Food Porn (30 Sept. 2013)

            As often noted, it says something significant and disturbing that commercials on CNN and the other cable-news channels trend toward advertising catheters, large cars, Cialis and other drugs for old people: the audience analysis for the news channels is, apparently, the same that has newspapers' placing their editorials right after the obituaries. What I've been noticing lately, though, is the commercials on the day-time re-runs of the fake news shows: the restaurant, cooking-school, fast food, booze, soft-drinks, and candy commercials with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

            I'm on the treadmill or elliptical trainer, switching from MSNBC to Comedy Central to my iPod, with the TV on mute and trying really hard to deny my ears and eyeballs to the hucksters during the interminable commercial breaks. But up there before those eyeballs are incredible images, impossibly perfect images, of impossibly perfect food.

            I'm trying to diet and get exercise, and I've just heard a very clever Colbert riff on Michelle Obama's plugging for Americans' drinking water (as an alternative to sugary drinks), and then I find myself staring at a double cheeseburger with bacon, slowly dripping what looks like extra-rich bourbon barbecue sauce. If I ate that thing I'd have to spend another hour on the treadmill and have a salad and fiber bar for dinner, and I'd still be over my "Lose It!" calorie allowance — no shit; there's an exclamation mark in the name — I'd still be over my calorie allowance for the day.

            CNN and MSNBC are catering to old farts, and Fox-News is trawling for old farts with anger issues. Comedy Central et al. are going for younger demographics, who are apparently strongly into highly fattening food, or, perhaps, can be tempted to buy highly fattening food.

            This is not good.

            In terms of minute-by-minute content, the youngsters are getting better news than their elders, but they're also getting the message that it's not only normal behavior but downright cool to eat a 1300-calorie superburger, washed down with beer or sugar-cola and followed with a casual chaser of M&Ms and Cheetos.

            In throwing Eve and Adam out of the Garden, God pronounces a severe sentence on them, but He has his harshest words for the serpent that tempted them. Arguing "On Liberty" in 1859 — he's in favor of it — John Stuart Mill allows that society probably has to tolerate a lot of, as I'll put it, whoring and «john-ing», but we are freer, if we choose, to regulate pimps or at least bring down upon them social disapproval. It's one thing to get your rocks off illicitly; it's another to tempt people into such behavior and make your living at it.

            In terms of US public health, pimps who provide STD testing and condoms are less of an threat than the hucksters pushing to young viewers a Tuesday-night special of a bottomless pasta bowl, all-you-can-eat breadsticks, and a turtle cheesecake dessert. For that matter, small-time drug deals are probably less of a threat to public health than the hucksters pushing to young viewers deliciously seductive food porn.

            SUGGESTION TO FTC, FCC, AND OTHER REGULATORY AGENCIES ALPHABETICAL: Do require calorie disclosure on menus and flashed across the screen in all those ads.


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ADDENDUM: As often, the satirists were on to a trend way before more earnest folk such as I. See Trey Parker and Matt Stone's South Park espisode 14.14, 17 November 2010, "Creme Fraiche" — not commercials but full-frontal Food Network!

The Serving Size of an American Pizza Is a Pizza (11 Dec. 2014)

   I originally planned to do a rather formal, moderately scholarly essay on John Stuart Mill's "Principle of Liberty" from his monograph On Liberty, and its relevance for publishing calorie counts on restaurant menus (and such). Then I figured that between the holidays and work coming in and an ant infestation, I'd just post something short and simple, and something just written out as a post, not drafted first and then copied and pasted into a blog post. Which I did, and then woke up in the middle of the night and decided to add a head note, and for the first time in years lost an entire piece of writing.
            So to begin again, informally, and putting off the meditation on liberty and nutrition — and delaying a bit my throwing in way more than my two cents on the kidnapping and torturing of terrorist detainees (I'm writing in midish-December of 2014) — and putting off further getting out holiday cards and present; to begin again: The portion size of a pizza in America is, for many of us, one pizza.
            At least it was for me when on paper-grading marathons when I taught and was and remains for me the serving I'm going to eat through within a few hours while coming up against deadlines for the work I'm doing in retirement.
            So a couple days ago I ordered in from Pizza Man Dan, a small, thin-crust, BBQ chicken pizza, with red onions and cilantro, "But hold the cashews." (That wasn't a special order; in California, that's a menu item.)
            What is new and different since my last marathon work session is that I now have the "LoseIt" app and record my food and exercise and discovered that the two slices of pizza I ate when just getting started was about half the calories LoseIt calculated I should be eating in a day.
            Again, this was not a hearty Chicago deep-dish pizza nor the sort of meat-lover's wet dream I used to order before I stopped eating mammals. This was just two slices of thin-crust that I scarfed up hot out of the box before I sat down for an actual meal.
            By the end of that initial attack on the pizza, with only half of it down and on the way to digestion, I was pretty much at my calories for the day: more exactly the calories if all I was doing was the marathon at the computer and hadn't hit the elliptical trainer.
            Now pizza is a most-excellent food. As I used to tell my friends, you dip a well-topped pizza slice in a bit of Metamucil, and you've got all your food groups: carbohydrates, cheese, tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, animal protein, and — if you actually did throw in or on some Metamucil, or ordered a whole wheat crust) — you've got your fiber.
            So it would be handy for poor, thin people to know that pizza is a wise thing to buy to get good caloric bang for the buck. If you're going to have only one meal today, a well-stuffed pizza (on sale or in the dumpster) would be a sensible investment.
            If you're reading on-line blogs, however, you are probably not desperate for calories and dumpster diving, but you are probably in need of information about just how food-energy rich — high calorie — are some of the things (most of the things?) most Americans are cramming into our bodies.
            We need those calorie counts on menus and with prepared food generally, and we need them running across the bottom of our TV screens when evil commercial geniuses are tempting us to eat like we mean it with food porn.
            And purveyors of that food, and more so the food porn, should indeed be compelled to supply that information.
            How to square that sort of compulsion with the great good of Liberty — that will be the subject of a later blog.
            After the rush. After the holidays.

            Maybe after I order in another pizza ….