On bad food and bad corporate decisions and stupid things people say.
I just wanna rant for a minute here.
So, what with the whole kerfuffle about Papa John's and Hostess and, a while back, Chik-Fil-A, there's been a lot of food-related assholery going around. Corporate douchebags doing what they do best: acting like total pricks.
And people justifiably protesting this stuff are becoming part of a different problem: food-shaming. Y'all, I can barely read a Facebook post or a Tumblr reblog or comments to something on LJ that doesn't eventually - or immediately - degenerate into food shaming. Which rapidly degenerates into body shaming.
"OMG that stuff is disgusting/bad for you/why Baby Jesus cried." "You shouldn't eat that crap anyway! You should eat healthier!" "That stuff contains pellets of arsenic/baby brains/cat poop dirt from an old woman's garden!" "Why don't you just cook? It's easier/better/healthier/cheaper/more fun to make your own!" "It makes you fat anyhow. Calories calories fat fat fat OMFG CANCER." "Maybe Americans wouldn't be so fat and unhealthy if they quit eating this stuff anyway. CHILDHOOD OBESITY EPIDEMIC! TAXPAYER MONEY! LARD-RELATED FINANCIAL RUIN!" And so on.
Can we not? Can we just . . . not? Okay? Because people are gonna eat what people are gonna eat, and I don't think that anyone is laboring under the misconception that Twinkies, Ding Dongs, chicken nuggets fried in crack, and that delicious cinnamon dessert pizza is good for us on a nutritional level. I mean, maybe there are some benighted souls who have not yet been exposed to enough health fearmongering that they aren't yet aware that eating anything but fat-free organic produce watered with unicorn tears, fertilized with fairy dust, and picked fresh by virgins bathed daily in the milk of flying white horses will make them fat and then kill them. But odds are, you are not friends with them on Facebook, Livejournal, Tumblr, or anywhere else. Odds are, they cannot read. And frankly, I think we should leave them comfortably languishing in ignorance for as long as possible, because honestly, that fearmongering hateful bullshit is far more harmful than a handful of Little Debbies.
So on a bigger level, just don't give people shit for eating "unhealthy" food.
Food deserts are real. I once lived in a neighborhood where the nearest supermarket with produce was . . . Jesus . . . six, seven miles away? Across a huge highway, through a series of really, really bad neighborhoods. You could not walk there. Bus routes in this city are a joke, and buses stop running at night, so you're fucked anyway if you have a job with weird hours. Not everyone can bike, or hike, especially in the boiling heat or deathly cold, which describes Oklahoma nine months out of the year, or if they have allergies, which is a problem for about the same amount of time. Or if they have small children.
Some stores have horrible food, period. The nearest store to us has a produce section. The stuff I bring home from it sometimes goes bad within hours of coming in the door. I should take a camera down there and just take a picture of the apples, then do the same for the apples at the good store, across the river where the rich people live. Sure, the apples at the "good" place are sometimes second-rate. But the apples at the Poverty Mart a mile away are bruised, dented, mushy, puckered, have slashes in them, are misshapen and often really small, or they are just plain unripe and give me the shits. Sometimes they are unripe AND bruised and mushy. It's fucked. They are certainly not organic -- not that I care, although I've had people hollering down my neck that I should for many years now. But the shitty apples are cheap. So I eat them if that's all we can afford that week. Unless they are unripe. Then I have some cookies. The broccoli at that place sometimes bends almost 90 degrees before it snaps. The carrots are leathery. The lettuce is all iceberg, and it's sweet because it's already going over. Berries? They have 'em, but they are fuckass expensive. I don't know if they're good, I can't afford to try them. Stores in poor areas get horrible produce. Rich people who shop at high-line stores don't realize this, I think, or they don't realize the scope of the problem, but it's true.
Don't start with me on farmer's markets. Don't. It's not happening. Too much walking, too many people, incompatible hours, too much being out of the house, too much of an anxiety disorder.
I realize this is sometimes super-hard for people who love cooking to grok, but some folks hate cooking. I mean, it makes us miserable to do it, actually sad. Some of us can't handle doing it every day. Some of us don't have the fridge space to store adequate fresh food, or frozen pre-made healthy meals. Some of us don't have fridges that work at all. Some of us have no kitchen space to prepare food. Some of us would rather spend time doing other stuff than cooking. Some of us have no time to prepare or plan meals. Or we don't have the mental or emotional energy to do it. Sometimes, on a party day or game day, you don't want to have to cook, because you've got nine other things going on and you're doing them all with one hand.
Some of us don't know how to cook. "It's not hard" doesn't help anyone; unless you are willing to come and teach in person, or offer detailed advice, don't go there. I appreciate that some people like it, and that it's easier than it looks, but I'm not learning before I am ready, period, thanks. And I won't be ready until I am not so fucking tired and batshit crazy that I'll often wait three hours to take my meds in the morning because I am too fucked to get up and get a drink of goddamn water because the cats knocked over the one I leave standing next to my meds basket.
Grow your own? I'd LOVE to have a garden, but that is not happening. I'm sun-sensitive, I have allergies, I don't have the energy for upkeep, let alone getting it started.
Some of us like shitty food. We find it comforting. It's filling. It's satisfying. It's sweet. It's got that slippery mouth-feel from all the fat that people love to scream and shit themselves about. It's crappy in a way that a lot of folks find enjoyable. And those are all legitimate things to like about things like Twinkies and those "chocolate" donuts that taste like candle wax and sweetened paper pulp. Yes, other foods are satisfying and happy-making as well, but, oh, hey, I just got a bulletin from Under A Rock University's Center for the Study of Really Obvious Things:
NOBODY HAS TO FUCKING JUSTIFY OR DEFEND THEIR FOOD CHOICES TO YOU, EVER. It really is that simple.
Some of us don't do our own shopping. Some of us don't have time or energy to argue with the other people in the household about what gets bought. That sounds lazy, like a cop-out, but it's not. When you live a rough life, and you don't have many emotional resources, and you live with people with totally different food tastes than yours, sometimes it's easier - and cheaper - to compromise and get the fucking Little Debbies that you both like, rather than get more expensive stuff for two people.
Some of us genuinely, for-real, put our "health" second, behind our emotional well-being. The fact that people get all het up about physical health, and think that emotional health should come second, is a seriously fucked-up manifestation of ableism, and a seriously fucked-up manifestation of just how deeply we equate "healthy" with "looking fuckable" (i.e. thin). If you start up with that shit to my face, it makes me want to puke Twinkie goo all over your sandals. Food, and how we acquire, prepare, store, and eat it, is actually a huge part of our emotional well-being. As far as I am concerned, my mental health is all I have, because if I lose the delicate balance on that, then I commit suicide, and if I do that, all those petty concerns about trans fats and empty calories and just have a fucking celery stick and some peanut butter go straight out the window. Giving me hack about how/what I eat? Not cool. At all. Because it is basically attacking my coping mechanisms and how I administer emotional care to myself. Do I have to explain, really, how not-okay that is?
As a sub-point of the above, some of us are recovering from ugly food issues. Shut up about us eating Twinkies. There was a time when I was so mentally fucked I would have had a breakdown if you'd made me eat one. The fact that I can eat them without blinking now is a fucking victory, fuck you. They are little golden trophies of I AM NOT STARVING MYSELF ANYMORE. Every bite is a raised middle finger to that skinny cunt inside me who WANTED ME TO KILL MYSELF because I was so fat I deserved it. So, you know, leave off.
And, finally, anyone who resorts to fat-shaming on the topic needs to have their head surgically extracted from their rectal cavity before they asphyxiate.
You may have YOUR reasons for not eating that stuff, and that's actually cool. I'm down with that. But don't you give people shit about THEIR reasons for eating it. You are not them. You do not know their deal. And even if they are a lazy-ass slovenly bastard who is too stupid not to be fat, or whatever dumb-shit thing you are thinking, that is none of your business, either. You can't shame someone out of being unhealthy, unsightly, or just generally not to your liking. Shocking, I know, but it's true. Otherwise, I would be a very different and much less entertaining person. Or I wouldn't exist. I can't quite tell. And pardon me, but I think that not having me in it would actually make the world a worse place. Not by much, maybe, but I do good things for people and animals, I make my friends laugh, I help people find things in the craft store I don't even work at, and I sometimes tell people they look beautiful if it seems unlikely to me that they realize it.
Also, don't fucking let these corporate assholes off the hook. At all. Okay? They are greedy shitheads. We don't need to talk about how shitty the food is, or how bad it is for you. That's shifting the point. We need to focus on their behavior, because they are slime-sucking bastards. It wouldn't make a fucking difference if they were purveying five-star cuisine made of stardust and unicorn butter. They would still be pricks.
So hold them accountable for that. Don't slag off the food choices people make. It's fucking annoying, and missing the point.
Here endeth the lesson.
X-posted from Dreamwidth. Comment count:
So, what with the whole kerfuffle about Papa John's and Hostess and, a while back, Chik-Fil-A, there's been a lot of food-related assholery going around. Corporate douchebags doing what they do best: acting like total pricks.
And people justifiably protesting this stuff are becoming part of a different problem: food-shaming. Y'all, I can barely read a Facebook post or a Tumblr reblog or comments to something on LJ that doesn't eventually - or immediately - degenerate into food shaming. Which rapidly degenerates into body shaming.
"OMG that stuff is disgusting/bad for you/why Baby Jesus cried." "You shouldn't eat that crap anyway! You should eat healthier!" "That stuff contains pellets of arsenic/baby brains/cat poop dirt from an old woman's garden!" "Why don't you just cook? It's easier/better/healthier/cheaper/more fun to make your own!" "It makes you fat anyhow. Calories calories fat fat fat OMFG CANCER." "Maybe Americans wouldn't be so fat and unhealthy if they quit eating this stuff anyway. CHILDHOOD OBESITY EPIDEMIC! TAXPAYER MONEY! LARD-RELATED FINANCIAL RUIN!" And so on.
Can we not? Can we just . . . not? Okay? Because people are gonna eat what people are gonna eat, and I don't think that anyone is laboring under the misconception that Twinkies, Ding Dongs, chicken nuggets fried in crack, and that delicious cinnamon dessert pizza is good for us on a nutritional level. I mean, maybe there are some benighted souls who have not yet been exposed to enough health fearmongering that they aren't yet aware that eating anything but fat-free organic produce watered with unicorn tears, fertilized with fairy dust, and picked fresh by virgins bathed daily in the milk of flying white horses will make them fat and then kill them. But odds are, you are not friends with them on Facebook, Livejournal, Tumblr, or anywhere else. Odds are, they cannot read. And frankly, I think we should leave them comfortably languishing in ignorance for as long as possible, because honestly, that fearmongering hateful bullshit is far more harmful than a handful of Little Debbies.
So on a bigger level, just don't give people shit for eating "unhealthy" food.
Food deserts are real. I once lived in a neighborhood where the nearest supermarket with produce was . . . Jesus . . . six, seven miles away? Across a huge highway, through a series of really, really bad neighborhoods. You could not walk there. Bus routes in this city are a joke, and buses stop running at night, so you're fucked anyway if you have a job with weird hours. Not everyone can bike, or hike, especially in the boiling heat or deathly cold, which describes Oklahoma nine months out of the year, or if they have allergies, which is a problem for about the same amount of time. Or if they have small children.
Some stores have horrible food, period. The nearest store to us has a produce section. The stuff I bring home from it sometimes goes bad within hours of coming in the door. I should take a camera down there and just take a picture of the apples, then do the same for the apples at the good store, across the river where the rich people live. Sure, the apples at the "good" place are sometimes second-rate. But the apples at the Poverty Mart a mile away are bruised, dented, mushy, puckered, have slashes in them, are misshapen and often really small, or they are just plain unripe and give me the shits. Sometimes they are unripe AND bruised and mushy. It's fucked. They are certainly not organic -- not that I care, although I've had people hollering down my neck that I should for many years now. But the shitty apples are cheap. So I eat them if that's all we can afford that week. Unless they are unripe. Then I have some cookies. The broccoli at that place sometimes bends almost 90 degrees before it snaps. The carrots are leathery. The lettuce is all iceberg, and it's sweet because it's already going over. Berries? They have 'em, but they are fuckass expensive. I don't know if they're good, I can't afford to try them. Stores in poor areas get horrible produce. Rich people who shop at high-line stores don't realize this, I think, or they don't realize the scope of the problem, but it's true.
Don't start with me on farmer's markets. Don't. It's not happening. Too much walking, too many people, incompatible hours, too much being out of the house, too much of an anxiety disorder.
I realize this is sometimes super-hard for people who love cooking to grok, but some folks hate cooking. I mean, it makes us miserable to do it, actually sad. Some of us can't handle doing it every day. Some of us don't have the fridge space to store adequate fresh food, or frozen pre-made healthy meals. Some of us don't have fridges that work at all. Some of us have no kitchen space to prepare food. Some of us would rather spend time doing other stuff than cooking. Some of us have no time to prepare or plan meals. Or we don't have the mental or emotional energy to do it. Sometimes, on a party day or game day, you don't want to have to cook, because you've got nine other things going on and you're doing them all with one hand.
Some of us don't know how to cook. "It's not hard" doesn't help anyone; unless you are willing to come and teach in person, or offer detailed advice, don't go there. I appreciate that some people like it, and that it's easier than it looks, but I'm not learning before I am ready, period, thanks. And I won't be ready until I am not so fucking tired and batshit crazy that I'll often wait three hours to take my meds in the morning because I am too fucked to get up and get a drink of goddamn water because the cats knocked over the one I leave standing next to my meds basket.
Grow your own? I'd LOVE to have a garden, but that is not happening. I'm sun-sensitive, I have allergies, I don't have the energy for upkeep, let alone getting it started.
Some of us like shitty food. We find it comforting. It's filling. It's satisfying. It's sweet. It's got that slippery mouth-feel from all the fat that people love to scream and shit themselves about. It's crappy in a way that a lot of folks find enjoyable. And those are all legitimate things to like about things like Twinkies and those "chocolate" donuts that taste like candle wax and sweetened paper pulp. Yes, other foods are satisfying and happy-making as well, but, oh, hey, I just got a bulletin from Under A Rock University's Center for the Study of Really Obvious Things:
NOBODY HAS TO FUCKING JUSTIFY OR DEFEND THEIR FOOD CHOICES TO YOU, EVER. It really is that simple.
Some of us don't do our own shopping. Some of us don't have time or energy to argue with the other people in the household about what gets bought. That sounds lazy, like a cop-out, but it's not. When you live a rough life, and you don't have many emotional resources, and you live with people with totally different food tastes than yours, sometimes it's easier - and cheaper - to compromise and get the fucking Little Debbies that you both like, rather than get more expensive stuff for two people.
Some of us genuinely, for-real, put our "health" second, behind our emotional well-being. The fact that people get all het up about physical health, and think that emotional health should come second, is a seriously fucked-up manifestation of ableism, and a seriously fucked-up manifestation of just how deeply we equate "healthy" with "looking fuckable" (i.e. thin). If you start up with that shit to my face, it makes me want to puke Twinkie goo all over your sandals. Food, and how we acquire, prepare, store, and eat it, is actually a huge part of our emotional well-being. As far as I am concerned, my mental health is all I have, because if I lose the delicate balance on that, then I commit suicide, and if I do that, all those petty concerns about trans fats and empty calories and just have a fucking celery stick and some peanut butter go straight out the window. Giving me hack about how/what I eat? Not cool. At all. Because it is basically attacking my coping mechanisms and how I administer emotional care to myself. Do I have to explain, really, how not-okay that is?
As a sub-point of the above, some of us are recovering from ugly food issues. Shut up about us eating Twinkies. There was a time when I was so mentally fucked I would have had a breakdown if you'd made me eat one. The fact that I can eat them without blinking now is a fucking victory, fuck you. They are little golden trophies of I AM NOT STARVING MYSELF ANYMORE. Every bite is a raised middle finger to that skinny cunt inside me who WANTED ME TO KILL MYSELF because I was so fat I deserved it. So, you know, leave off.
And, finally, anyone who resorts to fat-shaming on the topic needs to have their head surgically extracted from their rectal cavity before they asphyxiate.
You may have YOUR reasons for not eating that stuff, and that's actually cool. I'm down with that. But don't you give people shit about THEIR reasons for eating it. You are not them. You do not know their deal. And even if they are a lazy-ass slovenly bastard who is too stupid not to be fat, or whatever dumb-shit thing you are thinking, that is none of your business, either. You can't shame someone out of being unhealthy, unsightly, or just generally not to your liking. Shocking, I know, but it's true. Otherwise, I would be a very different and much less entertaining person. Or I wouldn't exist. I can't quite tell. And pardon me, but I think that not having me in it would actually make the world a worse place. Not by much, maybe, but I do good things for people and animals, I make my friends laugh, I help people find things in the craft store I don't even work at, and I sometimes tell people they look beautiful if it seems unlikely to me that they realize it.
Also, don't fucking let these corporate assholes off the hook. At all. Okay? They are greedy shitheads. We don't need to talk about how shitty the food is, or how bad it is for you. That's shifting the point. We need to focus on their behavior, because they are slime-sucking bastards. It wouldn't make a fucking difference if they were purveying five-star cuisine made of stardust and unicorn butter. They would still be pricks.
So hold them accountable for that. Don't slag off the food choices people make. It's fucking annoying, and missing the point.
Here endeth the lesson.
X-posted from Dreamwidth. Comment count: