Political Correctness Versus Nutrition
John McCain’s Contingencies article about health care and already been getting attention for the part where he promises to deregulate health care to make it just like the deregulating banking system. But Brad DeLong wisely notes that there’s actually more laughable stuff than that in the article.
For example, McCain wisely observes that lifestyle habits are a crucial element of public health “The final important principle of reform is to rediscover our sense of personal responsibility to take better care of ourselves and our children.” But then he blames the absence of such information on . . . political correctness:
Parents who don’t impart to their children a sense of personal responsibility for their health, nutrition, and exercise–vital quality-of-life information that political correctness has expelled from our schools–have failed their responsibility.
Pining for the good old days you could call African-Americans “colored” and teachers weren’t afraid to say that Big Macs aren’t very healthy? What kind of nonsense is this? Meanwhile, it would be interesting if McCain actually had a policy proposal to improve public health education in the United States. That sounds like a worthwhile goal, and I’d like to hear politicians’ ideas about doing it. But McCain has no such policy. He just calls for “well-informed American families making practical decisions to address their imperatives for better health and more secure prosperity.” But that’s not what’s happening — what we need are ideas to change things.
29 Responses to “Political Correctness Versus Nutrition”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
September 20th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
I knew it! The reason Americans are fat is because those PC leftists are so in love with McDonald’s that they force information about what is healthy out of schools!
September 20th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
It’s say that this was a dig at fat-acceptance activism, but there’s really no reason to think that that particular movement has had much success changing educator’s minds on healthy eating.
(Nor is that really what they’re about in the first place.)
As for ideas, well… Republicans tend to have a nasty tendency of coming up with, and implementing, the most disastrous ideas imaginable.
I think a Republican party without an idea in its head is probably safer.
September 20th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
There’s an incoherence about Palin’s praise for Title IX too. The wingnut critique is that there’s some kind of liberal culture of non-competitive sport that is robbing children of their vital bodily fluids.
But the fast-foodification of schools has all to do with budgeting and the dodgy corporate incentives whereby there’s an upfront payment for installing soda machines or when McD’s has, say, fundraising nights for local schools in their outlets.
Follow the money.
September 20th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Pining for the good old days you could call African-Americans “colored” and teachers weren’t afraid to say that Big Macs aren’t very healthy? What kind of nonsense is this?
If MattY keeps saying odious and incredibly obviously wrong things like that, he won’t have enough credibility remaining for my plan to work.
I think I need to find someone else; maybe I’ll create some DailyKos accounts or something.
September 20th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
In fairness, i think the point McCain is making about political correctness isn’t crazy – you could argue that it is politically incorrect to censure obesity because of the chance it’ll make someone who’s overweight feel uncomfortable. Thus attempts to teach the consequences of healthy and unhealthy eating might be inhibited by people wishing to spare the feelings of fat kids and their fat parents. I’m not sure how important of an impact this has on obesity in reality, but it’s a much more sensical argument than blaming obesity on the inability of teachers to refer to black students as colored.
September 20th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
I’m not usually one to come to Johnny Mac’s defense, but…
The rest of the Contingencies article shows him to lack a real understanding of the issues and definitely a lack of understanding of the solutions. However, I’m not sure this paragraph is a complete throw-away. The cause he cites certainly seems wrong (although maybe things like no-child-left-behind and budget cuts have left nutrition and exercise out of schools), but there also seems to be a lack of knowledge transfer about nutrition from parent to child going on…
Blame all you want, but it doesn’t chant the fact that we still gotta get America back on the treadmill. Or at least running around the baseball diamond once in a while.
September 20th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
@Josh M: There’s a point to that, too.
There’s a question I’ve been pondering: I smoke and drink occasionally, but I also run marathons, so I’m in shape. Overweight friends of mine will comment on my smoking saying how it’s unhealthy and such. Meanwhile, I see them destroying their bodies by eating crappy food and not exercising. How is it that it’s socially acceptable to comment on someone’s smoking but not on someone’s hamburger?
September 20th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
But the fact is that it is the left that calls for nutritious whole-grain foods and the right that derides them for doing so. It is the left that calls for walkable cities and the right that derides them for doing so.
And just try to pry that cigarette from a rightwinger’s hands. It’s only socially acceptable to deride smoking on the left- not on the right. On the right it’s not socially acceptable to criticize fast food or deep-fried anything.
Someone should go all bipartisan on McCain and offer to co-sponsor a bill that would substitute walking paths for school buses, serve vegetarian meals in the lunchrooms, and prohibit fast-food joints within a half mile of public schools. We’d see soon enough who really wants healthy habits in our schools.
September 20th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Considering that it’s the states with the most conservative populations that are also the fattest, I don’t see why a good reason why a conservative candidate should be taken seriously on this issue.
September 20th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Yes, you’re oddly blind to McCain’s actual target: fat acceptance.
I’m not sure that this movement is best described as “politically correct”. The Right’s infatuation with its PC strawman makes it an attractive way to characterize the fat acceptance movement; but the truth of the matter is that the Right bashes PCism because it’s supposedly essentially leftist and, arguably, fat acceptance is ambiguous in terms of its right vs. left politics.
Specifically, I find that obesity is a very notable exception on the left with regard to tolerance. The people who wouldn’t otherwise be caught dead making hate-filled assertions about groups of people (other than conservatives and US southerners) feel quite free to label all overweight people as lazy slobs with decadent values. From my point of view, there is a connection between the notion of the virtue of tolerance and leftist and, in this context, the left’s exceptionalism about obesity is hypocritical. So McCain’s association of fat acceptance with leftism should be accurate, though it’s not.
At any rate, it’s not the case that fat acceptance has much to do with America’s obesity problem. Fat acceptance began as a social movement long before the obesity problem was widespread and, regardless, is such a rarely held value that it cannot explain the wide scope of American obesity. American obesity is most likely explained by the combination of changing diet and lower rates of physical activity. These are not essentially political, at least in terms of the culture wars, and thus McCain’s attempts to utilize the problem of obesity as a culture war club is cynical and misleading. But what else is new from this lying SOB?
September 20th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Sounds like we’ve got a nation of whiners whining about their health care. Buck up, people. When John McCain was a POW, he only dreamed of having your crappy health care and lack of insurance.
September 20th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
The people who wouldn’t otherwise be caught dead making hate-filled assertions about groups of people (other than conservatives and US southerners) feel quite free to label all overweight people as lazy slobs with decadent values.
Really? Who, exactly, are “the people” on “the left” you’re referring to here? What exactly did “they” say about overweight people?
September 20th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
“Really? Who, exactly, are ‘the people’ on ‘the left’ you’re referring to here? What exactly did ‘they’ say about overweight people?”
I’m not writing as a right-wing person setting up a strawman of the left. I know you’re eager for a “gotcha” on that, but I can’t oblige. I’m a leftist.
You want specific examples and I’m not going to provide you with them because it’s unnecessary and would probably lead to a digression about the specific people I’m using as examples.
I don’t know anyone personally with this attitude. But for a number of years I was a very active participant in a popular Internet community of very thoughtful, articulate people who are almost exclusively leftist/liberal. I felt at home there. But I was continually astonished at the virulence displayed by a considerable number of people against the overweight—and these people were mostly very leftist tolerant otherwise. I wasn’t aware of this strong sentiment, but I’ve seen it elsewhere on the web where people say what they really feel. There’s a strong movement among the left in the US for a cluster of lifestyle choices typified, for example, by the Pacific Northwest liberal. This group is quite focused upon an active lifestyle and diet and personal health as core prescriptive values, where “good” people conform to them and “bad” people do not.
I agree with many of those values, but I disagree with what seems to me to be a typical excess in vilification and a general failure of keeping things in perspective. I strongly suspect that the American penchant for puritanical moralizing is something that the left is no less immune to than the right; it just internalizes a different set of values in a typically puritanical and very judgmental fashion.
The language I’ve seen such people use against those they consider obese is really shocking, to me anyway, in its intensity and virulence. Things like “fat, lazy slobs” with rhetorical flourishes that display a certain zealous relish that, to me, is very reminiscent of right-wing “haters”.
I have no idea how large a portion of the American left-of-center these people are. Certainly not a majority—the majority don’t care that much. Probably the majority of the American left eats fast food. I certainly don’t mean to characterize the entire left in these terms.
But that fact that it’s a vocal minority signals to me that it’s a mistake to think, as McCain does, that the left in general has a strong value of tolerance for the overweight.
September 20th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Re: How is it that it’s socially acceptable to comment on someone’s smoking but not on someone’s hamburger?
Because eating is necessary while one can live an entire life without smoking and not notice any lack.
September 20th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who thought a steady diet of fast food was good for them. The problem is exactly in personal choices, and how well parents teach their kids. Matt seems to think some additional mandate on the already over-burdened public school system would be a good idea; McCain seems to think people being responsible might be a good idea. If we take Matt’s advice, which current things that are taught during the day should get less time as a result?
September 20th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
I think what McCain is decrying is that that you can’t call kids fat anymore.
Because if it was up to him, he’d sit them down and say “cut the bullshit, fatty”.
And all would be right with the world.
September 20th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Any McSame references to political correctness in the
public schools, is just a Republican dog-whistle to
those who want vouchers, paid for by the taxpayers,
to send their kids to Southern “academies” of their choosing..
September 20th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
Matt seems to think some additional mandate on the already over-burdened public school system would be a good idea; McCain seems to think people being responsible might be a good idea.
Hey, White Flight: is it a good idea for parents to participate a school fundraiser at the local McDonald’s?
September 20th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who thought a steady diet of fast food was good for them. The problem is exactly in personal choices, and how well parents teach their kids…McCain seems to think people being responsible might be a good idea.”
“Being responsible” seems like a lame way of putting it. I live in the rural south and I wouldn’t be hard pressed at all to find people who would find nothing wrong not just with Big-Macs, but meals consisting mainly in fatback, baloney, or gravy. In the poorer suburbs it’s Doritos, Ding-Dongs, and Coca-Cola. Our eating culture or cultures are saturated with junk-food. Many middle class white families try to resist the temptation to eat fatty, salty, or sugary foods. A lot of the rest of America doesn’t understand why and how these foods can be bad for you.
McCain’s talk of responsibility is also kind of annoying when we have school cafeterias lined with vending machines full of junk food and soda pop. My high school made no effort at all to make sure kids were eating an actual lunch and not buying Twinkies from the school (at a nice profit margin). My guess is that if an actual parent acted that way around dinner time they’d be scolded by John McCain for being irresponsible (as well they should be). And yet schools–which have kids in some cases for two meals, and for half their waking hours–across the country are doing it right now.
September 20th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
“you could call African-Americans “colored” ”
where the hell did that come from?
The descent of Matthew’s writing into idle fatuousness continues apace.
September 21st, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Ya John McCain is over the TOP is his health care plans. The Iowa Democrats put out a video where he not only mixes up all the facts, but he also consistently talks about “Shaq’s Challenge”—
quote from the video “Shaq Challenged ME”
it’s pretty funny– check it out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3JVzb9E0Ms
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:46 am
As a fat person, I can decidedly assure John McCain that no one is letting “political correctness” keep them from condemning my body. Not in school. Not while reading the newspaper. Not while watching TV. Not while walking down the street. The stigmatization of fat has not gone anywhere. Its just continuing its decades long failure to make fat people into not-fat people. Now, I’d respond to that by questioning whether this is the approach we need at all, and looking for ways to serve the health of fat people instead of just telling them to be thin. John McCain sees this and decides that the problem is that he’s not yelling loud enough. Surely, if I heard I wasn’t supposed to be fat, I wouldn’t be fat. Must be those PC boogeymen covering my ears.
My friends, that’s just not the case. Trust me, fat acceptance isn’t remotely that influential. The policy of McCain (and, to be fair, Obama) just isn’t working. McCain, though, is the one who is creating a conspiracy the must surely be thwarting him rather than take responsibility for the failure of these policies to achieve their stated goals.
March 11th, 2009 at 5:11 am
Great post, thanks for the info
March 11th, 2009 at 7:48 am
I bookmarked this site. Thank you for good job!
March 22nd, 2009 at 7:12 am
tramadol
Great site. Good info
April 2nd, 2009 at 8:48 am
Great site. Good info
buy cheap viagra