetos, or corn-puffed snacks in general, were originally developed as cheap animal feed for zoos. Big surprise: most of the animals fed Cheetos died from malnutrition. Animals are no longer fed Cheetos (excluding pugs). There's a pretty good chance that Cheetos began its legacy with the potential murder of Cheetahs. What kind of sick joke was it to put a Cheetah on the bag?

When you're a kid, you don't realize any of this. Chester helps to further solidify your body's love of simple carbohydrates, blasting straight through your bloodstream into your brain, giving you that neuro-chemical fix. You were going to eat carbs anyway, but you eat these Cheetos because they also pack in the secondary quality that they're cool -- cooler than rice at least. And Cheetos were cool for a kid in 1991 when Zach Morris was cool and the idea of a cheese-dusted Cheetah skateboarding was cool. It didn't take you very long to realize that Cheetos were not conducive to athleticism and skateboarding, hanging your head in shame, standing on a broken skateboard that gave way under your engorged corn/cheese-filled body.

You look at Chester now and the magic is gone. All that is left is the icy clockwork of humanity rife with tragedy or humor --depending on your mood.

Modern Milk Monstrosity

Moving away from the usual setup of this blog, I figured I'd engage with the more popular and mainstream chatter of food politics. The New York Times, being the moderate, liberal bedfellow of the food war machine, approaches most of the big issues on food in their painfully lackadaisical way. What does the FDA say; what does the Mayo-Clinic recommend; what has petty research on hamsters and rats allowed us to speculate about our constitution as humans. Though the New York Times does have its moments of clarity, where they might allow room for the unorthodox, for something radical that engages with the power politics and the irrefutable history of modern food industry, they cannot help but return to their moderating influences, resting assured with a religious-like faith that technology, scientists/doctors and government-controlled institutions are all operating toward an objectivity in the name of the well-being of its populace.

Milk Makeover In summary of the link I have provided, it is a small snippet of the New York Times reporting that various school systems have a dilemma over milk. School children prefer flavored milk, and they will consume it more regularly; however, flavored milk has a good deal more sugar. Trying to counteract the childhood obesity epidemic, school systems have been debating getting rid of the flavored milk altogether or even leaning it out by reducing the sugar content.

The New York Times adds its voice to the tower of babel concerning food obesity. Posing the current health epidemic as a matter of individual choice, plays into the NYT's liberal ideology that wishes to placate the unfortunate with government programs, but will not acknowledge that the system is inherently designed to disenfranchise groups, creating a hierarchical structure of power and ultimately health. Oh, if we just offer a healthier choice to kids, they will consume fewer calories and less sugar and that will offset childhood obesity. Let's not acknowledge that children and school systems determine their consumption by federal government subsidies, pushing down the cost of corn, dairy and meat to the lowest possible prices and that choice on the part of the child or school system has little to do with it. Poverty and obesity are deeply linked.

But I don't want to get too deeply into the general idea of false choice and poverty. I prefer for now to focus on the mainstream ideas about what is healthful dairy consumption. The only issue about the milk that is of any concern to the people in this article is the fat, sugar and the resulting calorie content of the milk. The scientific-aesthetic of calorie obsession really tickles the fancy of those worshipping at the altar of technology, science and physics-envy. But it doesn't work because not all fats, sugars, calories are created equal.

The low-fat milk is accepted dogmatically in the article as being absolutely healthful without question. Isn't that odd when the low-fat milk has the least amount of omega 3 fatty-acids and naturally occurring Vitamin A. All low-fat milk has to be fortified with man-made Vitamin A. The milk is also homogenized, which means the government and the dairy industry, in a mutual partnership of thievery, establish an acceptable quality for dairy milk. They then proceed to mix quality milk with lower quality milk to produce one uniform, lower quality product. The process also guarantees that a milk's fat content won't naturally separate while on shelves -- a meaningless, aesthetic goal.

The milk goes on to be pasteurized or ultra-pasteurized which cooks the milk for a time at high heat to guarantee no dangerous micro-organisms are alive in it; this process also destroys many of the milk's naturally occurring enzymes that assist the body in the digestion of the milk and the absorption of the nutrients. It also destroys and degrades many of the nutrients themselves.

I don't even have time or space to go into the reality of what the cows are being fed because of farming industries, primarily corn, creating sick and diseased animals that produce sick and diseased milk with inferior nutrient profiles.

Yeah, let's complain about the sugar content of the milk, ignoring that the milk we are feeding children is nutritionally approaching nothing. I'm sure nutrients are not essential to the functioning of organs, especially the functioning of the human metabolism. Surely nutrient-devoid milk has nothing to do with obesity, just measly sugar is the culprit. Also no milk fat means no omega 3s, which means an imbalance of Omega 3 to Omega 6 fatty acids in the diet, and at no point in human dietary history, has protein ever been consumed without a significant portion of fat. We are designed to eat protein and fat in unison, (think fish and meat) the fat is essential for the absorption of nutrients and also will deter an over consumption of protein which has all of its own ailments. If you remove the fat from milk, kids will consume excessive amount of protein through milk, already a huge dietary issue in America, and they, as the human body craves fat, will replace the missing fat with most likely an inferior omega-6-rich trans-fat vegetable oil in the form of processed food. Enjoy the inflammation, kids.

So the wrong-headed notion of obesity and food politics keep chugging along thanks to the New York Times. And I'll leave you with this thought: at one point kids only drank whole milk, as there was no other option. They even drank chocolate milk from whole milk -- the juice of Satan himself. Somehow they were not obese. Could it be that low-fat milk is not a solution to the obesity epidemic, but rather, a main culprit in the expanding waistlines of America? The consumption of animal fat in the past 50 years has actually significantly dropped because Americans avoid whole milk, cream and butter, but at the same time, obesity, diabetes and heart disease have risen at alarming rates because calorie consumption has increased dramatically. So keep sucking down your skim milk and eating your canola oil by recommendation of the Mayo Clinic and FDA and continue to wonder why everybody is getting so damn fat.

Get your etiology straight.

When Alcoholism Isn't Enough To Destroy Your Children: Eggo Mini-Muffin Tops: Blueberry

Hate your children but don't know how to convey it? Let Eggo Mini-Muffin Tops: Blueberry show everything you've wanted to say for years to your unwanted children. We know, everybody else was having kids, and you wanted to get invited to shit -- ya know? You didn't realize what kind of a commitment these little shits were going to be. Sometimes drunken rages and passive-aggressive insults are not enough to sufficiently screw up your children.

I'm really not sure who constitutes the market for this product. I guess the children that eat Uncrustables for lunch need something for breakfast, too. You can't just feed your kids Uncrustables for every meal. I'm sure some parents have tried, but sooner or later, you're going to have to stimulate your kid with some new, unholy concoction of corn and xantham gum.

Heidegger and Ho Hos

"Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs."

This blog is an obsession with the war-mechanisms of contemporary food and eating.