Nate Knows Nada

Yesterday, the Times ran an article on the low-carb food revolution
sweeping the food industry.  I don’t count my carbs, and the
article gave me further reason to avoid doing so.  Here’s the
quote that shocked me the most:

“None of this was really available,” Ms. Lipson said. “The amount of
stuff that’s available now, it’s amazing,” she said, poring over
pancake mixes, pasta and chocolate bars. Asking for “something like
rice,” she was directed to a row of canned low-carb mashed potatoes in
a variety of flavors. “Garlic parmesan?” she asked her husband. “You
like garlic parmesan?”

The price: $6.99 for seven ounces.

No one is claiming that eating low-carb is cheap. Robert Hall, 30, was
buying nacho cheese and cool ranch twists by CarbFit, some baked
cheese, low-carb soft tacos made by a company called Adios Carbs, and,
for his girlfriend, low-carb brownies. He left with $122.18 in low-carb
food. “I spent 300 bucks last time,” he said. “This was just a
supplemental visit.”

So, it’s massively expensive to eat this way.  Which makes me
more likely to want to follow the general model of portion control if I
wanted to lose weight.  Or — and I will if today’s beautiful
weather holds — spend more time on my bicycle.

But there’s a social justice concern here, too.  Following a
low-carb diet leads to bad use of the earth’s resources.  Since
most Americans bulk up on their protein with meat, this means that we
require more meat.  Meat — ususally from poultry or cattle —
requires lots of resources to produce, in terms of feed, waste products
generated (effluent and methane), and slaughter anddistribution
facilities.  (I think the general ratio is about 7-10 units of
feed to produce a unit of cow and about 3.5-5 units of feed for
chicken.)  It requires many more agricultural and economic
resources to sustain a massive scale diet shift like the one that we
are seeing right now.  Meat has a greater impact on the
environment that vegetable and grain matter, and the shift from plant
production to meat production also has a disproportionate effect upon
the world’s poor, who can’t afford the indulgence of meat.  Only a
wealthy country can even consider such a diet.

Political people don’t generally like civil disobedience, unless it’s for a cause that they support.  Witness the spectacle going on in my former domicile, San Francisco. 
(And enjoy the punctuation problem that kept the restraining order from
going out.  It makes this former editor and current teacher’s
heart absolutely warm.)  Conservative religious groups are foaming
at the mouth at the act of mass civil disobedience to California’s
unjust law defining marriage as only occurring between one man and one
woman.  But just a few months ago, when Roy Moore’s Ten
Commandments monstrosity was being fought over in Alabama, civil
disobedience of the law was all the rage with this same group of people.

My point above is not profound.  People are hypocrites,
especially when it comes to questions of power or perceived
power.  But it still surprises even cynical me when hypocrisy
occurs in public and we all see it.  Same idea’s going on with all
the hullaballoo about “activist judges” — they only seem to be
“activist” when they rule against you; when they’re for you, then the
judges are just upholding the rule of law.

But the members of the groups opposing gay marriage and acts of
civil disobedience against an unjust regime, such as in San Francisco,
should remember the words of the teacher they profess to revere:
“You hypocrite!  First remove the plank of wood from your own eye,
and then you will see clearly to remove the speck of dust from your
brother’s eye.”

Still, I am never surprised by hypocrisy in American (or other)
politics, by all parties involved, whether Howard Dean types or George
W. Bush.  Politics simply cannot bring out the best in people
without also bringing out the worst in them also.

Ryan makes the following observation:

It’s quite sad that we don’t have similar public religious studies education in America. I envy all my colleagues who had the benefit of a rigorous Catholic school education, steeped in theology and religious history. Public school kids would do well to learn a little religious history. In my public school we learned nothing about religion—I was forced to study on my own, borrowing philosophy and religious history texts from Olympia Public Library. I was both unsurprised and appalled when I saw this post over at Crooked Timber:

I’ve wondered before about this, in part because of a course in Classical Social Theory that I teach. I usually take a detour for a lecture before we read some Max Weber, because a chunk of the class (upper-level undergraduates) will have no clear idea what the Reformation was. This surprised me when it first happened, but now I anticipate it. Last year I got a very nice evaluation from an evangelical Protestant student saying, in part, “Thanks for respecting my views and for all the information about where Protestantism came from! I never knew that!” She would wear “Jesus Loves You” t-shirts to class and really livened up our discussions about Durkheim.

Now, I hardly expect all evangelicals to teach their children their own religious history, outside the occasional hagiographic sketch of the sect founder. To expect more would be absurd. But is it really that unreasonable to wish that any child coming out of a basic high school education in America would at least have a good idea of what the Reformation was? Ugh.

I envy my Catholic sistren and brethren too.  I was raised in the evangelical environment, and everything was filtered through that lens, and so there was a decided lack of historical background or context.  Even though I went to religious schools, I had to do the same thing as you — borrow texts in philosophy, theology, religious history, and the sociology of religion from acquaintances and libraries.

Americans are possibly the only nation I can think of with this simultaneous attraction and great fear of religion.  And we’re the poorer for it: we know very little about other religions (and if that threatens one’s faith to know about other religions, then it’s a pretty poor faith one has; anything else is probably intellectually dishonest), and we know very little real information about our own religion (whatever that is.

“Queens do not play. They will fucking kill you.
Lesbians know how to throw a punch that will leave a very large bruise,
and aren’t opposed to kicking protesting men right in the balls. The
underrepresented, unvoiced, ignored part of our population, the great
many that make up the Cho Army are something you are unaware of, and
pretty much the gang not to fuck with.”

Margaret Cho repsonds in her blog to a group of conservatives who
threatened to picket her performance at a Texas nightclub.  One of
the protestor leaders is also one of the people who sent her racist,
mysoginist, homophobic e-mail.  So his contribution ot the public
discourse is on a par, well, with the KKK.  So I feel free to
ignore his ilk, even to the point of telling such people that I don’t
listen to or consider their viewpoints valid.  (No, I wouldn’t
move to restrict his right to say whatever; but I’m exercising my right
to not listen and to ignore.)

Anyway, here’s the link for some interesting reading.

A note on the controversy regarding an American Airlines pilot who evangelized over the PA system.

Quote from Christianity Today weblog:
“Amazingly, only one publication was able to score an interview with
Findiesen himself. Even more amazing, that publication is The Advocate,
a gay magazine—editor-in-chief Bruce C. Steele was on the flight. Even
more amazing: The Advocate’s article is fair, even positive, toward
Findiesen’s actions.”

Now what’s so amazing about the fact that the Advocate was fair? 
It’s no more surprising that the Advocate conducted fair reporting than
that CT might be able to conduct fair reporting.  Both are
issue-oriented magazines, intended for very particular audiences that
both see themselves out of the mainstream.  (Frankly, the Advocate
and CT share more in common with each other than with mainstream
publications like the New York Times.)  If CT can be “objective”
or “fair” in its reporting, why can’t the Advocate?

Is there something about gays that makes them more prone to project
bias than evangelical Christians? What are we to think of such
“reporting” on CT’s part?

As you will see later in the letter, I’m not optimistic that these
work, based in my own previous experience and study.  But I
figured I’d better try regardless.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court pronounced correctly the other
day when it noted that gay civil unions are not marriage and that the
Massachusetts and US Constitutions regard “separate but equal” as being
actually “separate and NOT equal.”

I’ve already written about this before, so I won’t say much new here, except the following.

The creation of a whole group of people who are legally married under
at least one state’s laws — even if it only occurs for a couple of
years before conservatives can get a constitutional amendment on the
ballot — means that the genie is out of the bottle.  You can’t
unmarry those people, because the state has no authority to dissolve a
legal contract, so long as the contract it legal. (Let’s remember that
that’s what marriage is in the state: a contract.  It’s only
“sacred” in the context of a church or religious tradition.  So
all this nonsense that the governor and the president make about
preserving the “sacred” nature of tradition makes me wonder whether
they are running for priest or politician….)

But if there’s a move to take it away, BF and I will move to City Hall
pretty darn quickly, so as to be in the protected class.  For us,
of course, the more important marriage (in most of the sense of what
“marriage” means) will be the church marriage, but that will be
interesting to figure out as this is a Roman Catholic and Anglican
pairing.