In Reizen
zonder John verbaast Geert Mak zich erover hoeveel eten ‘Amerikanen’ verstouwen, zonder zich
af te vragen wat nu precies de oorzaken
van die vraatzucht zijn. Hij schrijft:
Je houdt niet voor mogelijk wat een
mensenlichaam allemaal kan hebben.
En bij die opmerking blijft het. Geen enkel word
over de kapitalische noodzaak om burgers te veranderen in consumenten, om de
bevolking permanent ontevreden te houden. in 2010 werd wereldwijd naar
schatting 467 miljard dollar aan adverteren en branding besteed, in de VS $142.5 miljard, kosten die in de prijs
van het product worden doorberekend waardoor de consument zijn eigen
onverzadigbaarheid betaalt. Obesitas is dan ook allereerst een psychologisch
fenomeen, en geen lichamelijk zoals Mak meent. Het is opmerkelijk dat hij de oorzaken van de Amerikaanse vraatzucht
niet heeft onderzocht, want hij claimt wel Pursuit
of Loneliness te hebben gelezen van de Amerikaanse socioloog Philip Slater,
die uitgebreid ingaat op de kapitalistische onverzadigbaarheid. Hij schrijft:
Our society is founded on overstimulation – on the creation of complex desires that can’t directly be gratified, but to seduce people into a lot of striving and buying in the vain effort to satisfy them. Most of these desires are vaguely or blatantly sexual – erotic delights are attached by advertisers to most of the goods an service that can be bought in the United States. The goal of American commerce, in other words, is to arouse kinky needs that defy satisfaction – in this way an infinite number of products can be inserted in the resulting gap. In such a culture availability itself is a turn-off.
Een ‘afknapper‘
voor zowel mannen als vrouwen. Slater in 1970:
Take, for example, the film
personality of the much-ideolized Marilyn Monroe: docile, accommodating,
brainless, defenseless, totally uncentered, incapasble of taking up for herself
or even knowing what she wants or needs. A sexual encounter with such a woman
in real life would border on rape – the ideas of ‘consenting adults’ wouldn’t
even apply. The term ‘perversion’ seems more appropriate for this kind of yearning
than for homosexuality or bestiality, since it isn’t directed toward a complete
being. The Marilyn Monroe image was the ideal sex object for the sexually
crippled and anxious male: a bland erotic pudding that would never upset his
delicate sexual stomach. It’s important to realize that this Playboy Ideal is a
sign of low, rather than high, sexual energy. It suggests that the sexual flame
is so faint and wavering that a whole person would overwhelm and extinguish it.
Only a vapid, compliant ninny-fantasy can keep it alive. It’s designed for men
who don’t really like sex but need it desperately for tension-release – men
whose libido is mainly wrapped up in achievement or dreams of glory. The
Marilyn Monroe image is thus more a capitalistic ideal than an erotic one.
Net als seks is eten een ‘basic instinct,’ en net als seks wordt in het kapitalisme ook de
zucht naar voedsel gemanipuleerd in een succesvolle poging om de consument
permanent onverzadigbaar te houden. Iedereen die weleens een McDonald’s Hamburger heeft gegeten weet
wat ik bedoel, het bevredigt maar heel even. ‘The pursuit of happiness’ is geeindigd in het permanent
ontevreden en dus ongelukkig houden van de bevolking. En toch blijft de omzet van
bijvoorbeeld ‘fast food’
almaar groeien. In 2001 schreef de Amerikaanse onderzoeksjournalist Eric
Schlosser in Fast Food Nation. The Dark Side
of the All American Meal:
Over the last three decades, fast
food has infiltrated every nook and cranny of American society. An industry
that began with a handful of modest hot dog and hamburger stands in southern
California has spread to every corner of the nation, selling a broad range of
foods wherever paying customers may be found. Fast food is now served at
stadiums, airports, zoos, high scholls, elementary schools, and universities,
on cruise ships, trains, and airplanes, at K-Marts, Wal-Marts, gas stations,
and even hospital cafetarias. In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast
food; in 2000, they spent more than 110 billion. Americans now spend more money
on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software,
or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines,
newspapers, videos, and recorded music – combined.
Kortom, we hebben hier te maken met een significant
sociaal-cultureel fenomeen. Schlosser merkt terecht op dat
A nation’s diet can be more revealing
than its art or literature. […] During a relatively brief period of time, the fast
food industry has helped to transform not only the American diet, but aslso our
landscape, economy, workforce, and popular culture. Fast food and its
consequences have become inescapable, regardless of whether you eat it twice a
day, try to avoid it, or have never taken a single bite.
In tegenstelling tot Geert Mak die niet verder kwam
dan de vrijblijvende verzuchting dat ‘Je
niet voor mogelijk houdt wat een mensenlichaam allemaal kan hebben,’ is
Eric Schlosser op zoek gegaan naar de oorzaken van deze ingrijpende
ontwikkeling:
The extraordinary growth of the fast
food industry has been driven by fundamental changes in American society.
Adjusted for inflation, the hourly wage of the average U.S. worker peaked in
1973 and then steadily declined for the next twnty-five years. During that
period, women entered the workforce in record numbers, often motivated less by
a feminist perspective than by a need to pay the bills. In 1975, about
one-third of American mothers with young children worked outside the home;
today almost two-thirds ofd such mothers are employed. As the sociologists
Cameron Lynne Macdonald and Carmen Sirianni have noted, the entry of so many
women into the workforce has greatly increased demand for the types of services
that housewives traditionally perform: cooking, cleaning, and childcare. A
generation ago, three-quarters of the money used to buy food in the United
States was spent to prepare meals at home. Today about half of the money used
to buy food is spent at restaurants – mainly at fast food restaurants. The
McDonald’s Corporation has become a powerful symbol of America’s service
economy, which is now responsible for 90 percent of the country’s new jobs,
aangezien de productie van goederen grotendeels is
geoutsourced naar lage lonen landen, waar de arbeiders nog goedkoper zijn, de vakbonden aan de leiband lopen en de
milieuwetgeving nog in de kinderschoenen staat. De resultaten van Eric
Schlosser’s onderzoek worden nog eens bekrachtigd door de Amerikaanse
hoogleraar Richard Wolff, auteur van onder andere Capitalism Hits The Fan. The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do
About It. 24 januari 2012 hoorde ik hem spreken in de All Souls Church in
New York over: The Costs of Capitalism’s
Crisis: Who Will Pay. Wie hem wil horen spreken kan dat hier doen:
Degenen die er geen tijd voor hebben kunnen
hieronder een samenvatting lezen van Wolff’s visie zoals hij die tegen de
kritische Amerikaanse radiomaker en auteur David Barsamian verwoordde. Nog even
dit: ‘As a writer, Barsamian is best known
for his series of interviews with Noam Chomsky, which have been published
in book form and translated into many languages, selling hundreds of thousands
of copies worldwide.’ Professor
Wolff vertelde hem het volgende:
What
distinguishes the United States from almost every other capitalist experiment
is that from 1820 to 1970, as best we can tell from the statistics we have, the
amount of money an average worker earned kept rising decade after decade. This
is measured in “real wages,” which means the money you earn compared to the
prices you have to pay. That’s remarkable. There’s probably no other capitalist
system that has delivered to its working class that kind of 150-year history.
It produced in the U.S. the expectation that every generation would live better
than the one before it, that if you worked hard, you could deliver a higher
standard of living to your kids.
Before we talk about why this
changed, let’s think for a moment about the trauma the end of this trend
represents to the working population. It is the end of the notion that a better
future is the reward for hard work. And the trauma is made worse by the fact
that there’s no discussion of it, no way to share the experience, because most
of the population literally believes that it hasn’t happened.
Barsamian: So why did it end?
Wolff: There are many reasons, but I think
four developments in the 1970s were key.
The first was the increasing use of
computers, which made it possible for employers to reduce their number of
workers, since one computer now did the work of many humans. For example, once
upon a time supermarkets needed workers to keep track of how many boxes of
cereal and rolls of toilet paper were leaving the shelves. Now a computer
scanner at the checkout counter does that. One man or woman sitting at a
monitor somewhere can tell exactly how many boxes of cereal have to be ordered
at a hundred different supermarkets. They don’t need an army of workers to
take inventory.
The second thing that happened in the
1970s was that employers moved production to other parts of the world, where
wages were lower. Between the computer replacing workers and jobs going
overseas, the demand for labor in the U.S. shrank.
The third event was that women joined
the paid workforce in large numbers and stayed, largely abandoning the role of
full-time mother and housewife. And, finally, we had a new wave of Latin
American immigrants who came here looking for jobs and a better life. So while
the number of jobs was declining, there was an increase in the number of people
looking for work. This combination meant that, for the first time in American
history, there was no labor shortage.
With so many people competing for
jobs, employers discovered that it was no longer necessary to give raises to
attract and keep employees. Since the 1970s American employers have enjoyed
record profits. During that same thirty years, according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics in Washington, DC, the wage earned by the majority of American
workers hasn’t changed. In real terms, adjusted for inflation, what a worker
makes in 2011 is about what the same worker made in 1978.
Barsamian: And employees are working longer
hours today, right?
Wolff: That’s right. According to the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (oecd), Americans do
more hours of paid labor per year than workers in any other advanced country.
That is because, if you don’t earn more per hour, the only way to deliver a
better life to your family is by doing more hours of work. So Americans have
been pushing themselves, taking second jobs or working full time if they had
worked only part time before. We have elderly people coming out of retirement
to help their grown children. Teenagers are working on weekends to help pay
bills. Americans have committed to an incredible number of work hours per household
to try to achieve a rising standard of living. Let’s remember that we are
constantly bombarded by advertising telling us that, to be a success, we need a
better house, a better car, a better vacation, and a college education for our
children. To be financially successful today, most of us have to work crazy
hours.
And of course the other thing the
American working class has done since the 1970s to keep their consumption
rising is take on debt. When your wages don’t go up, and adding a few hours a week
isn’t enough, you buy on credit.
In the 1970s we had to develop new
mechanisms for providing credit to the masses. Before then the only people who
carried credit cards were traveling businessmen with expense accounts, and the
only company offering such a card was American Express. But then MasterCard,
Visa, and others came along to make credit available to the rest of us, because
there was such a hunger on the part of our working class for a better standard
of living. American workers started to borrow money on a scale that had never
been seen before in any country.
Barsamian: So wages were flattening out,
workers’ hours and productivity were soaring, and Americans were accumulating
huge individual debts.
Wolff: The amazing thing about the last
thirty years is the collective self-delusion in the U.S. You cannot keep
borrowing money if your ability to pay it back — i.e., your real wage — isn’t
going up. You don’t need a PhD in economics to understand this.
So the current crisis really began in
the 1970s, when the wages stopped rising, but its effects were postponed for a
generation by debt. By 2007, however, the American working class had
accumulated a level of debt that was unsustainable. People could not make the
payments. They were exhausted: exhausted financially, exhausted physically by
all that work, and exhausted psychologically because the family had been torn
apart by everyone working.
Stay-at-home parents hold families
together. When you move everyone into the workplace, tensions in the family become
unmanageable. You can see evidence of this in popular culture. The sitcoms of
the 1960s showed happy middle-class families, but many sitcoms today show
struggling families. Americans are 5 percent of the world’s population, but we
consume 65 percent of the world’s psychotropic drugs, tranquilizers, and mood
enhancers. We are a people under unbelievable stress.
Vandaar de vergeefse
poging de onvrede weg te eten. Des te armer men is des te meer men eet, en wel relatief goedkoop vet en zoet voedsel dat een kortstondige vertroosting
biedt in een keiharde, materialistische maatschappij waar de ‘winner
takes all.’ Als Mak in plaats van zich te vergapen aan al die dikke ‘Amerikanen’
met personeelsleden van de restaurants zou hebben gesproken dan had hij geweten
onder welke condities ze gebukt gaan. Eric Schlosser:
Het gevolg is dat
Almost every facet of
American Life has now been franchised or chained,
waarbij overal geldt:
The key to a successful
franchise according to many texts on the subject, can be expressed in one word:
‘uniformity.’
Dit werpt toch een ander licht
op Mak’s terloopse opmerking dat
Hoe verder we naar het westen
rijden, des te groter de hoeveelheden die onze tafelgenoten bij het ontbijt
naar binnen schuiven.
Vooral ook wanneer men weet
dat overal in de VS waar sprake is van landbouw en veeteelt:
aldus Eric Schlosser. Obesitas is dus niet een
te verwaarlozen detail, maar een symptoom van de pathologische onverzadigbaarheid van de ‘Amerikaanse
Droom,’ die voor velen in een nachtmerrie is veranderd. Het is geen
teken van vrijheid, maar van verslaving:
Obesity in the United States has been increasingly
cited as a major health issue in recent decades. While many industrialized
countries have experienced similar increases, obesity rates in the United
States are among the highest in the world.[3] Of all countries, the United States has the highest
rate of obesity. From 13% obesity in 1962, estimates have steadily increased,
reaching 19.4% in 1997, 24.5% in 2004[4] 26.6% in 2007,[5] and 33.8% (adults) and 17% (children) in 2008.[6][7] In 2010, the CDC reported higher numbers once more,
counting 35.7% of American adults as obese, and 17% of American children.[8] […]
As American families have
become absorbed with other activities, formal meal time disappeared, leading to
increased snacking all day without a nutritional meal. While other cultures
will have a formal, planned meal with the family, Americans have lost this
tradition. […]
There has been an increase
in obesity-related medical problems, including type
II diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular
disease, and disability.[39] In particular, diabetes has become
the seventh leading cause of death in the United States,[40] with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimating in 2008 that
fifty-seven million adults aged twenty and older were pre-diabetic, 23.6 million diabetic,
with 90–95% of the latter being type 2-diabetic.[41] Obesity has also been shown to
increase the prevalence of complications during pregnancy and childbirth.
Babies born to obese women are almost three times as likely to die within one
month of birth and almost twice as likely to be stillborn than babies born to women
of normal weight.[42]
Obesity has been cited as a
contributing factor to approximately 100,000–400,000 deaths in the United
States per year[13] and has increased health care use
and expenditures,[39][43][44][45] costing society an estimated $117
billion in direct (preventive, diagnostic, and treatment services related to
weight) and indirect (absenteeism, loss of future earnings due to premature
death) costs.[46] This exceeds health-care costs
associated with smoking or problem
drinking[45] and accounts for 6% to 12% of
national health care expenditures in the United States.[47]
The Medicare and Medicaid programs bear about half
of this cost.[45] Annual hospital costs for treating
obesity-related diseases in children rose threefold, from US$ 35 million to US$
127 million, in the period from 1979 to 1999,[48] and the inpatient and ambulatory
healthcare costs increased drastically by US$ 395 per person per year.[44] These trends in healthcare costs
associated with pediatric obesity and its comorbidities are staggering, urging
the Surgeon General to predict that preventable morbidity and mortality
associated with obesity may surpass those associated with cigarette smoking.[43][49] Furthermore, the probability of
childhood obesity persisting into adulthood is estimated to increase from
approximately twenty percent at four years of age to approximately eighty
percent by adolescence,[50] and it is likely that these obesity
comorbidities will persist into adulthood.[51]
Morgen meer hierover.
![[Sail Away - Randy Newman Album Cover Art]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_s5jLeCI2QBHDR_yc44IkjFF2PBKkLcidQ8zSC9yyMr2F6j3652NIDJCfDx9FXxGSd2sB4VSTrdPx5Q3DQ6I9747Xr4unAYkMlpGKw3D9niNwcVUN7nViKBOU0XQifDes7eiJYg92zxMku_=s0-d)
Won't have to run through the jungle
And scuff up your feet
You'll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day
It's great to be an American
Ain't no lions or tigers-ain't no mamba snake
Just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake
Everybody is as happy as a man can be
Climb aboard, little wog-sail away with me
Sail away-sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Sail away-sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
In America every man is free
To take care of his home and his family
You'll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree
You're all gonna be an American
Sail away-sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Sail away-sail away
We will cross the
mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
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