Food, Fasting and Health–the personal and the political

The Unrepentant Marxist in South Beach, January 2011: 160 pounds

The Unrepentant Marxist today: 145 pounds

Back in 1989 I read a terrific novel by Oscar Hijuelos titled “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” about a couple of Cuban-American brothers who co-led a band in the 1950s whose greatest achievement was an appearance on the “I Love Lucy” show. After one brother dies in an auto accident, the other stops performing and takes a job as super in Washington Heights. Most of his free time is spent listening to old records of the Mambo Kings and hanging out in the neighborhood, playing dominoes, eating comidas tipicas, and drinking beer.

As happens to many people in their 60s, the surviving brother’s health starts to decline. After he survives a heart attack, the doctor puts him on a strict diet. No more comidas tipicas–just salads, fresh vegetables and lean meat. And absolutely no beer and no salt. After a month or so of this regimen, he develops such a craving for a Cuban sandwich (ham, pork, and melted cheese topped with a nice salty pickle) and a bottle of beer that he decides to go out in a blaze of glory. He brings home a Cuban sandwich, a quart of Budweiser, and dies in the middle of enjoying them while a Mambo Kings record plays away reminding him of his well-spent youth.

I really loved the novel and that particular passage. But that was nearly 25 years ago when I was 44 years old and fairly blasé when it came to matters of health, aging, and the big D. (That’s death.)

As you will learn as you hit your fifties and sixties, the weight tends to accumulate over the years, largely a function of a slowing metabolism. About 10 years ago I took a blood pressure test at work and learned that it was “slightly elevated”. And then around a year ago my taking naps on a nightly basis for a month got my wife so worried that she pressured me into seeing a doctor. I tried to explain to her that I don’t like going to doctors because I don’t want to get any bad news like I have cancer or something. Apparently medical experts are divided on most questions including the value of yearly checkups.

But the long-sacrosanct recommendation that everyone should have an annual physical was challenged yet again recently by researchers at the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen.

The research team, led by Dr. Lasse T. Krogsboll, analyzed the findings of 14 scientifically designed clinical trials of routine checkups that followed participants for up to 22 years. The team found no benefit to the risk of death or serious illness among seemingly healthy people who had general checkups, compared with people who did not. Their findings were published in November in BMJ (formerly The British Medical Journal).

NY Times, January 21, 2013

I was not surprised to learn that I still had elevated blood pressure but also too much of what they called “bad cholesterol”. Now my diet was nothing like the Mambo Kings guy but I do confess to enjoying eggs on the weekend and a buttered bagel. The bigger problem for me, however, was finding some healthy food to eat at lunch when I was still working at Columbia University. The only place that was convenient to my outpost in Manhattanville, where the school was colonizing as if it were the West Bank, was a Fairways grocery store that had food to take out at lunch. Yes, I will bare my soul. Many days I brought back sausages and peppers or meat loaf with mashed potatoes back to my desk. Plus I confess to having a half-muffin each morning. The feelings I get over this now are similar I’m sure to what somebody who kicked a $200 per day heroin habit must feel. How can I have been so stupid?

But what makes this all the more disconcerting is the memories I have of my mother’s last 2 or 3 years as she battled congestive heart disease. Yes, she was in her mid-80s when things got bad but who would want to do anything that makes hardening of the arteries more likely? I know I have to go some day but the idea of being a stroke victim or some other circulatory disease scares the pee out of me. When I used to visit my mother at the special nursing unit of the local hospital, I was always shook up when I saw Milt Brizel my high school geometry teacher who was paralyzed from the neck down, the aftermath of a stroke identical to the one depicted in the 2012 movie “Amour”, directed by Michael Haneke.

Haneke’s typical plot involves some deeply painful setback to a comfortable petty-bourgeois family, from home invasions to environmental collapse. The virtue of “Amour” is its willingness to describe exactly what befalls an elderly couple when one becomes incapacitated. At a certain point the wife demands to die but the husband keeps her alive, a challenge to notions about what really defines “love”.

As a sign of how backward American society is, the right of someone to end their own life in dignity is excluded in all but three states: Washington, Oregon and Montana. A truly civilized country would allow someone suffering some painful and terminal disease to take a couple of pills to end their misery. But the grip of organized religion is so great that it was capable of making someone as saintly as Jack Kervorkian to serve 8 years of a 10-25 year second-degree murder conviction sentence.

When I had my physical a year or so ago, I weighed 160 pounds. The doctor told me that he saw no need to put me on the kinds of medications that are advertised relentlessly on the network news each evening. He advised me to change my diet and get more exercise.

Once I retired on August 31, 2012, it became a lot easier to make those life-style changes. To start with, I cook my own food and not the junk they prepared at Fairway. Each morning starts with a bowl of steel cut oatmeal mixed with flax seed. When I first read that steel cut oatmeal was good for reducing bad cholesterol, I decided to get on board even if it reminded me of the Garrison Keillor radio show’s spiel for the fictional Raw Bits cereal: “It gives you the strength to get up in the morning and do the things that need to be done.”

Now, just a bit more than 6 months after retiring, I am down to 145 pounds and wearing size 32 trousers, that are actually a bit baggy on me. In a few months I will make another appointment with the doctor even though the NY Times does not think it is necessary (nor do they think that criticisms of Napoleon Chagnon are valid.) So, you ask, how did I do it? I imagine that most of you except the most morbidly curious have stuck with this post since it would remind you of the typical geezer telling you about his or her latest surgery.

Well, it has been the result of fasting every Monday and Thursday. Back in March 2012, a most remarkable article appeared in Harper’s magazine titled “Starving your way to vigor: the benefits of an empty stomach”. Written by Steve Hendricks, who embarked on a fasting regimen himself, it is an eye-opening account of its history as a medical treatment rather than a guide to spiritual elevation (something that interests me about as much as Lena Dunham’s “Girls” on HBO.)

In the 1960s a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania named Garfield G. Duncan be came troubled by the epidemic of American obesity, which then afflicted a shocking one man in twenty and one woman in nine. (Today it afflicts one in three men and women alike.) Like other researchers, Duncan fasted obese patients and studied how many regained their lost weight. Unlike other researchers, he noticed that the blood pressure of every patient who was hypertensive fell to within normal limits during these fasts. He reported, for illustration, the case of a man of fifty-three years and 325 pounds whose unmedicated blood pressure was 210/130 and whose medicated pressure was 184/106—still menacingly high. The man fasted for fourteen days without drugs, and his blood pressure fell to 136/90. Six months later, it was 130/75. Duncan did not record how many of his patients sustained such improvements after their fasts, but the possibility of a simple cure for some forms of hypertension seemed well worth pursuing.

Not until 2001, however, was there a definitive follow-up to his work. Its au thor, Alan Goldhamer, had fasted thousands of patients at his TrueNorth Health Center in Santa Rosa, California, and had seen high blood pressures trill downward like Coast Range streams. He studied 174 hypertensives who fasted for ten days; 154 of them became normotensive by fast’s end. The others also enjoyed substantial drops in pressure, and all who had been taking medication were able to stop. In patients with stage 3 (the most severe) hypertension, the average drop in systolic pressure was 60 mmHg. In all patients, the average drop in systolic/diastolic was 37/13. According to Goldhamer, this was and remains the largest reported drop in blood pressure achieved by any drug or therapy. Like Duncan, Goldhamer did not formally study how long his subjects maintained their newly lowered blood pressures, but he surveyed forty-two subjects six months after their fasts, and their average blood pressure had risen hardly a jot.

For me the best part of fasting is that is really easy. You don’t have count calories. All you need to do is not eat. Can anything be simpler? What I learned almost immediately is that you don’t get any hungrier 12 hours into the fast than you were in the first hour. Plus, you can eat pretty much normally on other days, which for me consists of the sort of food that the Mambo King guy hated. For me, there’s nothing more satisfying than some beans and a glass of red wine.

As my readers know, at least those who have stuck around long enough to read this ponderous piece, the issue of food and health has reached a crescendo of late, largely having to do with Michele Obama’s hypocritical campaigning. As a huckster for Walmart’s Healthy Food Initiative, she is just as shameless as her husband who just put a long-time Walmart executive in charge of the White House budget office. That shows where the second coming of Herbert Hoover’s head is really at.

Last Saturday morning Chris Hayes had a special food show on MSNBC. His featured guest was Tom Colicchio, the celebrity chef and host of the hit TV show “Top Chef”. He was there to promote “A Place at the Table”, his new documentary on hunger that reflected his deep-felt concerns about poor people getting adequately fed, just like our First Lady. Colicchio told Hayes:

People look at feeding programs whether it’s snack or whether school lunches a handout as a charity program. And we have to look at it as sort of a tool to prepare our children to eat, especially when you look at breakfast programs. There`s a new study that just came out by Deloitte that was done with Share a Strength and No Kid Hungry.

And they`re showing when kids eat breakfast in school, their math scores go up by 17 percent. They have less incidence of being absent. And so, there`s all kinds of benefits. And so, the school lunch program is just — right now, it`s just not funded. And that clip that you showed actually set up the — I actually testified in front of Congress on behalf of the school lunch program.

Colicchio joined a panel in the second half of the show that took up other questions related to food and the poor, in this instance the lowly paid workers who often had to rely on tips. Hayes introduced the segment this way:

In 1960, according to the CDC, Americans spent just 26 percent of their food budget eating away from home. By 2011, that figure had almost doubled to 49 percent.

Food retail and service is one of the healthiest growing industries in the country. For the past decade food industry job growth has far outpaced totally sector job growth.

And yet by almost any measurements, most of these are simply not good jobs. They are some of the worst jobs in the country. In fact, food industry workers use government assistance programs like Medicaid and food stamps in much higher than the general workforce does.

Over 27 percent of the food industry workers on Medicaid, compared to 19 percent of the general workforce, and over 13 percent of food service workers receive food stamps compared to just 8 percent of the general workforce.

According to Food Chain Workers Alliance, a workers advocacy group, nearly 80 percent don`t have paid sick days or don`t know if they do. Eighty- three percent of food industry workers do not receive health insurance from their employer, and 58 percent do not have any health insurance at all.

Given his familiarity with the terrain, or at least what his researchers fed to him over the teleprompter, one wonders why Hayes failed to grill Colicchio on this:

NY Times December 13, 2008

Lawsuit Accuses a Top Chef of Wage and Tip Violations

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Tom Colicchio, the celebrity restaurateur and judge on Bravo’s popular “Top Chef” television show, was sued in federal court on Thursday by a former waitress who accused his company of misappropriating employee tips, withholding some overtime pay and sometimes failing to pay minimum wage. Mr. Colicchio’s restaurants — including Craft, Craftbar and Craftsteak — were also named in the lawsuit.

In the lawsuit, the waitress, Nessa Rapone, who used to work at the bustling Craftbar restaurant at 900 Broadway, between 19th and 20th Streets, asserted that Mr. Colicchio’s company, Craft Worldwide Holdings, improperly shared employee tips with supervisors, did not keep proper time records and fired her when she protested.

The lawyers for Ms. Rapone, a Brooklyn resident who worked at Craftbar from March to May 2007, are seeking class-action status for the lawsuit, which was filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan. It accused management of federal and state wage law violations, including failing to pay workers time and a half for all hours worked beyond 40 a week. It also asserts that management shared employee tips with other workers who were not eligible under federal and state law to share in the tip pool.

Ms. Rapone’s lawsuit also accused the company of not compensating her for the cleaning and care of the uniform that she was required to wear at Craftbar.

“The Craft restaurants, all upscale establishments designed by well-known architects and catered by award-winning chefs, have earned Mr. Colicchio and his partners great success,” one of Ms. Rapone’s lawyers, Justin M. Swartz, said in a statement on Friday. “This success, however, has come at the expense of the restaurants’ hourly service workers to whom the defendants have denied proper minimum wages, overtime compensation, and tips they earned from customers.”

If you go to Craft’s website, you’ll see a bunch of farms that supply locally grown and organic meat, fish and vegetables with names like Cavendish Game Farm—not a supplier to TGIF’s, you can be sure. Colicchio says, “Please enjoy some of the great ingredients grown, raised and caught by our friends that share our commitment to serving great food. We feature their bounty on this evening’s menu.”

All this “localism” got started, as you probably know, at Alice Water’s Chez Panisse Restaurant in Berkeley where reservations have to be booked months in advance and where a typical entrée is $85, and where the rhetoric is quite Green:

Alice and Chez Panisse are convinced that the best-tasting food is organically and locally grown and harvested in ways that are ecologically sound by people who are taking care of the land for future generations.

Chain-smoking and hard drinking celebrity chef and TV star Anthony Bourdain, who would have probably sought out the Mambo King’s favorite restaurant, is unimpressed with Waters to say the least:

I’ll tell you. Alice Waters annoys the living shit out of me. We’re all in the middle of a recession, like we’re all going to start buying expensive organic food and running to the green market. There’s something very Khmer Rouge about Alice Waters that has become unrealistic. I mean I’m not crazy about our obsession with corn or ethanol and all that, but I’m a little uncomfortable with legislating good eating habits. I’m suspicious of orthodoxy, the kind of orthodoxy when it comes to what you put in your mouth. I’m a little reluctant to admit that maybe Americans are too stupid to figure out that the food we’re eating is killing us. But I don’t know if it’s time to send out special squads to close all the McDonald’s. My libertarian side is at odds with my revulsion at what we as a country have done to ourselves physically with what we’ve chosen to eat and our fast food culture. I’m really divided on that issue. It’d be great if he [Obama] served better food at the White House than what I suspect the Bushies were serving. It’s gotta be better than Nixon. He liked starting up a roaring fire, turning up the air conditioning, and eating a bowl of cottage cheese with ketchup. Anything above that is a good thing. He’s from Chicago, so he knows what good food is.

I know little about the cable TV comedy Portlandia, except that it pretty obvious from this clip that they are as fed up with “local” and “organic” food pretensions as Bourdain:

Having said that, I of course believe in environmentally sustainable farming, ranching, and fishing. I own Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan books on healthy food and Green practices and swear by them.

But ultimately, like any other intractable social problem like global warming, food and health are ultimately a function of the mode of production. As long as there is profit in industrial farming and the peddling of sugar-laden fast food to the masses, the nation will continue to endure an epidemic of diabetes, heart disease, and all the rest.

The 90 year old Sidney Mintz, one of my favorite Marxist historians and political theorists, wrote a book in 1996 titled “Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom” whose final pages are worth quoting in their entirety as a coda to this post.

What does the American future hold, so far as eating is concerned? In a series of brilliant recent papers, Cornell University scientist David Pimentel and his colleagues have predicted sweeping changes in American agriculture, and hence in American eating patterns over the next half century!’ Indeed, the changes that these scientists forecast, if they do occur, will be more radical in their effects on American eating than even those of the last half century—which is to say a very great deal. Demographic, agricultural, and other factors enter in. Pimentel and his colleagues, working from present trends, predict a doubling of the national population by 2064; a reduction in arable land (through both erosion and urbanization) in the neighborhood of 180,000,000 acres, or 38 percent, in the same period of time; and a total exhaustion of national fossil fuel resources in not more than two decades. The figures on rapidly diminishing water supply are similarly worrisome.

This is an unbelievably grim scenario. If it eventuates, food exports (now calculated at an average of about $155 per person per year, given our present population) would be reduced to zero. For Americans, food costs would increase by a factor of between three and five—at worst, up to more than half of total income. Should these calculations prove correct, however, the composition of the American diet would also have to change substantially. While nearly two-thirds of the national grain product of the United States, grown on over two million acres, is now used as livestock feed, by 2060 all of it would have become food for us, not for our cattle and pigs and poultry. In effect, Pimentel sees North Americans coming to eat as most of the rest of the world eats, with meat representing a much reduced fraction of our total caloric and protein intake. Since India’s nearly one billion people and the People’s Republic of China’s even larger population get 70 to 8o percent of their calories and nearly all of their protein from grains and legumes, such a change in the States would be in the direction of aligning North American consumption with that of the rest of the world. It would also contribute to a vast improvement in American health. Substantial farmland could be returned to agriculture; the number of bypass and cancer operations would certainly decline.

But will it happen? As I write, McDonald’s looks ahead to a rapid expansion of its enterprises in such places as the People’s Republic of China, where it aims to add 600 retail establishments in the next decade; and Japan, where it now boasts more than a thousand. Whatever the scenario for the United States, many companies are working hard to spread our way of eating world-wide. Nor is there evidence that many Americans are much concerned, either about our fossil fuel consumption or our diet. Driving cars and eating meat are highly valued acts; though both involve the expenditure of unimaginably large quantities of water, soil, cereals, and fossil fuel, there is no collective indication that anyone is deeply concerned. Only sudden shortages reveal, as if in lightning flashes, how deeply held such consumption values are; Operation Desert Storm was a case in point. Indeed, one solution” to the Pimentel prophecies is war. Successful aggression could keep meat and gas available and affordable, at least for a good while longer. Its effects on American moral integrity would be utterly disastrous. But the enormity of the decisions involved in such trade-offs would not be clearly grasped until after the decisions were made. There is a real trap in our not separating what we are free to do, but need not do, if it is a bad idea—from what we cannot help doing, even though it is a bad idea, because we think someone is trying to stop us from doing it.

No one can look down the road and predict how the American people will behave, fifty years from now. One sinister prophecy is embodied in the words of Josef Joffe, the editorial page editor of Suddeutsche Zeitung, who writes: “It is profligacy—being hooked on the sweet poison of consumption—that might yet lay low the American economy and thus American might.” But the worry is not that we will let our consumption gluttony destroy our economy; it is, rather, that we might let our obsessive notions of individual freedom destroy our democracy. The long-term lessons of our economic and agricultural policies are there to be learned now. But we have to be willing to learn them.

Creeped out by Sandra Steingraber

Over the past dozen years or so, I have written 620 reviews that appeared on Rotten Tomatoes, an aggregator of film reviews written by those regarded as a “top critic” (adorned by a star) like Anthony Lane of the New Yorker Magazine and the lowliest like me. Most reviewers, like my colleagues in NYFCO—a group by virtue of my membership allows me to post to RT—are appealing to the same reader, namely the man or women trying to figure out which movie to go see on a Saturday night. My reviews target an entirely different readership, those reprobates who are looking for a radical documentary or some neo-neorealist flick from the Third World, the grittier the better.

I would estimate that 80 percent of my reviews were based on a press screening or a DVD sent to my home by a publicist. And of those, about a half were accompanied by an invitation to interview the director or star, something that has never interested me until a couple of weeks ago when a publicist told me that Sandra Steingraber was in town for a tour promoting the new documentary based on her book “Living Downstream”.

Last June I wrote a highly complementary review of the book that started:

Anticipating that “Pink Ribbons Inc.” would deal with the question of the corporate role in making women sick, I read Sandra Steingraber’s “Living Downstream: an ecologist looks at cancer in the environment”, a book that I purchased in 1997 when it first came out. To give you a sense of its provenance, you can read this blurb by Richard Levins on the back cover: “Sandra Steingraber’s ‘upstream’ approach to cancer is imperative. It is about time someone wrote this book.” Levins, as you might know, is one of America’s most respected Marxist biologists.

Born in 1959, Steingraber grew up in rural Illinois surrounded by corn and soybean fields that were drenched by chemical pesticides and herbicides. In her 20s, when studying biology, she developed bladder cancer, a disease that is not usually found among the young but is endemic to the kind of workplaces that The Plastic Focus Group endured. The book is written as a kind of memoir and investigative journalism that revolves around her return to her hometown and the various places that might have led to her disease.

Despite my enthusiasm for her book, I had nagging doubts about the wisdom of doing an interview with a big shot celebrity. This is a distinguished professor from Ithaca College who has probably been interviewed on NPR dozens of times. She has also been the recipient of many awards. In the documentary you can see her receiving one of them before an audience of several thousand adoring people. I worried that she might regard 30 minutes spent with me as a waste of her precious time even though she probably understood that she was obligated to meet with me since the publicist had arranged it.

I went down to the publicist’s office in the West Village for a 2pm meeting last Friday during a driving rain. When I got up to the office, the publicist introduced me to Steingraber and the director Chanda Chevannes who were sitting at a conference table looking at me with an expression on their faces like Charles Manson’s parole board. I almost excused myself to go to the bathroom to see if my forehead had accidentally been smudged on the subway in the shape of a swastika.

Since I had brought my camcorder with me, I broached the subject of recording the interview, explaining that I would not put it up on Vimeo if they preferred not to. But I would like to have it for my own use in writing up the interview later on. The expression on Steingraber’s face changed at this point as she said, “No-no. I don’t want to do that.” This time she looked more like Julia Roberts being asked for her autograph by a stubborn fan following her down the street.

I was also told that the interview must end after 30 minutes. Fine, I replied, since I planned on getting straight to the point. I was starting to get a very bad vibe. I wasn’t sure whether the two were more aggravated by my obscurity or by my politics.

Keep in mind that my questions sought to clarify issues posed by the film and her writings. I didn’t plan to ask her, for example, how she felt during an exam at her oncologist. Let NPR take care of that.

Since we were nearing Election Day and since Steingraber blogs at Huffington Post, an Obama outpost like the Nation or MSNBC, I wanted to hone in on class questions. I asked her that since she credited Rachel Carsons with leading to the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency, what she made of Lisa Jackson, the current head of the EPA and an Obama appointee. One of the major concerns of “Living Downstream” is the carcinogenic nature of Atrazine, a widely used pesticide. It turns out that Jackson assembled an EPA panel that concluded that there was insufficient evidence to ban the chemical. I was also curious to see how Steingraber would react to Jackson’s statement before a Senate investigation committee that she knows of no instances where fracking led to contaminated water, an issue that Steingraber has taken up in recent years.

Her reply was to talk about the need of the federal government to protect its citizens. That’s about it. Despite her ability to make connections between the environment and our health, she was not able to tie both to the nature of the economic system we are living in. This is something that Chris Hedges does quite well but it does not lead to banquets and awards.

At two twenty-nine sharp, the director informed me that I had one minute left. She reminded me of Columbia University business school dean Glenn Hubbard telling Charles Ferguson in “Inside Job”: “In fact, you’ve got three minutes. So give it your best shot.”

As I was getting ready to put on my jacket and head back uptown, Steingraber asked me when my article would appear. I told her that evening. I planned to write it up when I got home. She then asked me for my email address. What for, I wondered? She told me that it was important to get the science of cancer causality and treatment correct so she wanted a copy of my article before it went up since corrections might be necessary. I didn’t mention it to her at the time—mostly because I was so stunned by the request—but I planned to write a film review not something to be submitted to the New England Journal of Medicine. I suspect that her real concern was politics, not cell mutation. Like most big shots she probably was anxious to control how she was perceived.

That evening I dashed off a brief email to her explaining that I was not going to write a review but simply post a notice about the showing of the documentary over at Lincoln Center the next day with a description from the film’s website. That would save her the trouble of putting my review under a microscope.

I also pointed out that she would have not had the nerve to ask someone like Anthony Lane to submit to such a vetting process, only someone at the bottom of the totem pole like me.

Whenever I am confronted by situations like this, I am always reminded of Michael Yates’s priceless account of going to an after-conference social hosted by Columbia University professors that appeared in his wonderful “Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate”:

I had come to Manhattan to give a talk at one of Columbia University’s ongoing seminars. Faculty and outside scholars have organized these on a wide variety of subjects; the same one might run for many years. I was to speak to the Seminar on Full Employment. I walked through the great university’s gate at Broadway and 116th Street with some trepidation. I had never spoken at an Ivy League university, and I wondered if the group’s participants would be as brilliant as I sometimes imagined people at such schools were. We found our way to Faculty House, where we were to have dinner and where the meeting was to be held. We met the person who had invited me, a friendly elderly man of some renown. The first thing he did was inform me that I would have to pay for my wife’s dinner. I was astounded. I should have refused, but I gave him the money. Dinner was a lavish affair, with fine food and table settings. The dining room overlooked the slums of East Harlem. Everyone was white except the servers. The conversation revolved around trips these elite academics had taken and the research they were doing. When the talk turned to children, we silenced the polite chatter when we said that our three sons were cooks. Apparently no one could believe that a college professor had children who did such work. After dinner I gave my talk. It went well, but the questions were abstrusely academic and trivial. Later we were dragooned into going to a professor’s apartment, which overlooked Central Park, to watch a television show about the overboard spending of American consumers. The host served cheap beer; I got a half a glass. When the show ended we had to go around the room in order and make comments. These were so convoluted, egotistic, and laden with academic jargon that Karen and I wondered what we would say. I was glad her turn came first. She stated that the show was shallow and again that pretty much stopped the discussion. Thankfully we left soon after. As we walked out the door, we heard one person remind another that she owed a dollar for the short cab ride from the college to the apartment.

Living Downstream, the documentary

Film Society of Lincoln Center – Mountainfilm Series
LIVING DOWNSTREAM by Chanda Chevannes
Canada, 2010, HD, color, 55 min.

Screening October 20 at 2pm at the Walter Reade Theater
Followed by a 45-min Q+A moderated by Mountainfilm director David Holbrooke.

Click here for multi-city US tour dates

National broadcast on Outside TV: November 2012

From the film website:

Based on the acclaimed book by ecologist and cancer survivor Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D., Living Downstream is an eloquent and cinematic documentary film.

This poetic film follows Sandra during one pivotal year as she travels across North America, working to break the silence about cancer and its environmental links. After a routine cancer screening, Sandra receives some worrying results and is thrust into a period of medical uncertainty. Thus, we begin two journeys with Sandra: her private struggles with cancer and her public quest to bring attention to the urgent human rights issue of cancer prevention.

But Sandra is not the only one who is on a journey—the chemicals against which she is fighting are also on the move. We follow these invisible toxins as they migrate to some of the most beautiful places in North America. We see how these chemicals enter our bodies and how, once inside, scientists believe they may be working to cause cancer.

Several experts in the fields of toxicology and cancer research make important cameo appearances in the film, highlighting their own findings on two pervasive chemicals: atrazine, one of the most widely used herbicides in the world, and the industrial compounds, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Their work further illuminates the significant connection between a healthy environment and human health.

At once Sandra’s personal journey and her scientific exploration, Living Downstream is a powerful reminder of the intimate connection between the health of our bodies and the health of our air, land, and water.

Head Games; They Call it Myanmar

For those who have seen “Hoop Dreams”, arguably the best documentary about sports ever made, it should be sufficient motivation to see “Head Games”, a documentary about the link between sports-related concussions and permanent brain damage including early Alzheimer’s, simply by pointing out that they are both the work of director Steve James.

Opening yesterday at the AMC Empire 25 in N.Y. and the Laemmle in Los Angeles, as well as through video on-demand, the film is focused on the crusading work of Chris Nowinski, who played football at Harvard. They say that 9/10ths of the success of any documentary is based on the presence of a compelling personality. That being the case, Nowinski’s presence throughout the film should qualify it for an Academy Award. After graduating Harvard, Nowinski landed a spot on a TV reality show where his macho brawn and Ivy League degree served to make him a villain. After the show ended, he parlayed that into a career as a professional wrestler—a bad guy who taunted the crowds about his superiority. Professional wrestling turns out to be a dangerous sport despite the fact that it is fake. Nowinski explains that a headfirst fall to the mat—or worse to the concrete floor below—that is off by an inch can lead to a serious injury. After experiencing one such fall, he suffered a headache and dizziness that lasted for months. A visit to neurologist Robert Cantu revealed that he had suffered a major concussion.

Eventually Cantu and Nowinski teamed up to form the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at the Boston University School of Medicine that has been in the forefront of understanding the impact of sports-related concussions and agitating for reforms, particularly in the NFL. As anybody who follows professional football can attest, there have been major changes. For example, the N.Y. Jets’s star defensive back Darrelle Revis was required to sit out at least one game after receiving what was described as a mild concussion. In the past, the only way a player was kept off the field is if he suffered a blow that would have left him unconscious for a minute or so and transported off the field on a stretcher.

What “Head Games” reveals is that a revolution in sports rather than piecemeal meliorist reforms might be required. For one thing, there is a strong possibility that what can be described as “sub-concussions” can lead to brain damage just as easily. These are the dingers that leave a player woozy for a minute or so but not impaired enough to be sent to the bench. Some medical experts estimate that someone having played football from high school into the NFL might have suffered dozens of such blows throughout their playing time.

The other problem is that NFL type standards, including a physician assigned to look for the evidence of concussions at each and every game, do not apply to amateur sports. Most high schools can hardly afford to keep a team on the field nowadays let alone pay for the presence of a doctor. Furthermore, the risk of concussion does not just apply to male sports. Young women playing soccer risk injury simply by “heading” a ball.

I first wrote about Chris Nowinski back in January of 2010 after seeing him on Brian Gumbel’s HBO Real Sports program. It is worth repeating what I said then:

I also recommend that you take a look at Chris Nowinski’s website (http://www.chrisnowinski.com/). With his Harvard degree, he is not the typical jock. As a professional wrestler, he took time to speak out on young people getting involved with politics, particularly through registering to vote. You might also be aware that professional wrestling not only requires immense physical gifts; it also requires the ability to craft a persona for yourself. Initially Nowinski styled himself as a villainous snob from the Ivy League (not that hard to do!) and even used the ring name Chris Harvard. While it is difficult to figure out whether this was meant to shore up his villainous image in professional wrestling, Nowinski also assumed the role of “race traitor” akin to the hero of “Avatar”, as his wiki page indicates:

On the May 26, 2003 edition of Raw, Christopher Nowinski helped Rodney Mack defeat Bubba Ray Dudley in a “White Boy Challenge” and joined Theodore Long’s group “Thuggin’ And Buggin’ Enterprises”, a group of African Americans who worked a race angle in which they portrayed themselves as being victims of racism and being held down by the “White Man”.

A remarkable character, to say the least. Let’s hope that his six concussions do not eventually rob the world of his talents as spokesmen for the gladiator victims of the bread and circuses in today’s version of the Roman Empire.

“They Call it Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain” opened at Lincoln Center yesterday as well as theaters in Louisville and Santa Fe. Director Robert H. Lieberman’s film is not exactly what I would describe as leading edge politically or cinematically but it is worth seeing since it really does lift the curtain on a country that has been as isolated as North Korea in many ways.

Lieberman’s model seems to be the sort of show that you can see on the Travel Channel, especially Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations”. The format consists of a bemused visitor from the West visiting the boondocks and asking the natives “How come you like to eat raw rats?” Lieberman’s presence throughout the film revolves around two questions: “What is life like for you in Myanmar?” and “Why are you wearing that funny stuff on your face?” The funny stuff turns out to be thanaka, a powder made of ground bark that has a cooling effect on the face and arms.

That being said, Lieberman is a lot more intelligent and interesting than Anthony Bourdain. He came to Myanmar to train young Burmese how to make films rather than to taste raw rats. From the Cornell University website:

Robert H. Lieberman, a Cornell graduate and member of the physics faculty since 1980, directs the LSC Physics Help Center and its staff of 15 course assistants.

A recipient of the John M. and Emily B. Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching, he holds a joint appointment as a Senior Lecturer with the Physics Department and the Center for Learning & Teaching. Since 1990 he has been a Faculty Fellow at Cornell’s Risley Residential College for the Performing Arts.

In addition to his work in science, he is a novelist and film writer/director. His latest novel “The Last Boy” is a story that deals with the subject of Global Warming. His most recent films include the feature comedy “Green Lights” and the documentary “Last Stop Kew Gardens.”

Prior to joining the Physics Department, he was a professor of Engineering at Cornell. He has held two Fulbright Lectureships in film and creative writing. The most recent was in association with the Mowel Film Fund in the Philippines. Prior to that he was at the Academy of Performing Arts and Film in Bratislava. He presently serves as a Senior Specialist with the Fulbright Program.

Despite the concessions made to the Travel Channel prejudices of his ostensible audience, Lieberman does provide useful information on the country including its long history of despotic rule predating the Generals who ruled and ruined the country in the name of socialism. He points out that when Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar in 2008, the Generals initially prevented outside aid for political reasons despite the fact that the storm would cost the lives of 138,000 of its citizens. Given the secrecy and isolation that typified its rule, Lieberman was taking genuine risks by interviewing its people, who for their own safety remained unidentified throughout the film.

Much of “They Call it Myanmar” consists of interviews with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s Nelson Mandela. Filmed before the country’s thaw, it does not foreshadow her liberation from house arrest and return to politics.

U Thein Sein, a reformer who has given approval to her party’s re-entry into the electoral arena, currently leads the country. The N.Y. Times has urged the Obama administration to ease sanctions against the country in light of the progress that has been made.

While I can recommend “They Call it Myanmar”, the best film about the country so far remains “Burma Soldier”, a film I reviewed back in May 2011 that appeared originally on HBO and can be still be watched there on-demand. For those appalled by the crimes of Green “socialism” in Libya or Baathist “socialism” in Syria, it is a reminder of how that word can be so obscenely appropriated by those with nothing but a lust for wealth and power as I pointed out in my review:

General Ne Win, who came to a power in a 1962 coup, proposed a “Burmese Way to Socialism” that blended Marxist verbiage with outright nonsense. For example, the film describes his 1988 fiscal measures, taken on the advice of an astrologer. Win devalued the currency according to a formula: any monies divisible by the number nine were now invalid. So devastating were consequences for the poor and the working class that the seeds for today’s pro-democracy movement were implanted. Sometimes it is easy to forget that the main reason the Burmese people want the right to elect their own leaders freely is because that is a way to address economic exploitation, even that which occurs in the name of socialism. As a tarnished symbol of a degraded system, General Ne Win had much in common with Libya’s Qaddafi. Win claimed that his socialist system would mix Marxism and Buddhism, while Qaddafi’s recipe included Islam instead of Buddhism. In either case, you ended up with a despotic system that sparked a wholesale revolt.

 

Retirement miscellany

Last Monday they had a little going away party for me at work with a gift clock to remind me of my workmates. You can’t see the words with the glare off the bronze but it says “Thanks Louis Proyect, from FINSYS”. Finsys is Financial Systems, the project I have supported for the past 15 years or so.

Although I am a pretty unsentimental bastard, I was genuinely touched by the tributes people paid to me. I was in an unusual position on the team, having functioned more or less as their technical support. Typically I was asked to create a Sybase table that could be used in testing by another programmer. So just as someone, for example, in the accounts payable department was their user, so were they mine. As so often is the case in information technology, the user tends to complain about the technical support they are getting. Accounts payable might complain about the service they were receiving from the rest of the team, and they had the same attitude toward me much of the time no matter how hard I tried to keep up with the requests. That is why I appreciated their thanks to me so much. I was leaving on a positive note. I told them as well that no matter how churlish I could be—and believe me, I can get very churlish—I was always grateful to work with such good people.

I told the group that there were three things that allowed me to work at Columbia University as long as I did. The first was the people I worked with, who like me tended to be at the school for reasons other than money. Because of their relative indifference to big bucks, they were a lot less aggressive and a lot less conniving than the people I used to work with on Wall Street.

The second was my boss who had a better knack for motivating her staff than anybody I’ve worked for in my 44-year career. She could ream you out if your work was not up to snuff but you never held it against her. Usually performance reviews were anxiety-provoking  in previous jobs over the years but that was not my experience working for her for the simple reason that you always knew where you stood. If she didn’t yell at you, you were doing your job. Over the past 10 years or so, I got yelled at very infrequently so I felt pretty secure most of the time.

Lastly there was the advantage of working at a university, which meant being able to take classes for free, the high point of which was the two years of Turkish language courses given by the irrepressible Etem Erol, who is now at Yale. With houseguests from Izmir here since July 25^th, I find that I can follow much of the conversation although my speaking is limited to simple questions like “Yemek istiyor musun?” (Do you want something to eat?)

But of even greater importance was access to Jstor, Lexis-Nexis, and Proquest—three scholarly databases that I have used over the years to great advantage, as well as the Columbia University library. I will continue to have access to all of this as a retiree.

As part of my exit process, I spent time talking to a woman in personnel about my insurance options. With my last paycheck on Tuesday, I am no longer insured except for Medicare Part A, which is free and available to everybody over 65. I understood that I had to look into getting Medicare Part B or Part C, or whatever but needed her help in sorting things out. As it turns out, Medicare is not exactly free. Part A entitles you to hospitalization but only 80 percent. Part B is intended to help cover the costs of Part A as well as pay for doctor visits. Furthermore, if you have access to private insurance, as I would as a spouse added to my wife’s GHI plan, you should sign up for that rather than Part B.  As the woman in personnel began explaining all the ins and outs to me, my brain began to fog over. It reminded me of how Peter Camejo used to explain covered options, or butterfly spreads, to me. I could never figure out what he was talking about but trusted him to give me good advice.

When I asked her whether Part B was the way to go if it was cheaper than getting added to my wife’s GHI plan, she said that you get treated better if you have private insurance. Some doctors will not take Medicare patients.

At that point, I told her that she should excuse me for sounding political but it sounded to me like Medicare was not exactly cracked up to be as advertised, namely basically free medical coverage for retirees. The slogan of “Medicare for All” that is counterpoised to the new Affordable Care Act by some on the left might need to be rethought.

At that point, she opened up to me and started off by saying that she remembered me from my remarks to Robert Kasdin, Lee Bollinger’s chief of administration, at a meeting for IT, Personnel and Financial Systems employees held the day after a worker was killed during demolition of the building across the street from ours. I had told Kasdin that Columbia should make every effort to force the companies it was using for the Manhattanville expansion to follow OSHA rules to the letter. It was very bad for a leading liberal arts institution to give the appearance that it put construction costs over the lives and well being of ordinary working people.

Apparently this was the sort of thing others would like to hear at such at a meeting but only I had the brass to say.

I was pleasantly surprised to find her assessment of Medicare’s shortcomings in terms familiar to readers of Alternet or the Nation Magazine. It reminded me that the support for the Occupy Movement did not come out of the blue. Millions and millions of Americans have been profoundly impacted by the financial crisis to the degree that an unrepentant Marxist like me does not so nutty to a solid middle-class citizen.

The times they are a-changin’

Yesterday and today were the first post-retirement days. Today I had breakfast with a member of my wife’s dissertation board who is a lefty like me. The three of us had a pleasant chat, with her talking mostly about the ardors she faced getting tenure and me exchanging ideas about the political situation.

Afterwards, we came home and I sat down to write this article. As much as I liked being at Columbia University, I think I prefer things this way. Years ago, when I fantasized about retiring this was the image that always came to mind, Ferdinand the Bull smelling the flowers rather than dodging the matador’s sword:

I think I can get used to this.

Reflections on Obamacare

On September 9^th 2009 Barack Obama gave a speech to Congress that defined his approach to health care:

There are those on the left who believe that the only way to fix the system is through a single-payer system like Canada’s, where we would severely restrict the private insurance market and have the government provide coverage for everyone. On the right, there are those who argue that we should end the employer-based system and leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own.

I have to say that there are arguments to be made for both approaches. But either one would represent a radical shift that would disrupt the health care most people currently have. Since health care represents one-sixth of our economy, I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn’t, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch. And that is precisely what those of you in Congress have tried to do over the past several months.

This amounted to the opening salvo in a policy debate that seems to have been concluded with the Supreme Court decision this week. There are a number of points that can be made about these two dubious paragraphs.

When Obama was starting out as an ambitious young politician, he had no problem speaking as one of “those on the left” who backed a single-payer system:

As should be obvious to anybody who has been following his sorry career, he is a master trickster who knows how to adopt popular positions when they are to his advantage and to drop them once they are a liability.

Also, in the first paragraph there is this business about those on the right “who argue that we should end the employer-based system and leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own.” Does anybody have an idea what the fuck he is talking about? I for one make a point of listening to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity from time to time just to see what the anti-Christ is up to but have never heard such an argument from those quarters. In fact the rightwing in the U.S. is very happy about employer-based systems and attack Obamacare mostly on the basis that it is a threat to the status quo.

For me the most interesting point was the one made in the second paragraph, namely that health care represents 1/6^th of the economy. While most of the discussion about the Supreme Court decision has revolved around rather secondary questions such as what makes John Roberts tick or how the decision impacts the 2012 presidential race, I remembered something I wrote about health care before Obama became president:

Another adviser with a particular interest in health care is David Cutler, a Harvard economist who was also an adviser to Bill Clinton–surprise, surprise. Cutler wrote an article for the New England Journal of Medicine in 2006 asserting that “The rising cost … of health care has been the source of a lot of saber rattling in the media and the public square, without anyone seriously analyzing the benefits gained.”

Anxious to show the good side of rising costs, Cutler and a group of other economists defend the idea that a powerful and profitable medical industry can serve as an engine of economic growth in the USA as the wretched Gina Kolata reported in the August 22, 2006 NY Times.

By 2030, predicts Robert W. Fogel, a Nobel laureate at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, about 25 percent of the G.D.P. will be spent on health care, making it ”the driving force in the economy,” just as railroads drove the economy at the start of the 20th century…

Other economists agree.

David Cutler, an economist at Harvard, calculated the value of extra spending on medicine. ”Take a typical person aged 45,” he said. ”They will spend $30,000 more over their lifetime caring for cardiovascular disease than they would have spent in 1950. And they will live maybe three more years because of it.”

It makes sense to think of insurance companies, drug companies and health care providers as part of the same sector of the capitalist economy. Any threat posed to the insurance companies would also be perceived as a threat to the institutions that provide medical care based on profit. If you are for cutting costs by eliminating the insurance companies, naturally you will want to bring health care costs under control.

On June 8^th the New York Times reported on Obama’s contacts with lobbyists from this sector. While the newspaper of record does get pilloried from the left for all the correct reasons, it does do some very good investigative reporting from time to time that led one rightwing idiot I used to work with at Met Life back in 1968 to call it the Jew York Times.

The article begins:

After weeks of talks, drug industry lobbyists were growing nervous. To cut a deal with the White House on overhauling health care, they needed to be sure that President Obama would stop a proposal intended to bring down medicine prices.

On June 3, 2009, one of the lobbyists e-mailed Nancy-Ann DeParle, the president’s health care adviser. Ms. DeParle reassured the lobbyist. Although Mr. Obama was overseas, she wrote, she and other top officials had “made decision, based on how constructive you guys have been, to oppose importation” on a different proposal.

Just like that, Mr. Obama’s staff signaled a willingness to put aside support for the reimportation of prescription medicines at lower prices and by doing so solidified a compact with an industry the president had vilified on the campaign trail. Central to Mr. Obama’s drive to remake the nation’s health care system was an unlikely collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry that forced unappealing trade-offs.

Since there has been so much liberal jubilation over the Great Victory, including in the pages of the Communist Party’s newspaper, there’s a tendency to forget about the resistance to that very piece of legislation when it first surfaced. Even though it fell far short of the single-payer approach that the young Obama backed, the House Bill in early 2010 included a public option that would have signaled the entrance of the government after the fashion of Medicare. Those who could not afford private insurance would be able to go to a provider that did not operate on the profit principle. Since Obama cared much more about the interests of the insurance companies than the poor, the public option was sacrificed at the altar of the Free Market deities.

Of course, when Obama found it convenient to back a public option, he said so. Words are cheap, after all.

As most people know, the Senate is even more undemocratic than the House. States with small, largely white, rural and reactionary populations get the same number of Senators to represent them as much larger, multiracial, urban and liberal-leaning populations. Montana, for example, has less than a million residents, many of whom are typical Rush Limbaugh fans. Meanwhile, New York, a state that has 20 times as many residents, gets the same number.

Keeping this in mind, how does a Montana Senator, a Democrat named Max Baucus who received thousands of dollars in contributions from Jack Abramoff, the arch-reactionary lobbyist infamous for the crooked deals that landed him in prison, end up supervising the drafting of the Senate legislation that became Obamacare?

The always useful Wikipedia describes Baucus’s economic record:

Baucus has a 74 percent pro-business voting record as rated by the United States Chamber of Commerce. He twice voted to make filing bankruptcy more difficult for debtors, once in July 2001 to restrict rules on personal bankruptcy, and a second time in March 2005 to include means-testing and restrictions for bankruptcy filers.

In March 2005, Baucus voted against repealing tax subsidies that benefit companies that outsource U.S. jobs offshore. On January 4, 2007, he wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal calling on Democrats to renew President George W. Bush’s fast-track authority for international trade deals.

A perfect background for someone drafting healthcare legislation. And just to make sure that it came out right, he lined up someone named Liz Fowler to write the 85-page piece of legislation that MSNBC and the Communist Party are throwing confetti over.

As it turns out, Fowler was a former executive at WellPoint, a big insurance company. Imagine that! The Guardian described a perfect match between Baucus and Fowler, something that could have been used in an online dating TV commercial:

Baucus took $1.5m from the health sector for his political fund in the past year. Other members of the committee have received hundreds of thousands of dollars. They include Senator Pat Roberts, who last week tried to stall the bill by arguing that lobbyists needed three days to read it.

Baucus holds dinners for health industry executives at which they pay thousands of dollars each to be at the table, and an annual fly-fishing and golfing weekend in his home state of Montana that lobbyists pay handsomely to attend. They have included John Jonas, who represents healthcare firms for Patton Boggs, widely regarded as the top lobbying firm in Washington. Jonas, who formerly worked on the congressional staff, acknowledges that political contributions are intended to buy influence and says it works.

“It would be very naive to say they’re not influenced. The contributors certainly hope they’re influencing and the recipients probably ultimately are influenced,” he said. “I think it’s a morally suspect practice, and then you have to look at its application to see if it’s morally bankrupt … I think what’s bad about the system is it’s got more and more lax over time.

“When I started in this practice you did not talk issues at a fundraiser. It was impolite. And then with this need for money, the system has got coarser over time so that they go around the room asking what issues you’re interested in, much more of a linkage of dollars to a discussion of the issues now.”

The health industry permeates the process in other ways. At Baucus’s side, drafting much of the wording of the reform, was Liz Fowler, a senate committee counsel whose last position was vice-president of the country’s largest health insurer, Wellpoint, which stands to be a principal beneficiary of the new law.

Health companies and their lobby firms also recruit heavily among congressional staffers as a means of maintaining influence.

So that’s what the Communists and Ed Schultz are giddy with delight over, and what the Nation Magazine’s editor Katrina vanden Heuvel called “a beginning to the end of America’s healthcare crisis”–a crappy piece of legislation that was written by an insurance industry lobbyist under the supervision of a yahoo from Montana who took bribes from Jack Abramoff.

Off with their heads.

Obama on mandates in 2008

Pink Ribbons Inc.; Living Downstream; The Education of Dee Dee Ricks

Yesterday the must-see documentary “Pink Ribbons Inc.” opened at the IFC Center in NY. The film was released well before the news broke that the Susan G. Komen Foundation had stopped funding Planned Parenthood because it provided abortion services. If you think the Komen’s main offense was fetus fetishism, as radical feminists used to put it in the 1970s, you haven’t see the worst of it. This powerful mixture of investigative journalism and cultural analysis lies bare the truly sinister partnership of “cause marketing” and the rotten corporations seeking to exploit women’s suffering from an epidemic largely spawned by corporate America.

The film is based on Samantha King’s “Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy”. King, one of the primary interviewees, is joined by a number of other experts on the subject, including women who have survived breast cancer. As a way of showing what the radical critique of corporate philanthropy is up against, the film also interviews Nancy G. Brinker, the CEO and founder of Komen, as well as a number of the corporate chieftains who have teamed up with her.

The most riveting figure among all the interviewees is Barbara Ehrenreich, the long-time socialist journalist and educator who wrote about her own encounter with the disease in an article titled “Welcome to Cancerland” that appeared in the November 2001 Harper’s Magazine.

My official induction into breast cancer comes about ten days later with the biopsy, which, for reasons I cannot ferret out of the surgeon, has to be a surgical one, performed on an outpatient basis but under general anesthesia, from which I awake to find him standing perpendicular to me, at the far end of the gurney, down near my feet, stating gravely, “Unfortunately, there is a cancer.” It takes me all the rest of that drug-addled day to decide that the most heinous thing about that sentence is not the presence of cancer but the absence of me — for I, Barbara, do not enter into it even as a location, a geographical reference point. Where I once was — not a commanding presence perhaps but nonetheless a standard assemblage of flesh and words and gesture — “there is a cancer.” I have been replaced by it, is the surgeon’s implication. This is what I am now, medically speaking.

Ehrenreich is a compelling personality. Her saturnine observations on the medical profession, the pink ribbon industry, her personal drama, and the class dimensions of the epidemic, are worth the price of the admission. But there are some other eye-opening interviews that should be singled out.

Like Ehrenreich, Barbara A. Brenner is a sharp critic of American society and a breast cancer survivor. As Executive Director of Breast Cancer Action, she mobilizes women and men against the type of incestuous relationship that the Komen foundation cultivates with corporate behemoths that produce carcinogenic commodities. When Brenner learned that Kentucky Fried Chicken had hooked up with Komen to give 50 cents to the foundation for every pink bucket of fried chicken that was sold, she launched a campaign directed against KFC and Komen named “What the Cluck?” that effectively put the kibosh on one of the more grotesque examples of “cause marketing”.

One of the more poignant moments in the film that amply demonstrates its class loyalties involves the handful of women organized as The Plastics Focus Group. These are women who worked in factories molding plastic car parts. As part of a research study on the ties between chemicals in the workplace to breast cancer, they described a battery of never-ending chemical assaults that left them feeling ill much of the time. While nosebleeds are bad enough on a daily basis, nothing prepared them for the cancer that would eventually destroy their lives.

One of the main points made in “Pink Ribbons Inc.” is that the Komen Foundation devotes very little resources to prevention, especially through the much needed campaigns against corporate polluters like Ford Motors that victimized the women working on plastic molding at the very time it was exploiting its ties to Komen. That, of course, would be tantamount to biting the hand that feeds it.

Ironically, the pink ribbon itself was thought up by someone very cognizant of the role of carcinogens unleashed by capitalist production. The documentary interviews Charlotte Haley, whose daughter, sister and grandmother all had breast cancer. She began handing out salmon-colored ribbons at grocery stores with cards stating, “The National Cancer Institute annual budget is $1.8 billion, only 5 percent goes for cancer prevention. Help us wake up our legislators and America by wearing this ribbon.” For as long as she has been involved with breast cancer issues, Haley has always emphasized the likely environmental causes of a disease that has become an epidemic after WWII when American industry began to pump out enormous quantities of carcinogens, the carbon based materials that while cheap are deadly.

Anticipating that “Pink Ribbons Inc.” would deal with the question of the corporate role in making women sick, I read Sandra Steingraber’s “Living Downstream: an ecologist looks at cancer in the environment”, a book that I purchased in 1997 when it first came out. To give you a sense of its provenance, you can read this blurb by Richard Levins on the back cover: “Sandra Steingraber’s ‘upstream’ approach to cancer is imperative. It is about time someone wrote this book.” Levins, as you might know, is one of America’s most respected Marxist biologists.

Born in 1959, Steingraber grew up in rural Illinois surrounded by corn and soybean fields that were drenched by chemical pesticides and herbicides. In her 20s, when studying biology, she developed bladder cancer, a disease that is not usually found among the young but is endemic to the kind of workplaces that The Plastic Focus Group endured. The book is written as a kind of memoir and investigative journalism that revolves around her return to her hometown and the various places that might have led to her disease.

Put simply, “Living Downstream” is a latter-day “The Silent Spring”, with frequent nods to Rachel Carson who died of breast cancer, likely from the sort of chemical causes that impacted Steingraber as well. Steingraber is not only a highly accomplished researcher; she is also a deeply gifted writer, as this excerpt should illustrate:

Bean fields are humble; they start out that way and stay that way. For reasons I can’t explain, they are also a little bit sad. Walking through a soybean field, I feel like myself, only sadder. A soybean is a delicate plant. Like all other legumes—clover, peas, alfalfa—the soybean plant has a softness in its leaves. Fully grown, it is mostly shaped like a little bush that never extends much above the thighs, but, late in the season, an inconspicuous twining reveals its origin as an Asian vine. In spite of their modesty, the high-yielding varieties of soybeans are given brawny names—Jack, Burlison, Pharoah—that sound like brands of condoms.

As it turns out, 99 percent of corn and soybeans in Illinois were sprayed with herbicides by 1993. Although they have been shown to produce chromosome damage in lab animals, it is difficult to establish a direct connection between the chemicals and breast or ovarian cancer, their likely cause in rural Illinois. That, of course, is the loophole that corporate America exploits. Their “experts” demand proof that dioxins or PCB’s cause cancer, when the exact moment when a cell mutates is impossible to pinpoint. For that matter, the exact cause of cancer is still not known, nor may never be known since cancer is not exactly caused in the same way as, for example, malaria is caused by a mosquito’s bite.

Cancer has been around for as long as homo sapiens, but it is only in the more recent past, as industry has become more and more carcinogenic, that it has become the widespread menace that confronts humanity. If there is any stronger motivation for abolishing the capitalist system than eliminating a profit motive that makes pollution the threat it is to life and limb, I certainly can’t name it.

Let me conclude with a few words about a documentary that was aired recently on HBO and that can be seen on-demand if you are a subscriber. Titled “The Education of Dee Dee Ricks”, it is the story of a woman best described as out of the cast of Bravo’s “Housewives of New York”. (I watch such shows with my wife from time to time, I confess, because they are a lot funnier than most of the situation comedies on network TV.) If you don’t think that unrepentant Marxists have any business watching such garbage, let me advise you that the top-drawer Bookforum has a pretty positive review of Bravo executive Andy Cohen’s memoir. On second thought, I’ll watch garbage if I feel like it, so there.

Anyhow, Ricks has it all. She lives in a 14 million dollar apartment, is a young-looking 39, endowed with natural blond hair and a statuesque body. In other words, she has all the privileges and much of the seeming shallowness of the Bravo housewives.

Like the petty-minded bureaucrat in Kurosawa’s “Ikiru”, she learns out of the blue one day that she has cancer. Her illness, like that character’s, gives her a new and more uplifted perspective on life. From observing the exclusively white and privileged nature of the women receiving treatment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital (a place I worked in the 1980s), she decides to become a fundraiser for a clinic in Harlem that caters to Black women in the community who die from breast cancer at a rate 5 to 8 times that of whites.

The film is very graphic in its depiction of Ricks’s surgery and aftermath—she undergoes a double mastectomy and 8 rounds of chemotherapy. Throughout it all, she continues to raise money for the clinic and becomes close friends, almost like a sister, with Cynthia Dodson, a Black woman who has stage-4 breast cancer.

This is a poignant study of the solidarity that emerges between women enduring a dreaded disease and a partial explanation for the appeal that the Komen foundation has for many women. Indeed, Ricks is seen giving a testimonial to Dodson at a Komen fundraising dinner.

If you do not have HBO, keep an eye out for this documentary if it ever makes other venues since it is a very inspiring film about women dealing with their number one health threat in this epoch.

Debt, deadbeats, death, and deliverance

A NY Times article caught my eye a few days before I posted my article on debt. Titled “Debt Collector Is Faulted for Tough Tactics in Hospitals“,  it was a reminder of how contemporary America is starting to resemble a Charles Dickens novel.

Employees [of Accretive Inc., a collection agency) were told to stall patients entering the emergency room until they had agreed to pay a previous balance, according to the documents. Employees in the emergency room, for example, were told to ask incoming patients first for a credit card payment. If that failed, employees were told to say, “If you have your checkbook in your car I will be happy to wait for you,” internal documents show.

Employees at Accretive’s client hospitals ask patients to make “point of service” payments before they receive treatment. Until she went to Fairview for her son Maxx’s ear tube surgery in November, Marcia Newton, a stay-at-home mother in Corcoran, Minn., said she had never been asked to pay for care before receiving it. “They were really aggressive about getting that money upfront,” she said in an interview.

Ms. Newton was shocked to learn that the employees were debt collectors. “You really feel hoodwinked,” she said.

My first exposure to the “bottom line” mentality of the medical industry was at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in 1985, where I had taken a job as a database administrator. Ever since I started programming in 1968, every place I worked was in the financial industry. Finally, I felt like I was working for the common good—foolish me.

Memorial Sloan-Kettering is the most prestigious cancer hospital in the United States, founded with money from two General Motors tycoons, Alfred P. Sloan and Charles F. Kettering. Without a trace of irony, the wiki on Sloan-Kettering states:

At the August 8, 1945 announcement about the research institute, Sloan and Kettering emphasized that the dramatic news of the atomic bomb, developed with a US$2 billion research program, was a graphic illustration of what can be accomplished by scientifically organized research as practiced by American industry. If as much money and talented personnel were available as the government had for the atomic bomb, they said, very rapid progress could be made in cancer research.

As head of GM, Sloan did lots of business in Nazi Germany, much of it through Opel, its subsidiary. In a good introduction to the sordid ties titled “Hitler’s Carmaker: The Inside Story of How General Motors Helped Mobilize the Third Reich“, Edwin Black writes:

Within a few years of partnering with the Hitler regime, Opel began to dwarf all competition. By 1937, GM’s subsidiary had grown to triple the size of Daimler-Benz and quadruple that of Ford’s fledgling German operation, known as Ford-Werke. By the end of the 1930s, Opel was valued at $86.7 million, which in 21st-century dollars, translates into roughly $1.1 billion.

In the meantime, GM was responsible for stunning growth in Germany’s economy. As most economists of the day knew, and as Sloan himself bragged, automobile manufacturing created thousands of factory jobs, hundreds of suppliers, numerous dealerships, widespread motorization and an attached oil industry.

Moreover, the growth of the highway network, from local roads to the Autobahn, spurred a construction boom that spawned thousands of additional jobs and necessitated hundreds of additional suppliers. Even GM’s own sponsored expert historian, who decades later examined Hitler-era documentation, concluded: “The auto industry spearheaded the remarkable recovery of the German economy that boosted the popularity of the Nazi regime by virtually eliminating within a few years the mass unemployment that had idled a quarter of the workforce and contributed so importantly to Hitler’s rise.”

For the first year or so at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, I worked on a data model for the hospital that would be used as a platform for applications like patient registration, etc. Back in the mid-80s, “normalization” and “entity relationships” were all the rage in EDP, as if defining the data model would in and of itself guarantee successful systems design and implementation. Today it is all about “object orientation” and just as much of an illusion. Computer software development fails most often because of tyrannical management structures that set target dates arbitrarily and play little attention to the grunts that are actually familiar with the enterprise. In some ways, that is the biggest joke about “Red Plenty”. If automation failed in the USSR, it was not so much about central planning as it was about bureaucratic fiat—the same methods that define American big business with all its EDP Hindenburg crashes.

Just around the time that the data model was completed, word came down that the top management at Sloan-Kettering had decided to buy a package from Shared Medical Systems. Although it was not based on a database management system, as most new systems were, it had the best gosh-darned bill collection software you could buy.

My boss Mary Hamilton explained the thinking of top management to me. Someone’s loved one would go into the hospital and get chemo or radiation “therapy” that did nothing to stop the halt of the disease. When death came, often within six months or so, the survivors had no incentive in paying for the huge bills associated with getting poisoned or zapped in small doses. So the hospital had to track the deadbeats down and collect.

When I was working at Sloan-Kettering, I read a terrific book titled “The Cancer Industry” that along with “The Cancer Wars” is essential reading for those with a class analysis. To this day, I remember what the book said about Hubert Humphrey’s stay at Sloan-Kettering. I don’t have the book handy but these paragraphs from a 1990 review should suffice:

Among the horrors stories in The Cancer Industry is the case history of Senator Hubert Humphrey, who was operated on by a team of surgeons at Memorial Sloan-Kettering on October 6, 1976. His surgeon appeared before the press and television cameras to announce that the senator was cured by the operation, but as a preventive measure, to “wipe out any microscopic colonies of cancer cells that may be hidden in the body, treatment would begin with experimental drugs.” Moss describes the aftermath:

“Within about a year, Senator Humphrey was dead. In that short time he had withered from a vigorous middle-aged man to an old, balding and feeble cancer victim. Humphrey himself blamed chemotherapy … calling it `bottled death’ and refusing in the end to return to Memorial Hospital for drug treatment.”

In 2000 Siemens acquired Shared Medical Systems and renamed the package Soarian, whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean. Appropriately enough, Siemens shared GM/Opel’s coziness with the Nazis as wiki relates:

Preceding World War II, Siemens was involved in funding the rise of the Nazi Party and the secret rearmament of Germany. During the Second World War, Siemens supported the Hitler regime, contributed to the war effort and participated in the “Nazification” of the economy. Siemens had many factories in and around notorious concentration camps to build electric switches for military uses. In one example, almost 100,000 men and women from Auschwitz worked in a Siemens factory inside the camp, supplying the electricity to the camp.

If you go to the Siemens website, you can read about their bill-collecting prowess:

Soarian MedSuite enables you to minimize operational costs with a comprehensive billing function that captures charges immediately, then quickly generates and issues bills – helping you increase billing accuracy and reduce revenue loss. To improve collections, Soarian MedSuite immediately accounts for all services incurred during a patient’s visit and automatically calculates the total amount due. In addition, the system also supports multi-discounting and multi-payers as well as enables users to view the status of unpaid balances on all patient bills.

After finding out about Sloan-Kettering’s new-found determination to wring every last cent out of the family of poor Uncle Ned, I decided to go to Nicaragua and work for some Sandinista government agency as a volunteer. The technology would have been backward compared to the systems I worked on in the USA, but the values were progressive.

Michael Urmann, the executive director of Tecnica (who I learned died some days ago), said that I would be of more use in New York recruiting other volunteers because I was good at working with people, despite the obnoxious reputation I have earned (probably deservedly so.)

Within a year of my return, I landed a job at Goldman-Sachs. I figured if I was going to work for some scumbag corporation, I might as well go to the top (or bottom, I guess.) Toward the end of my stint there, a new EDP chief came in, a real prick named Rick Adam that I have written about before. I documented his sleazy past at an aircraft company he launched after leaving Goldman but I did not write about his latest venture following its collapse.

Adam is now the CEO of Recondo Technology, described on its website as Automating the Hospital Across the Revenue Cycle—the word revenue should be highlighted. In a link titled Point of Service Collections, there’s this:

Reduce Bad Debt and Write-Offs

Today SurePayHealth is helping hospitals and other providers across the US to verify patient identity and insurance eligibility, and to calculate an accurate patient statement at Point of Service. By ensuring data quality on the front end of the revenue cycle, hospitals can reduce back-office rework as well as full time employees required to manage bad debt and write-offs.

Yes, bad debt. That’s the ticket. Reduce all the bad debt and that which you can’t collect, you turn over to the goons at Accretive.

A few years after leaving Goldman, I went to work at Columbia University where remained for the next 20 years. That’s nearly 20 times as long as the average tenure at my other EDP jobs. I can’t say that Columbia has much in common with a Sandinista government agency but at least it doesn’t suck as bad as Goldman or Sloan-Kettering.

Now, at the age of 67, with retirement looming ahead, I will finally be relieved of the need to work for “the man” and devote my remaining years on earth to doing the things I really like: reading and writing. As Karl Marx once put it:

…the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working, he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working.

–Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

Sugar: the bitter truth

A couple of months ago, after I began taking naps almost every night over a three week period—something that was unprecedented for me—my wife urged me to get a check-up. So alarmed was I about my changing sleep patterns coming at me with the force of jet lag that I broke with my ostrich-like aversion to medical exams and made an appointment. At the age of 67, I knew that it was better to find out about some frightening condition even if medical science lacked the means to overcome it.

My overall attitude toward such matters was profoundly fatalistic. I could not help but think that my body was like a car with over 100,000 miles on it. It might get me from point A to point B for the time being but eventually it would be done in by the organic counterpart of rust. To extend the motor vehicle analogy further, by the time I had reached the age of 50 I began feeling like Yves Montand driving that truck filled with dynamite in “Wages of Fear”. No matter how careful you were, death would catch up to you. I might have spent over 45 years defending socialist ideas, but before that I was a hard-core existentialist. It was hard not to think in existential terms, after all, when it came to matters of life and death.

By the time of the appointment, my sleeping patterns had returned to normal. But the report I got back from my blood test left me feeling a bit rattled. My cholesterol levels were high and the doctor recommended a change in diet and more exercise. About five years ago I took a blood-pressure test in a cafeteria at work and was told that it was slightly elevated. That persuaded me to cut down on salt and start using a butter substitute. With respect to exercise, there’s not much more I can do beyond the 10 to 12 miles per week that I have been jogging since 1970. I may not be very fast but I am consistent.

After getting this report, I tried to figure out where the bad cholesterol was coming from. Most nights, a typical meal at home is fish or some white meat with vegetables. I have a couple of eggs on Sunday morning and a bit of cheese in the evening before dinner, but that’s about it when it comes to dietary fat. I began to feel like someone who has been told that they are HIV positive. But instead of trying to figure out which one-night stand had made me ill, I looked back at some of my foolish flings with fast food. Was it the Kentucky Fried Chicken I used to eat 2 or 3 times a week when I lived in Kansas City in 1978? Or maybe all the slices of pizza I’ve enjoyed over the years in New York City? Like Christopher Hitchens telling an interviewer that he would have not have forsaken booze or tobacco, even if he knew early on that it would lead to esophageal cancer, I had difficulty imagining what life in New York would be like without pizza. Given all the shit you have to put up when living here, such small pleasures make it worth it.

Last Sunday’s “Sixty Minutes” had a segment that cleared things up for me. It turns out that sugar is the main cause of high cholesterol rather than fat nowadays. Titled Is Sugar Toxic?, it focuses on the crusade of Dr. Robert Lustig, a California endocrinologist whose main concern is with the impact of sugar on young people. Among the people interviewed is Kimber Stanhope who conducted an experiment on young people whose sugar intake was measured carefully hour by hour. This is what she reported:

But now, studies done by Kimber Stanhope, a nutritional biologist at the University of California, Davis are starting to back him up. She’s in the middle of a groundbreaking, five-year study which has already shown strong evidence linking excess high fructose corn syrup consumption to an increase in risk factors for heart disease and stroke. That suggests calories from added sugars are different than calories from other foods.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: The mantra that you hear from most nutritionists is that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie.

Kimber Stanhope: And I think the results of the study showed clearly that is not true.

Stanhope’s conclusions weren’t easy to come by. Nutrition studies are expensive and difficult. Stanhope has paid groups of research subjects to live in this hospital wing for weeks at a time, under a sort of 24-hour lockdown. They undergo scans and blood tests – every calorie they ingest, meticulously weighed and prepared.

Kimber Stanhope: They’re never out of our sight. So we do know that they are consuming exactly what we need them to consume.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: And they’re not sneaking any candy bars on the side.

Kimber Stanhope: Yeah, right, exactly.

For the first few days, participants eat a diet low in added sugars, so baseline blood levels can be measured.

[Research assistant: So remember you guys have to finish all of your Kool-Aid. ]

Then, 25 percent of their calories are replaced with sweetened drinks and Stanhope’s team starts drawing blood every 30 minutes around the clock. And those blood samples? They revealed something disturbing.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: And what are you starting to see?

Kimber Stanhope: We found that the subjects who consumed high fructose corn syrup had increased blood levels of LDL cholesterol and other risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: How quickly did these changes occur?

Kimber Stanhope: Within two weeks.

Kimber Stanhope’s study suggests that when a person consumes too much sweet stuff, the liver gets overloaded with fructose and converts some of it into fat. Some of that fat ends up in the bloodstream and helps generate a dangerous kind of cholesterol called small dense LDL. These particles are known to lodge in blood vessels, form plaque and are associated with heart attacks.

Unlike most people, I don’t have a sweet tooth. I have a teaspoon of sugar with my coffee in the morning and a piece of cake or a cookie on Saturday afternoon but that’s about it. Perhaps the fact that I have had only one cavity in the past 20 years testifies to what I thought my ostensibly good dietary habits supported.

But it turns out that the real culprit was probably the fucking corn syrup that is almost universal nowadays in just about every product found on grocery shelves:

Lustig says the American lifestyle is killing us.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: And most of it you say is preventable?

Dr. Robert Lustig: Seventy-five percent of it is preventable.

While Dr. Lustig has published a dozen scientific articles on the evils of sugar, it was his lecture on YouTube, called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” that brought his message to the masses.

By “bad food” Dr. Lustig means the obvious things such as table sugar, honey, syrup, sugary drinks and desserts, but also just about every processed food you can imagine, where sugar is often hidden: yogurts and sauces, bread, and even peanut butter. And what about the man-made, often vilified sweetener, high fructose corn syrup?

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Is it worse than just table sugar?

Dr. Robert Lustig: No. ‘Cause it’s the exact same. They are basically equivalent. The problem is they’re both bad. They’re both equally toxic.

Since the 1970s, sugar consumption has gone down nearly 40 percent, but high fructose corn syrup has more than made up the difference. Dr. Lustig says they are both toxic because they both contain fructose — that’s what makes them sweet and irresistible.

Dr. Robert Lustig: We love it. We go out of our way to find it. I think one of the reasons evolutionarily is because there is no food stuff on the planet that has fructose that is poisonous to you. It is all good. So when you taste something that’s sweet, it’s an evolutionary Darwinian signal that this is a safe food.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: We were born this way?

Dr. Robert Lustig: We were born this way.

Central to Dr. Lustig’s theory is that we used to get our fructose mostly in small amounts of fruit — which came loaded with fiber that slows absorption and consumption — after all, who can eat 10 oranges at a time? But as sugar and high fructose corn syrup became cheaper to refine and produce, we started gorging on them. Americans now consume 130 pounds per person a year — that’s a third of a pound every day.

Perhaps the widespread use of corn syrup might have something to do with all the commercials for products that contain it, including “Sixty Minutes” that has been sponsored by:

• Campbell’s Soup
• Lifesavers
• Pepsi-Cola
• Prego tomato sauce
• Progresso
• Werther’s butterscotch candies

If you go to Prego’s website, you will be deluged by all the “nutritional” buzzwords like organic and healthy, but except for its Heart Smart brand that only came into existence as a result of consumer pressure, all their products contain corn syrup.

Campbell’s, which owns Prego, has also adapted to consumer pressure but most of its soups contain high fructose corn syrup, including the Classic Tomato Soup I used to eat growing up.

Even if I was to be more careful in looking for corn syrup in anything I buy in the store, there’s not much I can do about the food I eat at lunch, which has come from Fairway’s kitchens over the past 5 years since I have been working on West 131^st Street in West Harlem. Almost all their hot meals come with some kind of sauce that is calculated to taste good, even if it is larded with corn syrup (and salt for that matter.) I am trying to be more selective in what I take out from Fairway but in the final analysis I will have to wait until I retire to make sure that I control what goes down my gullet.

But ultimately sugar is a political problem rather than an existential one. In an article I wrote  five years ago on Sidney W. Mintz’s “Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History,” I cited a passage that dealt with the role of sugar in the capitalist economy, especially as a way of “lubricating” the de facto machinery that human labor represents. It is well worth repeating:

Mintz sketches out the early consumption of sugar, which was a commodity as precious as gold. When the Venerable Bede died in 735 A.D., his fellow monks inherited his trove of spices, including a package of sugar. Besides its tastiness, sugar–like salt and other spices–had importance as a preservative. That is why it was important to the Venerable Bede and the average European. Until the “discovery” of the Americas, sugar was a luxury imported good from the East that was largely confined to the ruling classes. In 1288, the royal household consumed 6,258 pounds of sugar. (Does this explain the hit-or-miss quality of the British smile, one wonders.)

When the British East India Company was chartered in 1660, one of its chief goals was to increase tea imports into Great Britain. A century later tea was the drink of choice in Great Britain, even more popular than malt liquor–and considerably cheaper. The rural poor had used malt liquor to moisten their bread, but a tax on malt made it relatively expensive. Meanwhile, factory workers relied on tea and sugar for a jolt that could help them keep pace with the rigors of the assembly line.

Tea, by comparison to malt liquor or gin, was cheap. You just needed sugar to make it more palatable. Hence, the irony that two key consumer goods of the British lower classes–tea and sugar–relied on the super-exploitation of African slaves and Indian plantation workers. This obviously sets the pattern for Wal-Mart today. Sugar also supplied a cheap substitute for complex carbohydrates, just as it does today. Oatmeal porridge was mixed with molasses–so-called “hasty pudding”. Mintz’s description of consumption patterns in the 18th century seem depressingly similar to those today:

The first half of the eighteenth century may have been a period of increased purchasing power for laboring people, even though the quality of nutrition probably declined at the same time. Innovations like the liquid stimulants and the greatly increased use of sugar were items for which additional income was used, as well as items by which one could attempt emulation of those at higher levels of the social system. But labeling this usage “emulation” explains very little. The circumstances under which a new habit is acquired are as important as the habits of those others from whom the habit is learned. It seemes likely that many of the new tea drinkers and sugar users were not fully satisfied with their daily fare. Some were doubtless inadequately fed; others were bored by their food and by the large quantities of starchy carbohydrates they ate. A hot liquid stimulant full of sweet calories doubtless “hit the spot,” perhaps particularly for people who were already undernourished.