Chilling effects
The slashing of trillions of dollars in spending means that the already fragile social safety net in the United States is likely to allow more people to “slip” through the cracks, and by slip I mean be pushed. Starting with Reagan there has been a notion that the mentally ill are better taken care of by their own wits on the street than by professional caregivers in a medical setting, same goes for junkies and other non-functioning drug addicts. The impact this has on the families of those people is immense and harmful. This is most immediately apparent in the lives of children. As hard as it is to have a drug addict for a parent it is only made harder by the lack of services available. One easy conclusion for children to make is that society at large doesn’t care about them. But what does this have to do with work?

When the economy isn’t doing well people are anxious about keeping their jobs. When the economy isn’t doing well and there is no safety net people are so anxious that they’ll endanger their health and well-being to keep their jobs. This includes things like not demanding a respirator because your manager might fire you for asking them to comply with OSHA, or dumping chemicals into a drain even though you know you shouldn’t, I’ve seen these things happen on work sites I’ve been on and it has never been pleasant. I don’t expect that suddenly all workplaces are going to turn into an homage to “The Jungle,” rather slowly as the economy errodes away at the financial health of businesses owners and managers become more tense, more willing to cut off anyone who steps out of line. After all there are a lot of people without jobs who would happily comply with the bosses orders.

This also has an impact on what people expect in a job. Particularly if you work on contract. Things like asking for medical and dental coverage are off the table. As a contractor it’s up to me to provide those things for myself, even if the job market is too competitive for me to charge enough to afford such things. Having no insurance for the last year I often wondered if I would be able to get “charity” care that is offered by some Catholic hospitals (chances are I wouldn’t).

Crime everywhere
Seattle crime statistics show, amazingly, a 6% drop in major crimes, howeer there was an increase in car theft¹. I think this is a not too surprising. More people out of work means more people trying to get by. And most people aren’t violent. Unlike what some pundits would like people to believe the world isn’t populated by savages barely containing their violence. Rather it’s full of people trying to take care of themselves and their loved ones the best way they know how. So when push comes to shove and you’ve got no way to pay your phone bill it’s more likely, I think, that you’d steal something rather than kill someone. I suspect that the five finger discount is going to become a much more popular method of payment as the economy continues to flounder.

Sweet, blessed, backlash
Things are very different now than they were during the Great Depression. Yet there are similarities. The differences are too many to recount. Some of the highlights though, in some ways we are a slightly more just society (think civil rights movement), communications technology has radically altered people’s ability to find and disseminate information, the ability of moneyed interest to directly influence elections is immense, and the use of social science, particularly psychology, against the general population (advertising, political and otherwise) is at an all time high. It appears that the people who run Washington (the Koch brothers) are perfectly content to endanger the lives of everyone so long as they are making money. Their ideological claims ignore the vast amount of benefit that they have, and continue to, derive from public goods (roads, dams, police, teachers, etc). But they’ll continue to erode the social safety net until their is nothing left. Eventually, presumably, people will throw all of the idiots in DC out. There are a number of ways to do this but I think publicly funded “clean” elections are the key.

As for me, right now, I’m just trying to get through nursing school and figure out whether or not there will still be an unemployment check coming.

1. Seattle Police, 2011, “2010 Crime Statistics” http://www.seattle.gov/police/Crime/10_STATS.HTM

Food like so many things in our lives exist in many dimensions, it cannot be extracted out of any of them. It naturally follows that people go from zero to crazy in less than second when it comes to food. Like so many other topics, food sends people over the edge until they can no longer even think clearly. It becomes a strictly emotional issue that can conveniently be tied to other ideas that let us hide our emotions, like ethics, religion, and freedom.

Enter science! Although a great many people on both sides of the political spectrum don’t like to side with science when it doesn’t support their view, I still rely on it heavily. That said what does science and facts have to say about food? In the United States approximately one third of our land is used as agricultural grassland (USDA, 1997). As many people have pointed out before, that is a lot of land and energy being used to support an unnecessary dietary choice. The other side of that is the health benefits of not eating, or eating very little, meat.

But all of those things are well known and relatively old hat for anyone interested in food. What I find more interesting is the relationship with food. What I’ve got in mind here is confirmation bias. The long and the short of confirmation bias is that if you believe something you’re more likely to believe something that affirms that. Think on that for a minute. You’re more likely to be receptive to hear/see/think things that confirm what you’re already thinking than things that challenge you. This is part of why propaganda is so powerful. Sociology provides enough insight into what the general populace is thinking. By playing upon the worst parts of human psychology it’s relatively easy to whip people into frothing mass. Add to that people’s inclination to follow orders and you’ve got a big mess.

What’s all this have to do with food though? It breaks down like this. Advertising (propoganda) tells us how to eat. We internalize those messages. Those messages are part of our culture. What happens when science tells us we’re wrong? We ignore it, we downplay it, we feel guilty about it. We do everything except actually make a change in our life because it’s too damn hard to do the right thing in the face of everyone you know. The result, people form communities of like-minded individuals and then don’t want to talk to people who don’t think/feel/eat the same way. It’s all horribly obvious, stupid, and lethal. We all know, we’re all living it every day.

What’s a person to do? I propose that, like most things, we have to start with ourselves. I think the wikipedia page about the adage “pot calling the kettle black” offers a lot of useful ways to think about it. In short, clean-up your mess before you start criticizing someone else. In searching for a sustainable diet I’ve found these month long experiments to be helpful, even if they are crazy-making. Lately I’ve looked at the cookies in my freezer as if they held the answers to all of life’s problems.

That’s part of what prompted my own sugar-free experiment. The other part of it is that sugar cane production has been at the heart of a number of bloody workers struggles, most recently in Columbia. The long and the short, industry of all types are ready to kill you for a buck, consider where you’re putting your money.

Given the nature of this experiment I’ve been reading more about food lately. Good magazine has had a number of interesting articles on food politics and culture that have got me thinking. As I sit in my environmentally controlled cubicle waiting for my lunch break surrounded by restaurants with food from around the world what is it that I’m really hoping to accomplish? I don’t know.

For me pushing my boundaries has always been important. Also knowing where other people are coming from has made me less of a jerk. Having a friend who was recently diagnosed with diabetes has been a wake up call. Although he is doing fine I know a number of other people that aren’t. I particularly remember sitting in the rank overcrowded homeless advocacy office watching my “clients” drink 2-liters of soda for breakfast. While it’s easy to say that they’re responsible for the bad decision they’re making (they are) it’s also helpful and worthwhile to ask what about the culture that allows and even encourages that? I think it’s far more telling that as a society that sugar is a drug but we don’t treat it as one.  I think Jamie Oliver makes this point quite well:

But wait there’s more! This also means I probably can’t eat out, or at least not in 99% of the places I normally go. I don’t know that they put sugar in the broth at the pho place I go to but I can only assume that everyone everywhere assumes (rightly) that their exercise hating, car loving, out of breath because I walked from the car, American customers want sugar. I only assume this because when I was cooking in a Cuban restaurant that’s what the head chef taught all us lowly line cooks. And so now eating out is off limits for April. This still leaves me getting tea and being sanctimonious.

The reasons I want to ditch sugar:

1. Sugar causes cavities. I have no dental insurance. I know from past experience that dental pain is remarkably difficult to manage and distracting; I’d rather avoid it altogether.
2. Sugar can lead to diabetes. I’ve had several friends who have developed diabetes and not a single one of them has said to me, “Getting diabetes was worth consuming all that sugar.”
3. Sugar may have a negative impact on memory.

There are other less scientific reasons but those pretty well sum up what I’m thinking about. My primary method of measurement is completely unscientific, I’m going to see how well I pay attention at work and in other attention dependent activities. This will include, writing, practicing my concerntina, reading, and doing work stuff. And by “see” I mean ask myself if I feel any different.

Here goes nothing!

The pocked marked streets were cold and slightly damp in the early morning light. The deafening blasts largely went unnoticed by the man in the grey ¾ length wool coat. He knew that people were screaming but he was feeling light headed having a hard time paying attention to them. It was most certainly something rather trivial he was certain. He leaned against a lamp post trying to catch his breath. His walk into the city had been predictably precarious. He didn’t expect that he’d actually find food or work but couldn’t resign himself to sitting idly. He felt so tired despite having gotten a full night’s sleep. He never slept well these days.

He was trying to enjoy his brief respite at the long defunct light provider. He considered how long it would last. He was warm, almost comfortable. The smell reminded him of working in a kitchen and preparing the large baron’s of beef. He smiled wanly, reminiscing. He forced himself to look down at his hands and his entrails being held in them.

Since losing my last job (Now where did I put that thing?) I was quite confident that I would be OK. I always am. In strange and unexpected ways I find myself being met with opportunities. Like being offered food it is normally just a matter of saying, “Yes, please.” However I know this isn’t everyone’s experience. I have quite a few friends who are unemployed, have been for some time.

Why me and not them? A readily available answer is nepotism. It is as simple and complex as that. In exploring social networks work, the resultant opportunities, and how they come to be there are two traditional, boring, explanations. I’m not particularly interested in those. I don’t think that it is exclusively the power of social institutions that prop people up or keep them down. Nor do I think it is because some people work hard and others don’t. I think both of these explanations are valid to a degree, more or less depending on circumstance.

The prevalence of these two explanations (blame society vs. blame the individual) is because they are easily understood. The reality of course is that to try to separate background from individual choice is an artificial and naïve division. The silent and omnipresent voice of culture is always with us. Rather it is both.

I was having a discussion with my brother the other day about the nature of sexism and how it manifests in our lives. As the conversation carried on he said “…it’s one of those things that you’ll discover inside yourself for the rest of your life.” That is the God’s honest truth right there.

Through the continued observation of self I’ve been able to more and more clearly suss out what is mine and what is others. More importantly I’ve been able to see more and more clearly that while there are a great many injustices in the world that I would happily rail against, it is more useful to look out how I contribute to those things in my own life.

Many of the failures of idealistic movements in history can probably be attributed to a lack of self-awareness. It’s so much easier to blame someone else as being “the problem,” rather than looking around for how to be a solution.

With that I’ll leave you with a song that’s been stuck in my head. If only I could get it out. I know I’ve got pliers around here somewhere.