Fast Food Nation

i wanted to share a blog i have been following for some time now- Sistah Vegan Project with Breeze Harper.

i really love how she analyzes EVERYTHING. exploring the the spaces in which issues intersect with others brings an entire new perspective on so many things. she talks about how race intersects with diet, how gender issues intersect with race, how both of those intersect with class issues and struggles, how class struggles intersect with diet, their connections with capitalism, its connection with the environment and our treatment of the earth....it's a new concept to think that all these things are connected and to hear and understand how they're connected.

i was just in a discussion on facebook about a physician's letter to the president asking him to consider the people that abuse the system when thinking about making healthcare universal. and the physician said something along the lines of "...the patient informed me they only eat fast food and smoke a pack of cigarettes a day...." (in order to show how many poor choices the patient was making that contributes to their ailments...leaving to doctor to question why they should have to pay for someone's healthcare like this). the fast food portion stuck out to me and i thought about Breeze Harper and her criticisms of the system and how they relate to our food choices.

around January, i stopped eating meat, and soon after that i stopped eating at fast food restaurants. theres a million and one reasons i stopped eating meat, and i may talk about that in another post, but this post is more focused on why i stopped eating fast food.

for one, most of them don't serve a meal (side-dishes, yes, but not full meals, with the exception of salads) without meat in it, so that was my personal issue. second, once meat is removed from the diet, you (well, i) become more conscious of the food groups and what you should be intaking. not getting enough iron or protein could be the difference between having energy and being light-headed just walking up a flight of stairs (not the worst case scenario). and many of these fast food restaurants do not offer fruits and vegetables (again, with the exception of salads), making their menu pretty dim for me. those are the initial reasons, but more importantly, i stopped eating at them because of what they stand for, what they promote and who they target.

i did a post a while back about a book i read that was a catalyst for my diet change and connecting that with another book i read that spoke about the staggering statistics on health (or lack thereof) in black and brown communities.

what they stand for: these companies stand for and benefit from money money and more money. Eating Animals and the documentary Food, Inc. illustrate how fast food chains have taken over the meat industry and made it what it is today (i.e. an industry that raises sick, diseased animals for the cheapest amount of money to produce the highest amount of profits while treating farmers, factory workers, restaurant employees and consumers like shit). the demand for meat has skyrocketed based almost solely on these fast food chains. they don't stand to feed the hungry (because TONS of their food is thrown away daily. i used to work at McDonalds. trust me.), they don't stand to help anyone's diet. they stand simply to take your money at the least cost to them. eating at these places is filling some white man's pocket and nothing more.

what they promote: fast food chains promote shitty, nutritionally vapid, cheap (cheap monetarily and qualitatively)....shit. lol...i don't know any other word to describe their food. theres a few people taking a photo a day or carrying around months or year old hamburgers and fries from McDonalds that AREN'T AGING. what kind of bread or meat doesn't mold or break down in some fashion? they promote illness, obesity, and all around bad health. we're making some corporation fatter while we somewhere down the line develop type 2 diabetes and hope we don't have to get one of our fingers or limbs cut off.

who they target: they target low-income families , most of which are black and brown communities. in my last post i talked about the Church's Chicken commercials with the black woman selling chicken with her exaggerated accent and neck twisting taking me back to the images of mammy. but look at any fast food restaurant commercials, who are in them (Popeye's, Church's, Checkers, and McDonald's)? whats that-oh, black people and brown people? whats that i hear-hip-hop? and urban slang? did she just say "chile"? oh....and they're dancing? ....seriously?

if the top paid marketing companies that design these commercials were to lay out their plans and reasoning behind why they chose who they chose for the commercials, why they have certain music playing and why the script sounds like it was written by a high schooler from brooklyn....everyone would be up in arms about how racist it is, yet when you see the product...i guess it becomes blurry for some of us.

the book, Killing the Black Body is also a good book that talks about mainly forced sterilization of colored women and reproductive rights, but it also goes into the history of health and takes it back to how food has basically been another factor in the demise of black and brown communities. during slavery, food was used to keep the slave alive just enough so that he/she could work, make babies, or serve the slave owner. eating lard, gravy and other scraps of menial food was what they had to eat to survive. can we not see the correlation between that time and black and brown people STILL eating only what can get us by and not things that aid in our betterment and longevity?

this is as much an individual issue as it is a societal. we have to be the ones to demand that these companies start offering better food options, to children especially. how much of the blame does the parent own when, for example, they have only 10 dollars to last them the rest of the week?-theres McDonald's EVERYWHERE (convenience) and their dollar menu allows for you to spend $3 (cheap) on a meal when anywhere else would be at least double that. and the company knows this. as much money as McDonald's, for instance, is making, there is no way they could not afford to offer fresh fruits and vegetables or maybe just better quality food like...i don't know...REAL meat.

the capitalistic system we live in is as much to blame for unhealthy eating choices as our individual will is. when this is the food we've been raised on (because our parents were working class), what we know, what our culinary preferences have come to love, it's no wonder black and brown communities have to many illnesses, diseases, and deaths based on factors that could have been avoided like our diet. these restaurants are the enemies, but the change that needs to happen is going to have to start with us before they will change. we have to make a dent somewhere in their pockets or raise enough awareness around the negatives of these fast food chains in order for something to change. although you as an individual can make a start by not eating from these restaurants or doing it less often.

comment. think. change your eating habits. analyze your diet. prioritize. criticize.

also, check out a post i did a while back on food. and some hip hop on food.

Crack Babies

sometimes when i'm reading a book, the author will mention other books that are written more in depth about whatever subject they may be tackling, and i usually will look those books up...and so on and so on. right now, i'm still reading Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington and in it, she has mentioned the book Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts, which i've also began to read.
the area that they overlap in is when they're talking about forced sterilization and the myth of the "crack baby".

this is what Washington had to say about crack babies:

"African Americans and whites use cocaine at similar rates, but blacks are twice as likely as whites to use it in crack form. however, 80% of drug users are white, and in raw numbers, twice as many whites as blacks use cocaine. this means that white crack users should be twice as easier to find, but most peoples' image of the crack user is informed by media accounts that had focused nearly exclusively on African American users' infants, dubbed "crack babies" are always portrayed as black. during eighteen years as a news and science editor at metropolitan dailies and national magazines, i have never seen a published photograph of a white crack baby.

...None of this [exaggerated "facts" about crack babies] had been demonstrated by research and none of this was true. although exposure to cocaine in the uterus can damage a fetus, a baby cannot be born addicted to cocaine, as children are sometimes born addicted to other narcotic drugs. moreover, the "diagnosis" of "crack baby" is based upon a woman's positive drug test, not upon the baby's clinical picture, so it makes no distinction between mothers who smoked crack habitually and those who did so rarely. there is no such medical entity as a crack baby."

this is something i have never heard before. like anyone else growing up in the '90's, i remember the stories about crack babies, screeching like animals in dark corners of the hospital, resisting any type of affection and ultimately doomed for life. and i had this idea until i read these books. i've since done some research on it, and all of what i have found seems to back Washington and Roberts up.
here is what Roberts had to say about this myth:

"...there is no good evidence to support this caricature of the crack baby. Nevertheless, the frightening image spawned a cottage industry of angry letters to the editor calling for harsh measure to keep crack addicts from having babies. 'Reducing her welfare payments will not stop this woman from having babies.' wrote one commentator. 'The only way to stop her is the dreaded 'S' words-involuntary sterilization, either surgically or with Norplant. the other alternative is to allocate our resources to caring for unlimited numbers of crack babies while other children continue to be without health care.' the figures cited are so astronomical that it seems as if most Black children in America are crack babies impaired by a host of defects.
The stories about hopelessly defective crack babies represent a new kind of biodeterminism. Instead of transmitting immutable deficiencies through their genes, these poor Black mothers inflict similar damage in utero, 'callously dooming a new generation to a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority.' The negative predictions easily become self-fulfilling prophecies when adoptive parents are afraid to take home a crack baby, teachers expect the children to be incaable of learning, and legislators believe it is pointless to waste money on programs for children who cannot possibly achieve.

Killing the Black Body is mainly about reproductive rights and how controlling them has been just another attempt of many to break down the black community by the government in attempts to forcibly sterilize black women (although it should be noted that this has happened at the same rate to Native American women link 1 and link 2 and Latina women link 1 and link 2 ).

here are the links that i found to back up their arguments:
NY Times: The Epidemic that wasn't.
The Myth of the Crack Baby
What about the Drug Babies?
From Crack Babies to Normal Kids

the gist of what they are saying is that the idea of the crack baby was the working of faulty experiments and studies along with exaggerated facts. the only test that was done during the time this myth was popularized as done with only 23 women with no control group to speak of. it neglected to note that many women who use crack cocaine also use it in conjuction with tobacco, alcohol and other drugs, making the tests and statistics on "crack babies" inconclusive. and, like one of the links i posted talks about, the follow-up tests were pretty much self-fulfilling prophecies.
these children weren't forming attachments to the nurses, not because they were monsters, but because these nurses were rejecting these babies assuming they would reject their advances! these babies were put in dark corners, lacked direct eye contact with nurses, and were treated not as babies, but as monsters. thus, adding to their developmental challenges. and the follow-up tests did not account for the impoverished lifestyles many of these children were living under. some children were noted as being slow to develop basic motor skills, such as grasping eating utensils. what was ignored was the fact that some of these children did not eat on a regular basis, and when they did eat, it may have been from a trash can...in which case they did not need utensils.

the insinuation (if not overt reasoning) these two authors put forth for why this crack baby myth was propelled by some doctors, nurses, and the media was to push legislations against women of color, to cut welfare programs or the funding behind services like WIC, to paint women on welfare in a more negative light, and to act as reasoning behind forced sterilization. and seeing how this was the 1980's, and many of these doctors and nurses should have seen the glaring disparities in the crack baby entity, it is not hard to surmise that there must have been ulterior motives.

the point is not to show that crack has no effect on a fetus. of course it does. however, it is not anymore than tobacco, and possibly less harmful than alcohol abuse.

here is a video i found on youtube about crack babies that looks like it was filmed i the early '90's that further shows these stereotypes and uninformed assumptions.

comment. think. criticize. always questions the media.

STRENGTH

I felt compelled yet again to share an excerpt from the book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington:

“The censuses of the postbellum decades not only perpetuated but also expanded upon the racial libels of the 1840 documents. However, their principal foci were physical illnesses, not mental. By the time of the eight census, that of 1860, superintendent Joseph C. G. Kennedy was predicting the certain demise of black Americans. By the census of 1890, the black birth rate had fallen in relation to that of whites. Life insurance companies considered blacks uninsurable and black extinction was actually predicted for the year 2000. These predictions dwelled upon the inherent and immutable physical inferiority that doomed the negro and offered frequent predictions of his extinction.”

“...black extinction was actually predicted for the year 2000...0.”

Wow. Read that once more. Black Americans were supposed to have been wiped out ten years ago...think about that.

This brings to mind these lyrics from a Jamiroquai song-“Stillness in Time”
“…and I’m never sad/and I’m always glad/anything you give me today/ I will be thankful for/people find it hard to be strong/ cuz they don’t know where they’re coming from…”

words to sum this up?
strength. tenacity. perseverance. fortitude. vigor.

comment. think. obliterate your limitations.

J. Marion Sims

so this is the second post for 'Black History Month' post.
this one is somewhat about a post i did earlier. its about J. Marion Sims.
i'm getting more into this book-Mecical Apartheid that i've spoken of in some earlier posts, but this chapter i just finished is dying to be heard. it mainly goes into Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey-3 of Sims' most tortures human experiments, but it also goes into detail about just how things like this were justified as well as the blatant contradictions of some of the most distinguished ethnologists and scientists of the time. this excerpt is more about the latter.

...physicians believed that blacks naturally harbored diseases, notably syphilis, that threatened the health of whites. each of these common beliefs served as rationales for abusive medical experimentation. one of the most tenacious beliefs was that blacks did not feel pain or anxiety, which excused painful surgical explorations without anesthesia on blacks. Dr. Charles White declared that "[blacks] bear surgical operations much better than white people and what would be the cause of insupportable pain for white men, a Negro would almost disregard...[i have] amputated the legs of many Negroes, who have held the upper part of the limb themselves." and when Kentucky surgeon Efraim McDowell wrote of gynecologic advances that were achieved by exquisitely painful surgeries, Dr. James Johnson, editor of the London Medical and Chirurgical Review, sneered, "When we come to reflect that all women operated upon in Kentucky, except one, were Negresses and that these people will bear anything with nearly if not quite as much impunity as dogs and rabbits, our wonder is lessened."

this excerpt is about J. Marion Sims and his "test subjects/victims":

As a plantation doctor, Sims attended many children, but he used only the black infants as subjects for dangerous experiments in tetany, a long-misunderstood children's neuromuscular disease characterized by cunvulsions and muscle spasms. the tetany that was epidemic among enslaved children was actually the result of severe calcium, magnesium, and vitamin D deficiency caused by the displacement of skull bones during birth.
he took a sick black baby from its mother, made incisions in its scalp, then weilded a cobbler's tool to pry the skull bones into new positions:... Sim's attempt to "open" the skull was based upon a scientific myth that the bones of black infants' skulls, unlike white infants', grew together quickly, leaving the brain no space to grow and develop. this premature closing of the black skull was held to cause low intelligence and perpetual childishness in adult blacks. when the infants died, Sims castigated the sloth and ignorance of their mothers and the black midwives who attended them.
... [Anarcha's] condition, vesicovaginal fistula, afflcited many women, blacks and white, who survived difficult childbirth. however, enslaved women had an especially high rate of this complication. despite physicians' tendency to blame "the ingnorance and obtrusive interference of our plantation accoucheurs and nigger midwives," Sims himself conceded that the rates of vesicovaginal fistual had risen when obstetricians began using forceps.
the condition may well have been due to a confluence of malnutrition, forceps use, and Anarcha's youth. the vitamin D deficiency that was very common among malnourished slave women caused bone defects, including a small pelvis. this made birth difficult, especially in underdeveloped pelvises of very young women, and slave women became mothers approximately three years earlier than did white women.
...He made [enslaved] women undress completely, then kneel on hands and knees while he and several physicians took turns inserting a special speculum he had devised to open the women's vaginas fully to view.
the surgeries themselves were terribly painful. not only had sims to close the unnatural openings in the ravaged vaginal tissues; he had to make the edges of these openings knit together. he opted to abrade, or "scarify" the edges of the vaginal tears every time he attempted to repair an opening. he then closed them with sutures and saw them become infected and reopen, painfully, every time.

this entire chapter details very relevant facts about what happened to his test subjects as well as test subjects of many medical "professionals" of the time.

i found a website that goes into detail about vasicovaginal fistulas. it has a video of the repair, definitely DID NOT watch (reading about it is bad enough, why would i want to watch a video...??) nor am i encouraging you to watch it. i thought that the drawings at the bottom were very informative.

i found it even more interesting that with all the torture he inflicted upon HUMAN BEINGS (whether he agreed with that or not), he is still celebrated as one of the fathers of gynecology. i googled him, and i found a foundation that was founded in his honor. it gives scholarships to gynecology students and the like, and their recollections of him as a doctor are quite porous. you can see here that his foundation make no mention of his early test subjects-the ones that he experimented on dozens of times, ones that made him famous, ones that brought him from a less than mediocre novice at medicine to a prominent "woman doctor" ("gynecology" wasn't used until later). and why?
well, its possible that the individuals that erected this foundation have no knowledge of his early "practices", or its possible that they know, yet would find it a bit immoral to have a foundation in the name of the vile, racist sadist that he was. theres actually a statue that stands in honor of him in NYC.

i may start a petition to have it taken down, burned, and then shat on. we'll see...
i found the following photo on a google search. found it fitting of my sentiments.


comment. converse. read the book. be thankful of your current situation whatever it may be. how is it that descendants of enslaved people still exist? mind boggling...
also, i found these website that give due respect to Sims' victims:
Anarcha 1, Anarcha 2, AND!!! i found this website that uses theater in respect to Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey.

Human Experiments

"Sims stands aloof, arms folded, one hand holding a metroscope (the forerunner of the speculum) as he regards the kneeling woman in a coolly evaluative medical gaze. his tie and morning coat contrast with her simple servants' dress, head rage, and bare feet.
the painting, commissioned and distributed by the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical house more than a century after the surgeries as one of its A History of Medicine in Pictures series, takes telling liberties with the historical facts. Thom portrays Betsey as a fully clothed, calm slave woman who kneels complacently on a small table, hand modestly raised to her breast, before a trio of white male physicians. two other slave women peer around a sheet, apparently hung for modesty's sake, in a childlike display of curiosity.
this innocuous tableau could hardly differ more from the gruesome reality in which each surgical scene was a violent struggle between the slaves and physicians and each woman's body was a bloodied battleground. each naked, unanesthetized slave woman had to be forcibly restrained by the other physicians through their shrieks of agony as Sims determinedly sliced, then suctured her genitalia. the other doctors, who could, fled when they could bear the horrific scened no longer. it then fell to the women to restrain on another."


this is the excerpt from a book i'm reading right now entitled Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington. she describes in the introduction, how she wanted to have this photo on the cover of the book, but was barred by the publishing company. and this, she felt, was the same type of covering up many people have done to the history of medical experimentation in this country as the artist (Robert Thom) of this photo has done to the reality of Sim's experiments and subjects.