Posts by Danielle
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Oh well. I can see this thread will never escape from the Middle-Class-Healthy-Food-Bad-Parenting Vortex. We should all get out while we still have our sanity.
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to Katharine Moody,
Deconstructing is not thinking – it’s analysing, then criticising – and in this case, it seems to me, for the sake of it.
I'm not doing anything "for the sake of it". I'm perfectly sincere when I say that your approach to this issue makes me really uncomfortable.
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
You're giving me shit for trying to be a little more understanding about why people choose the foods they do? Really?
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to Katharine Moody,
I see you didn’t comment one way or the other on that.
That's because I think it's complicated; if you tax "crap", what else can people eat? Will other, healthier foods be forced to become correspondingly cheaper? Will primary caregivers be given time off work to cook healthier meals for kids? At what point do you allow for the fact that sometimes people are fallible and sometimes basic humanity means that a kid is allowed hot chips?
Who’d a thought homemade pasta sauce could become so controversial, eh?
I love to cook; I am half-Cajun and we have great (if unhealthy) food traditions. I make all the meals in my house. But it takes time, and you get sore feet, and managing to hide all the vegetables the kids just won't. fucking. eat. inside a rissole or something is complicated, and I've finally handed over my dinners five days a week to Nadia Lim so I don't have to do it any more. But I can AFFORD My Food Bag, and I have the time to cook those meals, because I don't work full time. If you want a varied, healthy diet for several people in a household, it's quite a difficult operation, and if you work all day, and you barely make ends meet as it is... it just seems that we're blaming specific *people* for something really shitty that neoliberalism and capitalism have created. Food isn't about "personal responsibility": food is political.
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to B Jones,
Sadly, I don't currently consider this the kind of space where anyone affected would want to contribute their perspective.
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Wait. I thought you guys were telling me to stop thinking so much? You can't have it both ways.
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I'm quite a succinct person: I prefer to boil down arguments to the bare bones. So essentially, what Rosemary and Katherine are saying is (and please do correct me if I have this wrong) yes, this is probably structural and complicated and to do with poverty and inequality and all sorts of other things BUT (and here is where the hand-wavy part comes in) we should all stop thinking about it so much and tell poor people off for not doing stuff "right" instead.
You'll pardon me if I find that solution less than satisfying.
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
Perhaps, Danielle, you could elaborate on that? I would not want to take from that what was not intended.
I find it hard to engage in many threads in which I am interested because I can't be bothered deconstructing large numbers of blanket assertions I find problematic. I'm not sure whether the culture of the threads has changed, or if I have.
In some circles, putting sugary drinks into the baby’s bottle is tantamount to abuse.
Like this. I can't work out which bit of this I want to argue with first. If you don't tell off someone for giving their baby sugar, you're condoning what some people consider the moral equivalent of child beating. I mean... OK? Do you really think that's a helpful approach?
Or this:
And I kind of agree with the time poverty argument, but if we just look at pasta sauce as an example, it can be made early and stored in the fridge for days.
Maybe, if you work some shitty minimum wage job, you don't want to spend your day off making pasta sauce? Maybe you want to hang with your kids, or play social netball, or sit on your ass? I don't know, it's like we're constantly framing this as some sort of Moral Failing of the Poors, and at some point we're going to have to say that this is structural and socio-economic and... stop doing that finger-pointy tsk-tsk thing we, as a society, love to do.
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Here's what I'm saying: accosting parents or fat people or fat parents or chip-eating students or people at the dairy or whoeverthefuck about their choices is probably the LEAST helpful thing anyone can do.
(I barely post here anymore, compared to previously, so take from that what you will about my opinions of the tenor of discussions lately.)
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to Katharine Moody,
How many of us have seen this here – and said nothing?
Never. I've never seen it. However, it seems I spend rather less time than the rest of you do staring at fat people and judging them, because I have better things to do with my life.