Stop forcing veg down our throats: Despite the failure of the five-a-day message, policymakers are
determined to pursue an individual remedy for a collective ill
....Scientific advice as divided as this in, say, a paper about climate change, would be considered too diffuse to take seriously. But in the realm of individual behaviour, nothing is too flimsy or too disputed, nothing too unreasonable or too expensive, no goal too unlikely to espouse. The difference between what is considered reasonable as a collective responsibility – almost nothing – and what is considered reasonable as an individual responsibility – almost anything – is laughable. Over a week, 560g of vegetables a day (I'm going with the anti-fruit lobby, who make the most sense) amounts to about 4kg. You're eating on a budget, you say? You're choosing between heating and eating? You're skipping meals so your children can eat? You're going to a foodbank? Not to worry; haven't you seen those plastic bowls outside the newsagents? You can get three green peppers for a quid!...
...At the start of the year, a report from the Overseas Development Institute cited the Change 4 Life campaign specifically (which advises five a day) as an example of a public health message that had no discernible effect. An unhealthy diet is about more than poverty and time poverty; to counter these "healthy" messages with financial realities is, in a way, to play into the hands of the narrative beneath it all – you say, "it's hard to make this specific healthy choice when you have no money," and an Anne Milton or Norman Tebbitty smirk will come back: "Well, obviously … if they made good choices, they wouldn't be poor." April's The Psychologist (the British Psychological Society's magazine) is a special austerity issue, looking at the impact of the cuts across a range of situations, from academia to mental health to the council estate, so this is the running theme.
It is easier to conceptualise the world as a fair place, in which individuals get their just deserts, than to accept that there are systemic problems, games rigged in which some win big and others will never win. In boom times, this individualism is visible in a febrile therapy culture, in which, Manhattan-style, everyone is involved in a talking cure. In a bust, as the Midlands Psychology Group points out, "The quasi-religious belief in the power of the individual to overcome their own problems, embedded deeply in Anglo-American culture, and within much of psychotherapy itself, has long been used by the powerful as a justification for disciplining the poor."
So, what, if not a mere knowledge deficit and discipline failure among the poor, does cause obesity? The anthropologist Elizabeth Throop points to a culture in deep conflict – idealising thinness on one hand while characterising anorexia as the result of "low self-esteem"; depicting, in films, diets that will definitely make you fat (or "obesogenic behaviours"
while the characters eating them simultaneously deride obesity and are, themselves, very thin. An obesity systems influence diagram depicts the interplay between social psychology, individual psychology, physiology, food consumption, food production and the activity environment; it's too dense to summarise. Some of it I don't even believe (suspecting strongly that it came from self-reported calorie intake). And yet we're mad to fixate on the losers in this obesogenic world. We should be fascinated by the people who create it, protect its methods; the handful who win from the processes that create obesity. What makes them tick? Why can't a manufacturer make a pro-social decision every once in a while? Why is processed food so bad for us? Who gains from that?
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/02/forcing-veg-throat-five-a-day
NB: I rarely post OPs in GD; and am not doing so now because of any dislike of veg(!), but because it's summarizing one of things that I hate most in post-Thatcher/Reagan society: this 'quasi-religious belief in the power of the individual to overcome their own problems.... used by the powerful as a justification for disciplining the poor' (and the ill, and the bullied, and all seen as 'unsuccessful')
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