>On Oct 14, 2008, at 12:29 PM, shag wrote:
>
>>Oh, I'm planning on going b/c I want to know whether the food
>>actually tastes better -- and pollan has convinced me that
>>industrial organic food does not taste better.
>
>The milk sure tastes better, but maybe I'm a dupe. Besides, isn't it
>about the chemicals as well as taste?
>
>Doug
He was talking about industrial organic, a different beastie, that brings you asparagus in December -- from Brazil. That's the argument Pollan makes, yeah: the health benefits. He didn't really say whether he thought that the Polyfarm food tasted better. After all, what was all wrapped up in the taste was the culture that went with it: who you were eating with and why.
As for the health benefits, he's actually kinda squishy on that because he is responsible when it comes to the science. Even so, I don't care for the moralizing health nuttiness that this whole line of thought *tends* to pursue. I quoted this one before, from a cancer survivor:
"See, I was going to tie this all together with a big tirade on the bogus notion of health as a moral issue how people are always yelling at you to quit smoking or quit eating or quit procrastinating when you should be packing or quit doing anything the doing of which is considered a moral failure, ostensibly out of their concern for your health, but in reality because "health," in accordance with some convoluted Christian doctrine embedded in the cultural subconscious, has become a kind of yardstick by which conformity within the social order is measured, and how shaming people who are insufficiently obsessed with their cholesterol puts these concern trolls in a morally superior position and creates an underclass of "unhealthies" who have brought it on themselves through their blatant ingestion of Cheetos but I'm too exhausted from all the delicious smoking. Let's just say that if you ran into me at the coffeeshop and suggested that my self-indulgent punk rocker lifestyle caused my breast cancer, you wouldn't be the first. The idea that you, through some assiduously applied, sanctimonious personal health program, can "prevent" cancer, or death, or whatever, and that such practices should win you higher status in your tribe, is a fucking load of crap. "
heh. I generally don't care for her politics, but she's a good writer. yes.
http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2008/08/19/cardboard-jungle-causes-smoking/
we;ve gone down this road before, with me talking about my own health problems, and people shoving their moralizing crap at me about how X is bad for me, because they read it on the newstand checkout once, when they don't know what the *fuck* they are talking about. (e.g., the idea that my genetic heart disease is made worse by eating meat and butter and cream when, in fact, what really harms me is eating lots of fucking grain products. Irri-fuckin-tatin'.
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)