"Fork over Knife" and the Neoliberal Agenda

I've been taking a break from the blog, frustrated with myself that I seem to be hovering at the 10 lb weight loss mark. Since I told myself I would stick with the WW program for a year, I'm trying not to obsess about the week I spent in Chicago, eating carnitas tacos, ethiopian shiro, Red Mango. But now that I'm back, I've decided to take the time this week to assess some of my food and lifestyle values.

So, on the encouragement of my two C-Bus besties (after the encouragement they received from another mentor), I watched the documentary "Fork over Knife" the other night. The documentary espouses a "whole foods plant-based diet" and the screen time consists of mostly-white able-bodied male athletes, an important move for the film's agenda, which is de-bunking the myth that you will never get enough protein from plant-based foods. Now, I actually mostly agree with the film on this count: I believe that whole foods are both more filling and better for long-term health. In high school I met a peer-turned-good-friend who actually lived on a working family farm (I was a Massachusetts city kid transplanted to Maine in my mid-teens) and her attitudes toward vegetables actually transformed my food-values world. Carolyn taught me how her family, particularly during the growing season, shapes all of their meals around their vegetable dishes, often having two or three at a meal, the animal-based foods functioning as a cursory. I grew up in a world where a tablespoon of soggy, frozen peas served as my vegetable for the day. As someone turned vegetarian at 12, I struggled to get enough food (eating disorder aside) until I met Carolyn. (As you may have noticed by my Chicago exploits above, I am no longer a vegetarian, mostly because I got lazy after discovering a processed-soy food allergy). So I get it.

I think vegetables can be a center-piece--if you can afford them.

The film rarely addressed cost, though. Not on the day-to-day grocery bill cost. There was a health official in Chicago who spent two minutes talking about food deserts and economic inequalities more generally but I guess this wasn't as sexy as watching the vegan doctor's son-turned-fireman climb the fire pole. Besides the fact that the film itself was kind of an editing hack-job (they alternated a bit of nutritional science history with poorly integrated, contemporary lifestyle transformation stories) with ableist masculine rhetoric, I actually had a more serious problem with the film: it's neoliberal agenda.

If you're in the academy, you know that neoliberal is kind of the sexy, critical framework to justify the importance of all sorts of academic critiques for everything from pop culture to the prison industrial complex (or, if your my brilliant partner, you're integrating the two). And despite the fact that we might be a little bit bored by the buzz-word of it, it's actually a useful framework for understanding the increasingly-privatized and individual-based agenda of the U.S. expansionist project. Blahblahblah.

Here's where it showed up in the film. The other main objective of the film, besides debunking the protein-myth, was to discuss how a whole foods, plant-based diet can serve as treatment for a myriad of diseases, from obesity and diabetes (no surprise) to cancer and hepatitis. The mantra was "get off the meds, take control of your health" and "look at how much money we can save the healthcare system if you stop taking your meds". Now, I'm no fan of Big Pharma. I spend months in my Women's Health class asking my students to interrogate Big Pharma and diagnostic models they produce. And while I fully support eating whole foods as much as possible (insert major asterisk here with footnote caveat), I also don't think chronic health problems and diseases can or should be completely in the hands of "individual responsibility". It's not a surprise that everyone in the film is middle class or wealthier, with the kinds of jobs that afford them vacation and flex time, expendable income for massage, acupuncture, and yoga classes, and the comforts of more than just food. Plant based, whole food diets are expensive and until we transform our industrial agriculture system, work day length and unemployment crisis, child care networks, housing and green space development, and address the chronic stress that comes from daily interactions with  sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, and ableism--not mention addressing our actual healthcare model-- we can't expect folks to fix their diseases. My suggestion: a whole foods, plant-based diet, a complete cultural and political revolution, and some compassion.

All of this said, I did re-think last week's carnitas and bought some fresh, spicy arugula and a daikon radish to jazz up my salads this week.