association-list

An inter­est­ing book that attempts to tie overeat­ing to addic­tive behav­ior in gen­eral. All of it more or less makes sense to me, espe­cially com­par­ing my expe­ri­ences with weight con­trol and quit­ting smok­ing. Con­trary to Cory Doctorow’s sug­ges­tion here, there was a lot of inter­est­ing advice in the book. I sus­pect that part of Cory’s reac­tion was simply that the advice given (mostly CBT mindfulness/​thought-​​pattern-​​changing stuff along with planning/​portion sug­ges­tions) is simply that there is no silver bullet, even when you under­stand the psy­chol­ogy of the inter­ac­tion to a cer­tain degree. But if you’re look­ing for brain hacks, here’s an idea: as soon as you’re served at a restu­rant, ask for a to-​​go con­tainer, and imme­di­ately pack away every­thing over your imme­di­ate require­ments, then put your left­overs out of the way some­where. This seems less rude and waste­ful than return­ing the por­tion that you don’t plan or need to eat.

Inter­est­ingly, Kessler pulls his punches over­much. He’s a tech­no­crat, of course, and does come across with some policy pro­pos­als, many of which are already wind­ing their ways through the halls of power (Kessler, after all, was a key Wash­ing­ton player in much of the damage done to big tobacco in the last two decades). He stops, how­ever, before coming out and saying some­thing that really needs to be said. Most restau­rant food, espe­cially the food sold by the big chains, is more or less toxic sludge, and should be avoided until such a time as these busi­nesses recom­mit them­selves to pro­duc­ing actual food that is rarely more than one or two steps removed from its source. He dwells for much of the time on restau­rants, but the same thing could be said for much of the processed food that’s avail­able in super­mar­kets, or deliv­ered at many of the coffee shops and chain bak­eries around the country.

One last prob­lem that Kessler ignores is that many middle-​​American cities are food deserts. When I go home to Tulsa, for exam­ple, I seem to find it inor­di­nately dif­fi­cult to find a restau­rant that isn’t incor­po­rated in Delaware. The super­mar­kets are a little better, but not that much, as processed food seems to take up more and more shelf space each year, but that’s more of a nation­wide prob­lem than one that’s spe­cific to the mid­west. The prob­lem of processed foods in the mar­kets is less tractable than that of the restau­rants; food is already labeled with the number of calo­ries it con­tains, yet people buy it and overeat any­ways. Per­haps the best tech­no­cratic solu­tion to this issue would be to elim­i­nate feed­lot animal pro­duc­tion and grain sub­si­dies that make the processed foods so much cheaper than their con­stituent parts bought indi­vid­u­ally at rea­son­able levels of quality.