Cook Food

Dear Time Editor–

I commend you on Bryan Walsh’s thorough, thoughtful, important cover story on the consequences of our industrial food system. However, Walsh–along with almost everyone in the pro-food movement (as the folks working to change this system and produce food outside of it have been dubbed)–misses a crucial point in his comments about obesity. While processed industrial food does indeed have a huge negative impact on Americans’ health, obesity itself is not the problem. While the medical establishment insists that the cause-and-effect relationship between weight and heart disease and diabetes is linear and straightforward, a growing number of researchers and journalists (e.g., Linda Bacon, “Health At Every Size”; Paul Campos, “The Diet Myth”; Laura Fraser, “Losing It: False Hopes and Fat Profits in the Diet Industry”; Glenn Gaesser, “Big Fat Lies”; Michael Gard and Jan Wright, “The Obesity Epidemic”; Eric Oliver, “Fat Politics”) have shown that this conclusion is not supported by the evidence.

If we are to make real improvements in our health system, we must recognize that body size and health have very little to do with each other and treat people of all sized accordingly.

Lisa Jervis
author, Cook Food: A Manualfesto for Easy, Local, Healthy Eating
Oakland, CA

Seriously, this is a great piece, and it has the potential to move a lot of people. I think it’s a eatershed moment in the pro-food movement, because it’s shocking in the best possible way to see a mainstream magazine (and it doesn’t get more mainstream than Time) taking on a powerful industry without pulling any punches. I kept expecting Walsh to water things down or come out with an “on the other hand” series of points defending Monsanto, McDonald’s, and company. But he didn’t.

Except that he totally buys the medical industry line like everyone else.

More on this in that epically long post I am still working on (um, mostly still in my head at this point).

I’m working on a longer post about the way fat and health are talked about in pro-food circles, but in the meantime, I just read something that really frosted my shorts. Since it’s incredibly unlikely that the New York Times Magazine will print my letter to the editor, I figured I would share it here.

Dear Editor:

David Leonhardt is right to identify cheap soda and expensive vegetables as a public health issue that interlocks with the current health care debate. And while I am relieved to see that he doesn’t, in the final analysis, endorse the idea of overcharging fat people for health insurance (something that should be universal in the first place), I was very disturbed by two elements of his recent article. First is the idea that people are in control of their weight. The truth is that diets don’t work: the multibillion-dollar diet industry and its medicalized support system has never produced a success rate higher than 5 percent. Second is Leonhardt’s unquestioning acceptance of the conventional wisdom that a high body mass index is automatically unhealthy. A growing number of researchers and journalists (e.g., Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size“; Paul Campos, The Diet Myth; Laura Fraser, Losing It: False Hopes and Fat Profits in the Diet Industry; Glenn Gaesser, Big Fat Lies; Michael Gard and Jan Wright, The Obesity Epidemic; Eric Oliver, Fat Politics) have shown that this conclusion is not supported by evidence.

Lisa Jervis
Oakland, California

I was trying to keep it under 150 words (basically the only chance of being published), but I also felt that it was important to include the citations. Because, let’s face it, whenever you question the fat=unhealthy equation, most people think you’re just making shit up. Seriously.