As Blog Is My Witness, I Will Never Go Hangry Again

In my quest to be healthier, I've found myself hungrier. My problem is simple: overeating. Calories in, calories out.

Obviously I can't eat as much as I would like to, so sometimes bad things happen. Spefically this: when I get hungry, I get angry. Hungry and Angry. You know. "Hangry." Suffering from - hanger?

I get soft. I lose my mojo. I get lightheaded sometimes, which is how I know when I really need to eat. But mostly grumpy.

Fights are picked. Barbs are tossed. Soft household objects are thrown. Oh, what am I doing talking in the passive voice, I am the one doing these things. Who suffers? Me and anyone around me. Mike, coworkers, small woodland creatures - you name it.

It's okay to be hungry for a little bit. I can't possibly cover this concept better than the fabulous Sheryl did a while back.

I need to find a way to control this, and I am putting this out to all four of you readers out there - I will find a way to get my emotions under control as I get healthier. I believe that willpower is a muscle and the more I exercise it, the better I will get at it. When I start feeling rage, I will sit down and count to ten. Or do square breathing (in for four seconds, hold for four seconds, out for four seconds, hold for four seconds).

No more (wire?) hanger(s)! EVERRRR!

Sugar Shoop

Here I go, here I go, here I go again. Girls, what's my weakness?

SIMPLE CARBOHYDRATES! Okay then. I’m sorry, I just love Salt ‘n’ Suga. 'N' wheat. 'N' high fructose corn syrup.

I cannot resist a cookie or a Twizzler or a Lindt truffle. I need to keep these things out of my house. I refuse to categorically reject any food (except donuts, those are completely unsatisfying to me and I feel like I need to eat 4 to feel satisfied so I am avoiding them post-pregnancy).

So I won’t say to myself, “I will never eat sugar again.” I know only one person in real life who as actually done that, and she is awesome, but I’m not her. I can’t give things up forever. What I can do is keep sweets out of my house. On maternity leave, they were so much easier to pop in my mouth with a babe in one arm than, say, preparing a salad. But then I would continue eating candy and didn't compensate by eating more healthfully on other days, or by exercising. Now that I need to model good habits for the kiddo, and get back to fighting weight (aka non-obesity), I can’t run to the grocery or drugstore in the middle of the afternoon to fulfill a Bassett’s Allsort craving as I did during pregnancy.

And I can strive to try to eat sweets when and only when there is something delicious and unusual afoot. For example, a night out for ice cream with friends, or my mother’s special coginettes at Christmas. The sweet surprise of the food truck cupcake arriving in our neighborhood. The treat of Mexican cookies at a Cinco de Mayo parties. Not daily binging at my apartment.Moral of the story? I can't be perfect. But. Cookies are a sometimes food, y’all.

*Apologies for the lyrics bastardization go out to the incredible Salt 'n' Pepa, who I have on 100% good authority read this blog every morning before breakfast. I LOVE YOU LADIES and I hope you understand.

Things to Say to a Lady In The Family Way

When my boss was expecting her first child a couple of years ago, I really had no idea how to act around her. I had zero friends with kids, I had just gotten married, didn't even know if I wanted kids, and the whole thing was like an alien ritual. I would let her bring the subject up, and try to ask very boring questions. When are you due? Can you still have coffee? And then I would drop the subject like it was hot. I didn't want to ask invasive, annoying questions and display my vast ignorance. At the same time, I wish I had had a stockpile of polite things to ask or say to her just so I wouldn't look like a childhater.

Now that I too am in that delicate condition, and remember how very, very intimidated I was (and still am a lot of the time) by pregnancy conversation, I am very attuned to how people react to my ever-expanding body. There is a funny axis I measure this on:

              Blissfully ignorant
                       |
                       |
Uninterested------------+------------Very very interested
                       |
                       |
                  Know-it-all

Needless to say - but I'll say it anyway - the vast majority of people fall into the middle or left of this axis. They'll ask about the sex, say something about how fun babies are, and let it go. They'll hold the door, but won't give up a seat on the train. They'll have something charming to say about the experience (e.g. "I was three weeks early, but I think I knew she was coming because I was nesting like crazy"), but don't proselytize.

And, needless to say - but again, I'll say it anyway - there are a few, a very very few, people who do not fall into the middle. There are a few people who fall towards the right of this axis - they are either blissfully ignorant or know-it-all, but one way or the other, they are extremely interested in talking about your pregnancy. The know-it-alls usually have a bunch of kids, or have just had their first and just want to pass along their suddenly infinite wisdom. The blissfully ignorant are usually childfree, but unlike bewildered two-years-ago me, they are chockful of questions or remarks, many of which are wildly inappropriate.

And before anyone reading is like, "OMG IS SHE TALKING ABOUT ME?" - the answer is probably not, because usually you get these remarks from strangers or super-casual acquaintances, like someone on the bus or in your yoga class.

Some examples (and my real or imagined responses):

Know-it-alls: "You're not giving birth in a hospital, are you?" [Unless the baby comes out on the way over there, yes, yes I am.]
Blissfully Ignorant: "So was this pregnancy planned?"
[::Sob:: no and I regret it every day. Will you please take my baby?]
Know-it-alls: "You shouldn't be lifting weights this late in pregnancy." [Whoa, did my doctor get plastic surgery? Because my doctor is cool with my workout regime and you do not look like one bit like my doctor.]
Blissfully Ignorant: "Wow, you're getting huge, you must be due soon. Any minute now, huh? Har har." [I am four months pregnant, actually, but thanks.]
Know-it-alls: "Trust me, you do not want one of these, they are a pain in the ass. Do you want mine? Ha ha ha." [Wait, what? You mean something that my husband and I have worked through two miscarriages, four rounds of Clomid and untold doctor's visits to get to is a pain in the ass? Thank you, good Samaritan! I have reconsidered.]
Blissfully Ignorant: "So are you worried about losing the baby weight?" [I am more worried about keeping a small human alive, not only through the bone-crushing, flesh-tearing adventure that is childbirth, but also for the rest of that human's life. Ask me why I haven't lost the pre-baby weight.]

To be fair, I truly think that most of these comments come from a place of caring and interest. And I am really open to talking about any aspect of my pregnancy with anyone who asks - I will gladly discuss breastfeeding, miscarriage, fertility, weight gain, circumcision - I'm an open, if mostly ignorant, book. But there are some things you should just not say to a pregnant lady, and I think the six remarks/questions above are good examples of the "just-nos" or "find another way to say/ask thises."

On the other hand, I've heard some lovely comments and questions from various people, parents and childfree alike. I'm sure some would disagree with my assessment of all of the below as appropriate, but I say, you can always say "I can't," or "we're not really ready to talk about that," or whatever. For example:

Comments:

• "Wow, that's so exciting. Congratulations."


• "You look great." [Never fails.]


• "I would try to take a long leave if you can. I took 10 weeks and it goes by so fast."


• "I know a great maternity store/book/pre-natal masseuse you should check out."


• "My sister was also born in August and my mother really found swimming relaxing."


• "Oh, my brother's wife is due in February, she just passed through her morning sickness phase." [or some kind of story about someone you know - no birth horror stories plz]

Questions:

• "Are you excited?"


• "How are you feeling?" [So simple!]


• "What's your plan for the birth?" [Please don't be judgmental if you don't like the answer.]


• "Do you know the sex? Will you find out?"


• "Are you picking out a name ahead of time? Are you keeping it a secret?"


• "So what doctor are you seeing? Do you like him/her?" [If a local]

My perspective is slightly compounded by the fact that I try not to speak about my pregnancy unless spoken to or asked about it* - I would hate to end up on stfuparents. Doing a facebook pregnancy announcement was scary for me because I was sure I would jinx something and it felt so indulgent, I almost decided I didn't want to do it at all. Other than that, I'm trying to stay as classy as a 40lb-heavier+ragingly-hormonal+overheated person can possibly stay for the next few months.

And then, hoping all goes well, I'll get to listen to strangers talk to me about parenting instead of pregnancy. Except instead of nine months of unsolicited advice and judgment, I'll get a lifetime of it.

Can't wait!

*I know, no one solicited this damn post. But I consider it to be a PSA on behalf of expecting mothers everywhere. Hope it helps!

Let's Move - Away from Fat-Shaming

As she rolls out the pretty awesome Let's Move campaign against childhood obesity, Michelle Obama is taking guff about using her daughters as an example of learning to exit the highway to obesity.

It's unfortunate that that was the first thing I heard about Let's Move. The First Lady has made what I believe are some excellent points about obstacles to nutrition in our country. To wit:

"Urban sprawl and fears about safety often mean the only walking they do is out their front door to a bus or a car."
"It's about small changes that add up - like walking to school, replacing soda with water or skim milk, trimming those portion sizes a little - things like this can mean the difference between being healthy and fit or not."

I love that Michelle Obama is working on this. I love most of what she's saying about it.

However, I'm torn about whether it was a good idea to use the First Daughters as an example here. True, perhaps the family had this conversation, and the daughters were okay with it. Nevertheless, the act of using your own daughters' bodies to make a point seems excessive. On the one hand, this is very similar to what politicians do all the time in campaigns, apparently with the subject's consent - "Jack here is unemployed and his children are sick" - but on the other hand, you are telling the public about your daughters' medical issues, issues that are ridden with social stigma. Furthermore, it seems so unnecessary. Mrs. Obama's speech is so right-on about so many issues that the personal tie gilds the lily for me. As a tax-and-spend liberal, I'm probably not the audience, but I find it hard to believe that the personal anecdote would have changed anyone's mind. So why not leave it out?

I am not sure how much this bothers me. Perhaps not much. But I do know that the following bothers me: using body-shaming language about your pre-adolescent/adolescent daughters. For millions to read about. ABC reported that President Obama said the following:

"A couple of years ago – you’d never know it by looking at her now – Malia was getting a little chubby."

Again, perhaps this conversation with Malia happened and she was cool with it. But there is really, really no need for this and it detracts from what Let's Move is about - it's not supposed to be about making women feel like shit for being "a little chubby." It's about making healthy choices. As Psychology Today points out, "[w]ords like “chubby” don’t cause eating disorders but they are often a trigger to disordered eating behavior. As an eating disorder professional, we would strongly caution parents from using labels or prerogative words to describe their child’s weight as this has lasting impacts on a child’s self esteem."

I would ask anyone who has a young person in their lives they care about to encourage healthy choices by emphasizing benefits like growing up big and strong, having a well-functioning body (heart, tummy, etc), and maybe being able to perform better in school/sports/arts, rather than focusing on being not chubby. The more we teach children that healthy choices are about being well and not about deprivation to achieve a certain type of body, the better service we do for the young men and young women in our lives, and the healthier they will be.

Practical Research Problems

One area of my research studies how much physical activity people perform and how those factors might be related to the physical environment in their neighborhoods. One of the "gold standard" methods to complete this kind of data collection is to use accelerometers to measure how much physical activity people do during the day. There are obviously problems, people forget to wear them, or they occasionally malfunction, but overall you expect pretty reliable physical measurements from them. One particularly innovative intervention is to use an automated text-messaging system to remind kids to be active based on their accelerometer readings.

Proving that you can take nothing for granted in research, there is one way that several industrious kids (in a different, London-based study) figured out how to get around the read-outs of the accelerometers, attach them to their dogs!:

The Health Blog was impressed by the cleverness of some 11- and 12-year-old obese children in east London, who were participating in an exercise research study.

The kids were supposed to be wearing pedometers to measure the number of steps they were taking each day. But some of those in the study got the bright idea to clip the pedometers to the collars of their pet dogs, upping the distance the youngsters appeared to be moving each day, according to the BBC. (WSJ Health Blog)

I've got to hand it to those kids, that's a pretty smart idea.

Healthy Eating: Easier Said Than Done

This article features a Milwaukee farmer, Will Allen, who, through hard work, natural charm, and, of course, ability, sustains a thriving farm a mile away from a Milwaukee housing project.

My heart gets all melty on the subject of our failure to provide quality food to the poor - not only because of the tragedy of people in poor areas having access only to the crappiest of food and sometimes dying because of it, but until recently, I found it hard to believe that obesity and other problems related to eating poorly are sometimes out of the control of people who suffer from it. Turns out not everyone lives in the suburbs near a grocery store and owns a car.

First, the disbelief. It used to be the case for me that when I saw obese people, I assumed not that they were malnourished, but that they were simply eating too much - of whatever, I didn't really know or care. But often what is actually happening is that they are not eating the right foods because they can't afford to buy the right foods. In the Will Allen profile, Mr. Allen claims that the Pick n' Save nearest to the housing project is a three-mile trip. If you don't have a car, you're going to march to the nearest place, which is likely to be a fast food joint or convenience store. Imagine making meal after meal of 7-11 products. You'd get few vitamins and you'd probably put on a few pounds. But when we see an overweight person, the first thought for many of us is not usually, "you need to be eating more foods that are good for you." It's "you need to eat less."

Also, I think our country has kind of a screwed up political narrative about this. For example, I've heard it argued (but am too lazy to do the actual research to confirm) that food stamps largely cover not-so-nutritious food. If that's true, I think it's because of tax-haters and also because the words associated with "urban farming" are not "healthy," "job creating," and "fun," but rather "out-of-touch," "liberal" and "organic." So, if someone were to buy locally-grown organic romaine lettuce at a farmers market with food stamps, a politician may get up on a dais and scream, "This is an excess and an outrage. I pledge to save the taxpayers of this great state millions of dollars by reforming the program so that we all have to make sensible choices." Or, "providing children with free and reduced lunch is a waste of taxpayer dollars. We need to take responsibility as a society and pack nutritious meals for our children, or pony up the cash to buy them." Meanwhile, parents working for low-wages and long hours do not have time to pack their children healthy meals, and corporate suppliers are paying and lobbying the same characters to guarantee that their white bread and peanut butter are food-stamp-eligible and/or sold in public schools.

What I find most disheartening is the child obesity risk presented by unequal access to healthy food, because it leads to horrible problems like heart and kidney disease. But as demonstrated above, it's not always a matter of "laying off the cookies and chips." It's often an access issue, and that's what farmers like Will Allen are trying to get to - access.

It would be an interesting experiment to use state or federal funds, or even private grants to start up more urban farms in currently vacant lots in Detroit, Philadelphia, Jackson, and elsewhere. It would create jobs, a marketplace, healthy food, and a great sense of community.

Other than that, much better qualified people than myself have proposed policy solutions. Organizations like Grist, Wholesome Wave, and the Philadelphia Food Trust seem to be doing a lot of interesting and good work towards equity and access to healthy food.

The Health Care You Have, Not The Health Care You Want

I believe in health care reform, but since I can't read or listen to more than 20 or so words at a time without thinking about food or wanting to take a nap*, it's hard for me to sink my teeth into, you know, learning anything about it. Fortunately for me, there exist magazines to cater to me and my tiny attention span.

The New Yorker came out this week with Atul Gawande's kind of sweet overview of how universal health care evolved in slavering backwards socialist nations like France, Switzerland and the UK. The thesis is pinned to path-dependence: there was never a traumatic overhaul with bureaucrats scrambling to radically change everything, rather, things just kind of happened. For example in the UK, WWII required massive government assistance to put health services out in the sticks, where everyone's kids were fleeing, and then when all that stuff got bombed they had to redo it. So by 1948 the NHS sort of already existed.

Many Americans envision universal health care as a change on the level of a Bolshevik revolution, and the author's idea is that it doesn't really have to be that way. No one is going to shut hospitals down for 5 days and raise your taxes to 50%. You build gradually on what you have, and the result is an imperfect but workable patchwork-quilt-style safety net.

I like the idea of making universal healthcare a palatable idea, which Gawande does in a very straightforward, non-wonky way. The problem he overlooks, I think, is that for these European countries, there was a serious impetus for these incremental changes like war (UK), famine (France), everyone else is doing it (Switzerland). Here, it seems that impetus does not exist, but for the Cries Of The People (and who ever listens to those anyway).

Well, actually, there is the obvious: that nearly 50 million of us have zero insurance, but that doesn't seem to have resonated with many of us. (I don't like thinking that we're so callous as to say that a Teddy Grahams heiress should be able to have lots of extra money lying around for Botox but not have to contribute jack to a laid-off factory worker's cancer treatment. But maybe small, incremental edits to our collective consciousness have created that culture.) It does seem that at a minimum, almost everyone agrees that more people need to have their basic needs cared for. So, a journey of a thousand miles, etc. But will there have to be a catalyst to, you know, take that first step? A catalyst besides the problem itself? I hope an administration that is supposedly built on pragmatic competence will find a way to get us somewhere without requiring it.

*Which makes being a) married to an academic and b) the sister of a health policy nerd AWESOMELY FUNNY. Them: "So basically this method of measuring the effect gives us new ways to control for these variables, and predict the..." Me: "Look, a butterfly."

Monets vs. Seurats: I'm A Jerk

My father is a fattist. I.e., he can't stand overweight people the way some people can't abide smokers. They say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, so here goes:
I'm obsessed with weight. America is a fat, fat place, but living and working in New York City is somewhat of an anomaly, at least when it comes to women, because that's the gender whose trim, healthy members I'm enviously glaring at every morning. Everywhere I turn are model-actresses with youthful calves and slender hips. But when you look closer, these willowy femmes seem--I don't know, craggier. More lines on their faces. Worse teeth.
By comparison, in the odd event that I do see a larger person, it's more often that I observe fine grooming and much attention to detail in appearance.
Very unscientific, because I am in no way qualified to comment on this, but the psychology (mine and theirs) is interesting. Are the skinny, craggy people native NYCers, who have suffered more air pollution and are more hardened in general? Are the larger, better-coiffed women compensating by adorning themselves with manicures, highlights and carefully-applied lipliner?
As a tweener-hovering between normal and overweight, I'm just curious. And a bad person.
::Sigh::

Consumer Cities

Part of the reason that I got interested in studying gentrification is its importance in shaping American (and, as I am finding out world) cities. It is a fascinating location of a whole bunch of fundamental theoretical debates. And I don't mean "theoretical" in the sense of academically removed ivory tower stuff, but real fundamental debates about the underlying social issues facing American society. Gentrification, and the debates surrounding gentrification, narrow in on fundamental questions about the role of public financing for housing, jobs, education but also issues surrounding the environment, diversity and the role of public and private institutions in the development of new political ideas.

But, there are times when I find it uncanny how well timed things are. For instance, a couple of weeks ago, I was discussing Lance Freeman's book in the context of the paper that I was am writing when the next day the AYR published a review of it. But, today I found something that is probably even more directly relevant. From the Creative Class Group (Richard Florida's consultancy business), there was a link to this article in the International Herald Tribune. It is discussing the role of demand-driven location decisions in the economic development of cities and how cities can cater to those demands. There was one particular part that caught my attention, however:

The number of these "consumer immigrants" - those moving back to the city seeking a better quality of life - is relatively small compared with the hundreds of thousands of poorer economic migrants who traditionally head to the inner city.

But the "consumer immigrants" have a special significance because they are rich. They are the wealthy, educated, creative types that Bloomberg wants to engage with in his PlaNYC, his initiative to ensure that the extra million souls he predicts will arrive by 2030 do not produce an unlivable crush in Manhattan.

He is pushing for a congestion charge to cut traffic and pollution, plans an all-hybrid taxi fleet, wants to plant one million new trees, and would like to make sure that every New Yorker lives within a 10-minute walk of a park. These are all innovations that the upper-middle classes increasingly take for granted.

In his reinvention of New York as a greener city, Bloomberg may have drawn comfort from the cover story of New York magazine this week. It showed that, despite the city's grime and noise, New Yorkers are among the healthiest in the country.

Interestingly, this is precisely the conversation that I am responding to in the paper that I am currently writing (vainly, it seems — though seeing this gives me hope that the issue is important). There are several critiques that I have of this and I outline them below.

First, it is true that the number of "consumer immigrants" is vastly outnumbered by the number of "economic migrants" nation-wide. But, the thrust of this argument assumes that assumes that the "poorer economic migrants" are not simultaneously consumers or may desire nice places to live^[1]. And, wouldn't the economic payoff of those vastly numerically more numerous migrants be, overall, a greater economic boom to the city if it captured that demand?

Second, the initiatives that Bloomberg is proposing are seen, in many ways, as very progressive causes. And, I would argue that they are in fact very progressive causes. The problem is that the solutions are not. They reflect, in a certain way, the return of a New York tradition: the Rockefeller Republican. The effect of congestion pricing is also going to mean that places like Home Depot, Costco, etc. are going to be able to write off the extra overhead costs, but the smaller business person who relies on delivery to Manhattan is going to face a signficant reduction of profits. I in principle I agree with the fact that we need to reduce the use of cars; however, the recent subway problems after the flood indicate that money might be better invested in the mass transit system. Same with the "greening" of the taxis: Bloomberg ain't payin' for it - he's making the taxi drivers do that.

Finally, and I think that this made me the most irate, it might be true that New Yorkers as a whole may be becoming more healthy. But, let me offer an alternative explanation beginning from the premise of this article that more rich people are moving to the city. More rich people are moving in. Rich people tend to have better health than poor people and rich neighborhoods have better health than poor communities (net of individual differences in income)^[2], therefore, it may simply be that the sick people are dying or being pushed out. The implied assumption in that statement is that all New Yorkers are healthier but, in fact, it may just be that New York residents are richer - which is the very point of this article.

There are reasonable debates to be had about whether the "consumer city" is good or bad public policy and I would be interested to hear what people think about these proposals. While the environmental effects and social mixing of diverse cities are important, we also have to think about policies that are fair to the service-workers and current residents that provide the cheap labor that makes the "consumer city" possible. Furthermore, we also have to see that the demands and needs of all city residents are met and not necessarily pander to the few rich "consumer immigrants" that might move to the city.

Ah, so much here -- so I am going to go finish this paper now and let you know what I find out about these issues...

Related:

• The "Tolerant" Creative Class
• The New Class Struggle
• Race & Redevelopment I: Gentrification

^[1] On another note of language, it is interesting how this argument might be able to recast the immigration debate — or if it will be used to recast the immigration debate.
^[2] A. Diez Roux, 2001. (For propriety's sake I should mention that I work on a project on which Ana is a co-PI)

Pack up the Bags Honey, We're Heading to the City!

In the NYT today, there is an article quoting a United Nations Population Fund report predicting an explosion in the population of cities in the coming two decades and that, world-wide, the number of people living in cities will be greater than the number of people not living in cities. Among the more interesting findings is that cities, as a whole, take up approximately 2.8% of the Earth's land surface, and the report goes on to say: "This means that about 3.3 billion people occupy an area less than half the size of Australia."

Expecting the report to be a carefully worded diplomatic document calling on nations to make sure that policies protect all interested parties...yada, yada, yada, I was shocked to find the policy initiatives advocated by the report. It sounded like I was reading a David Harvey article. It was an utter condemnation of the private land system and the problems that it can cause for the poor (I quote it at length to give sense of the tone):

The problem is not so much the shortage of land or the number of poor urbanites, but rather their restricted access to serviced land and housing because of distorted land markets.

Servicing already settled areas costs more than pro­viding serviced land on unoccupied sites. Yet public authorities, pleading insufficient funds, seem to find smaller investments in ex post facto programmes more appealing than well-planned proactive policies. Much could be done to improve the situation, for instance, by enacting special legislation for the provision of adequately serviced land for low-income groups. Cities could finance urban development by taxing increases in land value resulting either from public investment in local urban infrastructure or services, or from the redefinition of land uses towards more profitable ones, such as changes from rural to urban or from residential to commercial uses.

The urban poor tend to be treated as if they were passive in the production and consumption of land, yet they have some capacity to pay for land, despite their low and unstable incomes. Indeed, the poor already pay very high prices for the housing they find through the informal market. This capacity to pay could be better mobilized through formal regulation and provision of plots of land.

Scarcity of land or financial resources is thus not the only obstacle to the implementation of sustainable policies. In a sense, poor people have to be protected from the abusive practices of developers who capitalize on services provided by the local communities or by the public sector. Political will, as well as managerial and technical capacities, are needed to identify, capture and properly invest available resources—including the resources of poor people themselves—into more equitable urban development.

I didn't have a chance to read the whole report, but it does go on to talk about these changes and the both the impact on global warming and the impact from global warming in terms of sea-level rise and the vulnerability to natural disaster. Surprisingly, one of the topics that the report does not appear to confront is the fact that concentrating poverty into areas in cities without water and sanitation facilities can lead to the outbreak of things like Multi-Drug Resistant TB and other diseases that have the opportunity to do all kinds of damage to the population, even if you live in one of the gated communities surrounding a favela, barrio or ghetto.

[Link to the full report]

WWJD?

This week, Congressman Tim Ryan (D-OH 17), is taking the "Food Stamp Challenge". Basically, he is trying to live on the $21.00 a day that a person receives in food stamps. After the first day, he writes:

So far today I have eaten a quarter container of cottage cheese, one and a half peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and had one cup of coffee. It still amazes me that so many Americans live like this every day. I already notice a difference in my energy level. After only a day on this diet, I’m tired and hungry, but I’m looking forward to talking to people about my experience, and making people aware of the millions across the country who deal with this every day.

To all of those crazies and not-so-crazies who think that the only thing that poor people need to do is "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" does not know anything about what it is like to go hungry on a day-to-day basis. First, there is the simple bad luck. hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has an excellent post on many of the issues raised on Tim Ryan's blog. At one point, Tim Ryan lost the peanut butter and jelly that he was supposed to eat for that week's meals because it was taken by TSA officers at the airport (or, as hilzoy points out, "there are lots of ways for a jar of peanut butter to come to grief. Your kid can eat it when you're not looking. Your grocery bag can break, leaving it shattered on the sidewalk. Similarly, the rats and roaches can get into your corn meal, or your wheat bread.").

But, what I like is that Tim Ryan is also pointing out the structural inequalities that cause much of this hunger:

As several people have mentioned it the comments, a problem faced many across the country, especially the inner-city poor, are the lack of low-cost food stores in an easily accessible area. These people can’t afford to drive to a Wal-Mart in the suburbs for the bargains; they aren’t members of the warehouse club stores. If you are constrained to where you can walk or take public transportation, then you can only shop at the places in your neighborhood, and you are forced to pay whatever they charge. That is EXACTLY what I was doing. I had the option to head out to Costco or Shoppers and decided instead to replicate as close as possible the REAL experience of someone who can't afford a car and is constrained by public transportation. As you'll see when I publish the video blog I'm working on, we took the Metro out to the store.

This being something that I study in my academic life (the unequal distribution of resources in neighborhoods), I will let you guess which areas are traditionally underserved by grocery stores and farmers markets (hint -- in urban areas, think of areas that are not white and not wealthy). Hilzoy also points out other things that make it even more difficult: 1) Tim Ryan had a staff to help him learn to live on $21.00 a day; 2) He wasn't a single parent trying to care for children as he was doing this (and, therefore, needing to pay for extra fares on the subway or find childcare), 3) he was able to spend an hour-and-a-half in the store looking for the food that he could buy for $21.00, 4) he was doing this while living in D.C. and therefore had access to public transportation (as opposed to say, Pheonix).

In other words, for those who idolize Horatio Alger stories, I am not sure that they would understand that, even with the meager help that poor people are afforded, discriminatory policies prevent them from having access to food in the first place, even if they do have access it's not enough to provide strength enough to pull on one's own bootstraps and finally, the safety net is so threadbare that it can't provide against simple bad luck.

Even for all of this, hilzoy leaves out one important factor that is not discussed. Most poor people don't have access to a supermarkt, grocery store, green grocer or fruit stand; however, what they do have access to is convenience stores. In those convenience stores, there are hundreds -- actually, probably thousands -- of different types of processed corn. Combos, pretzels, Fritos, doughnuts, soda pop, "fruit" juices, etc. all contain some kind of processed corn. Why? Because our government subsidizes the production of corn like it was as vital to living as water. At the same time, the prices of healthy fruits and vegetables are too high for a family to be able to afford on $21.00/week/person

I guess the question becomes, what can be done? If the problem is partly that there is not enough money to live on in a week, then that solution seems pretty straightforward - increase the allowance per week. But, if the problem is unequal access to food stores and quality produce, then the answer becomes more tricky. One could offer incentives to invest those types of stores in poor areas - but those incentives are generally tax breaks which come at the cost of defunding many of the programs that are designed to benefit the very people who need the food stores in the first place. Alternatively, a city could "redevelop" areas and provide the kinds of investment that make it profitable for grocery stores to invest - but that would probably come at the cost of pushing current residents out of the city. One option that I think could be successful in not only providing food, but also investment opportunities for current residents is microfinance loans to help people get their own businesses started.

The way that microfinance loans work is there is usually a collective of people [in orginial incarnations, it was only available for women - this was explained in one acadmic talk as the result that men would "simply drink the money away"] who receive small loans individually. They are able to use these loans to build a business that will provide them with the opportunity to make money and pay back the loans, which then becomes capital for the next person in the collective to invest. The idea is that people rely on each other to pay back loans to build a community. The intuition behind this has also been used to explain why immigrant communities have thrived in this country - small investors (convenience store, laundromat, handymen, fruit and vegetable market owners help each other out with loans).

I have to admit, I was a little very dubious of this idea when I first heard it. I mean, it seemed like another avenue through which the "unfallible free-market would prevail" arguments that is part of the larger neoliberal formulation of the 21st century. But, after reading more about it and thinking through what it would mean in precisely situations like this, it seems like a good idea. I mean, it can't take too much to help a small businessperson set up a viable business plan with a small (probably less than $20,000, for which it is surprisingly hard to obtain a loan -- hear Sudhir Venkatesh talk about in conjunction with his new book, Living Underground: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor on Fresh Air), especially if we eliminate some of the subsidies for corn production given to huge agribusiness firms that are causing many of the health problems to begin with! Maybe its a stretch, but I hope to see Congressman Ryan do something about the structural factors since he has identified them as being a problem.

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

I found this L.A. Times article (via this Mother Jones blog) about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's charitable work being negated by the Foundation's investment in companies that undermine their goal of eradicating disease in Africa.

It is interesting how the article points out the importance of intellectual property laws to Microsoft and the Gates Foundation's unwillingness to compromise those laws and advocate for access to generic medicines which could be the single most cost-effective way to aid in the AIDS epidemic. While I believe that the work of the Gates Foundation is, overall, admirable, it is deeply troubling that the poor suffer, essentially, at their own expense.

I also find the reporting in the L.A. Times refreshingly honest about the hypocrisy that undermines the very success of these projects while the Gates Foundation benefits from all of the great media coverage afforded to it. It may be worth targeting Bill Gates, in USAS-style to get the Gates Foundation to uphold some sort of ethical investment provisions...

[BTW, I found the derivation of the term "Robbing Peter to Pay Paul" - it is more interesting than I thought...]