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Samantha Irby Has Some Diet Advice for You: Stay Fat

by NumbersTISP Posted on June 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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Photo of Samantha Irby by Eva Blue

On this week’s episode of the Mother Jones food politics podcast, Bite (you should really subscribe!), we’re talking about fat shaming—and we hear from two amazing writers who try not to internalize all the messages about the importance of being skinny. First up, writer Lindy West, author of the book Shrill and many pieces about body image, including one for the Stranger called “Hello, I Am Fat.” Next, we talk to Samantha Irby, writer of the blog Bitches Gotta Eat and author of the new collection of essays We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Listen to the episode and read a short excerpt from Irby’s book below.

The following is an excerpt from Samantha Irby’s essay “Fuck It, Bitch. Stay Fat.”

Fuck it, bitch. Stay fat.

I mean, isn’t this what we really want to do anyway? Because we already know how one loses weight: eat less and exercise more. Or get surgery. Why are we still playing around with the Oreo diet or the whole-milk-and-unpasteurized-cheese diet or the diet where you still get to eat a pound of pasta?! Either you’re ready to eat vegetables and get on a treadmill, or you are not. And I’m ready. I just lost five pounds and here’s how: for two weeks I quit drinking booze and soda and I stopped eating dessert. I didn’t exercise—someone please tell me how you fit heart-rate-raising exercise into a schedule that includes working a real job and trying to get a good night’s sleep?—but I tried to set reasonable goals like “Don’t order one meat on top of another meat at lunch.”

Cover art provided by Penguin Random House

Dieting is crazy and turns most of us jerks into insufferable babies. Either (1) you’re a crabby asshole on the verge of tears all day long because you’re desperate for a handful of Cheetos, or (2) you’re perched atop a high horse made of fewer than twelve hundred daily calories, glaring down your nose at me and pointing out how much saturated fat is in my unsweetened iced tea. Man, don’t you hate a fat-skinny bitch more than anything else on the planet? You know who I mean—your friend who used to eat mayonnaise straight from the jar but who recently lost twenty pounds doing Whole30 because she was going through a midlife crisis and is now suddenly an expert on health and nutrition, totally qualified to rip the corn dog out of your greasy little clutches. HOLY SHIT, SHUT UP, GIRL. Can’t we all just decide that if you’re over the age of twenty-eight you don’t have to worry about being skinny anymore? Thin is a young woman’s game, and I’m perfectly happy to chill on the bench this quarter with a chili dog. And if I happen to burn a few calories while texting, then great.

Now, let’s not be crazy. Should you work out? Of course you should. But you don’t need some magazine intern cluck­ing at you from behind the computer screen about taking a jog around the block every once in a while. It doesn’t even have to be hard—just go to Curves a few times a week and trade a couple of meals a day for some Special K or a salad (but not the meat-and-cheese kind). And drink water. To make your belly feel full and distract you from how much you would die for a Dove bar. Also running to the bathroom all the time has to qualify as minimal cardiovascular exercise.

The hard part isn’t the knowing what to do, it’s the doing. I just had a yogurt. It had 150 calories in it and 2 grams of fat. I wrote it down in a little notebook full of lies that I keep in my backpack to motivate myself to try to eat better. In theory, that notebook is supposed to hold me accountable for all my food choices so that I can get on a path to better eating. In reality, I willfully ignore its existence every time someone brings a pizza to the office or the nights my friends coax me out to the bar or the entire week I spent in LA pretending I didn’t just vow to end my love affair with cheese. I know what I’m supposed to do; I just need someone to tell me how. Every single day until I die.

Seriously, though, every woman in America is probably an expert on health and exercise based solely upon her subscrip­tion to SELF magazine. Do you really need another article about how important it is to eat a big breakfast full of healthy fats and whole grains to curb afternoon snacking? NO, YOU DO NOT. You need bitches to write about how comfortable maternity jeans are for women who aren’t really pregnant. And sexy ways to remove a bra that has four hooks. I’m always amused when they encourage you to eat “instead” foods, like eating an apple when you really want to rub a bacon cheese­burger all over your boobs is a fair substitute. Why not instead list which ice creams have the least calories, by the pint? Oh, sure, you can tell a woman just to run five miles and take up crafting after she gets dumped by some asshole and her friends won’t call her back because they’re tired of listening to her dissect every single aspect of their relationship (“Do you think we’d still be together if I hadn’t hated on that Flight of the Conchords show in 2009?”), but she’d much prefer knowing whether an entire pint of Talenti has fewer calories than one of Häagen-Dazs. That’s an “instead” a girl could really go for.

The above is an excerpt from WE ARE NEVER MEETING IN REAL LIFE by Samantha Irby. Copyright (c) 2017 by Samantha Irby. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Samantha Irby Has Some Diet Advice for You: Stay Fat

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Why Trump Has You Craving Mac ‘n’ Cheese and Chocolate Cake

by LucilleAyers Posted on May 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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This week’s political news has left me feeling panicky. The more I scroll Twitter, the more often I find myself craving my favorite snacks: chocolate chip cookies and canned Diet Coke.

I’m not alone in my attachment to specific foods for certain moods. Studies suggest that when we’re sick, tired, sad, or stressed, we often eat in aims of feeling better. And given this year’s political climate, some of us may be experiencing an extra strong hankering for a greasy slice of pepperoni pizza or fresh buttercream frosting. A Market Watch survey of food businesses on election night showed spikes in cupcakes, wine, pizza, and other junk food orders.

On a recent episode of our food politics podcast, Bite, we asked listeners to tell us what dishes they’re turning to under the Trump administration.

There’s some science to suggest that we’re wired to crave certain kinds of foods in times of duress. Common comfort foods usually include a salty, sweet, or fattening element. A study by University of Colorado medicine professor Richard Johnson argues that our preference for these flavors may trace back to our early development as humans. To our Paleolithic ancestors, sweetness was a sign that a fruit was ripe and safe to eat. The excess calories helped us put on weight. “Foods that were good for survival are often things that are cemented in your neural pathways as being good for you, so you want more of them,” said San Diego Miramar College anthropology professor Laura González, who has researched emotional eating and comfort foods.

The stress response is similar. The moment we feel threat or impending doom, our bodies are flooded with chemicals that can affect our appetite and metabolism. Hormones like cortisol and ghrelin flood our system and, for some people, increase appetite and caloric intake. It’s common to look for that boost in calorie-dense dishes. “Foods that we turn to in times of stress reward the pleasure centers of our brain,” González said. “So they actually produce more dopamine and more serotonin.”

In González’s research on emotional eating, she found people linked favorite foods with memories of childhood, family, and holiday traditions. She noted that people across various cultures often reach for warm food. Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham’s theorizes that once our ancestors starting using fire to cook, they used less energy to digest, leading to stronger bodies and bigger brains—in short, cooked foods is what made us human.

It’s possible that Donald Trump himself isn’t safe from the effects of stress on appetite. During a recent visit to the White House, Time reporters noted that the president was the only one to receive extra sauce on his entree and two scoops of vanilla ice cream with his chocolate cream pie.

Here are some more favorite comfort foods from the Twittersphere:

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Why Trump Has You Craving Mac ‘n’ Cheese and Chocolate Cake

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The Instant Pot Is a Phenomenon—and Indian Cooks Are Using It in the Most Creative Ways

by BrandenK92 Posted on April 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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Perhaps you’ve heard by now about the Instant Pot, a slow cooker, rice cooker, food warmer, pressure cooker, sauté pan, and yogurt maker all rolled into one slightly unwieldy programmable metal contraption. Over the last few months, this kitchen gadget has garnered a lot of attention. It’s a bestseller on Amazon. The New York Times took it for a spin, as did NPR’s The Salt. Bon Appétit claimed it “will change your life.”

But there’s one group that applies exceptional creativity to the Instant Pot: people who cook Indian food. On a private Facebook group called Instant Pot for Indian Cooking, home chefs adapt traditional dishes—dals, biryanis, curries, and more—and post the photos and recipes to 70,000 members. They also poll each other for advice—questions like “How much paneer do you get from a gallon of whole milk” in the Instant Pot? and “Has anyone used packaged fried onion from the store for Instant Pot biryani?”

These folks are devoted to their Instant Pots. Many members boast that they’ve thrown away their traditional Indian pressure cookers. Someone recently posted a photo of her Instant Pot overlooking a scenic mountain vista. Yes, the Instant Pot went camping.

So what makes the Instant Pot so good for Indian cuisine? On the last episode of Bite, our food politics podcast, I had a quick lesson with Pooja Verma, who cooks a lot of Indian food for her family in Fremont, California. (The segment starts at 02:28)

Pooja told me she now does an impressive 80 percent of her cooking in the Instant Pot. One reason she likes it, she says, is that it’s great for recipes that usually only work in India’s hot climate. Take idlis—dumplings made from fermented rice and lentil flour. The key to making great idlis, Pooja explained, is that the batter must ferment without the addition of yeast. “So some smart people have figured out that the yogurt function in the Instant Pot emanates just the right amount of heat to get the batter fermented overnight.” For more Instant Pot cooking tips from Pooja, listen to our latest episode of Bite.

Bite is Mother Jones‘ food politics podcast. Listen to all our episodes here, or by subscribing in iTunes or Stitcher or via RSS.

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The Instant Pot Is a Phenomenon—and Indian Cooks Are Using It in the Most Creative Ways

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Science Says This Weird Virus Could Make You Fat

by BelindaStowers Posted on January 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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It’s January, the month of new diets and gym memberships. In the spirit of starting off a brand new year, there’s no reason not to eat healthier and move around more. But if your aim is just to lose pounds, you might be on the wrong track. In her new book, The Secret Life of Fat, biochemist Sylvia Tara reveals what many dieters have suspected for a long time: There’s more to losing weight than just eating less and exercise. Tara joined us on the most recent episode of Mother Jones’ food politics podcast Bite.

The long list of factors that influence body size and shape, writes Tara, includes our genes, hormones, and bacteria in our gut. And what’s more, she notes, weight is not a great indicator of overall health (a topic I’ve written about before).

But here’s what hardly anyone talks about: Viruses, too, can lead to weight gain. In her book, Tara tells the story of a 62-year-old man named Randy who had struggled with his weight for his entire life. After being scratched by a chicken on his family’s farm at age 11, Randy’s appetite increased dramatically—and despite his intense physical work on the farm every day, he swiftly packed on the pounds. No one could explain Randy’s weight gain, and the fact that the rest of his family members were slim made it even more puzzling.

It wasn’t until decades later that Randy found a possible explanation. He went to see a pioneering endocrinologist named Dr. Richard Atkinson, who suspected that Randy had contracted a virus that was partially responsible for his extra weight—and his difficulty shedding pounds. Atkinson’s postdoctoral assistant, an Indian scientist named Nikhil Dhurandhar who had studied metabolism-changing chicken viruses, confirmed Atkinson’s suspicion with a blood test: Randy tested positive for a virus called AD-36.

Tara chronicles a fascinating series of experiments in which Atkinson and Dhurandhar showed that AD-36 changed animals’ metabolisms. When marmoset monkeys were infected with the virus, for example, their body fat increased by almost 60 percent. The team then set about studying AD-36 in humans. Here’s how Tara describes what they found:

Dhurandhar and Atkinson tested over 500 human subjects to see if they had antibodies to the AD-36 virus, indicating they had been infected with it at some point in their lives. His team found that 30 percent of subjects who were obese tested positive for AD-36, but only 11 percent of nonobese individuals did—a 3-to-1 ratio. In addition, nonobese individuals who tested positive for AD-36 were significantly heavier than those who had never been exposed to a virus. Once again, the virus was correlated with fat.

The team went on to study pairs of twins in which one tested positive for AD-36 and the other tested negative. “It turned out exactly the way we hypothesized,” Dhurandhar told Tara. “The Ad-36 positive co-twins were significantly fatter compared to their AD-36 negative counterparts.”

Whether Randy was infected with AD-36 from the chicken that had scratched him as a child—and how large of a role AD-36 played in his own struggles—is almost impossible to know. There’s no cure for AD-36, though Atkinson is hopeful that scientists will someday develop a vaccine. He believes that as many as 30 percent of obese people may be infected with the virus.

Meanwhile, Tara reports, Randy still struggles to lose weight. He eats just 1,500 calories a day; his main meal is typically a salad. Atkinson told Tara that Randy “is a remarkable person, with more discipline than anyone I have ever met.”

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Science Says This Weird Virus Could Make You Fat

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Our Food System Relies on Immigrants. Here’s How One Waiter Is Coping With Trump’s Election.

by FerneBlubaugh Posted on November 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Enrique Diaz, 24, leads a busy life. He works 50 to 60 hours a week as a waiter at a restaurant in Lower Manhattan and takes classes at John Jay College for Criminal Justice, where he’s close to earning a bachelor’s degree in forensic psychology. On November 8, Diaz suddenly got a new challenge: contending with an incoming president who wants to purge him—and his family—from the country.

Enrique Diaz

President-elect Donald Trump ran on a platform of bare-knuckled xenophobia, insulting Muslims and Mexicans and vowing to expel 11 million undocumented immigrants. Since the election, he has reiterated those sentiments, declaring he would assemble a “deportation force,” appointing white nationalist Steve Bannon as his chief White House strategist, and tapping a notorious immigrant-basher, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama), as attorney general.

As I noted in this pre-election post, the Trump program amounts to a direct attack on the very people who feed us. The entire food system, from farm fields to meat-packing floors to restaurants, is shot through with immigrants, large numbers of whom are undocumented.

To get an idea of what it feels like to work in the food system while being targeted by the incoming administration, I interviewed Diaz for Bite podcast.

He moved to Brooklyn at eight years old, when his parents migrated from Mexico City without papers. Still living in Brooklyn, he currently has a two-year work permit under a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a policy created by a 2012 Obama administration executive order. DACA is intended to protect the approximately 1.7 million people in Diaz’ circumstances: undocumented young adults who migrated to the United States before their 16th birthday. DACA doesn’t offer a path to citizenship; it allows people who quality to apply for work permits and gain temporary protection against deportation.

Trump has vowed repeatedly, including on his campaign website, to rescind DACA “immediately.” So in addition to juggling 12-hour restaurant shifts and college classes, Diaz—whose brother also has DACA status —now has to contend with a promised immigration crackdown.

I talked to Diaz about his experience on Election Day, which started with a stint volunteering as a translator at a Brooklyn polling booth, and also about how the Trump victory went over with his fellow immigrants at work and at home with his family. “I’m afraid, I’m terrified,” Enrique said. “But I can’t show it at home”—he feels like he should maintain a calm face for his parents. Such stress reverberates through the food system.

Bite is Mother Jones‘ podcast for people who think hard about their food. Listen to all our episodes here, or subscribe in iTunes, Stitcher, or via RSS.

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Our Food System Relies on Immigrants. Here’s How One Waiter Is Coping With Trump’s Election.

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You’ve Been Wrong About Fortune Cookies Your Whole Life

by MerissaHogarth Posted on October 15, 2016

Mother Jones

The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory in San Francisco isn’t much bigger than a narrow garage, but it produces thousands of fortune cookies each day. Large machines drip batter onto hot circular plates, hardening them in an instant. Two Chinese American women quickly grab the warm wafers, fold them over an iron, and insert a small piece of paper inside before fully closing the cookie. They move quickly under the gaze of tourists, who pay 50 cents to snap a photo.

The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory in San Francisco’s Chinatown Photo by Jenny Luna

There’s a decent chance the last fortune cookie you ate came from this factory: San Francisco and Los Angeles churn out most of the country’s supply. Aside from being big producers of the treat since the mid-20th century, these two cities also have a running feud about which city can claim to be the cookie’s original hometown. Jennifer Lee writes about this history in her book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles; you can hear her on a recent episode of our podcast Bite.

Thirty years ago, this battle came to a head when representatives for each city met in San Francisco’s Court of Historical Review to settle the dispute once and for all. (To be clear, this court was a mock court, the same that deliberated on whether martinis originated in San Francisco or the nearby city of Martinez, and whether Bay Area bagels are as good as New York’s.) After arguments for both sides were heard, the judge was presented with a fortune cookie. It read: “Judge who rules in favor of L.A. not a very smart cookie.”

After the laughter died down, a small Japanese woman named Sally Osaki approached the stand. She was carrying two long irons with clamps on the end—the original tools for making fortune cookies, she said.

And then Osaki said something that shocked everyone: “They’re not Chinese, they’re Japanese.” Later, Osaki recalled that the statement “just came out. I knew it in my soul.”

The irons she carried belonged to the owner of the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Osaki, who grew up in Japan, recognized that the fortune cookie concept originated with Japanese bakers, who would stick messages into tea cakes. Fortune cookies, she said, only became a Chinese tradition later—during her family’s, and her people’s, darkest times.

At the start of World War II, 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps on the West Coast. They had to leave everything behind: their homes, their businesses, their belongings—and, for those who were bakers, their iron tools for making tea cakes. It’s rumored that Japanese families passed these on to Chinese immigrants in their neighborhoods. And, well, the rest is history.

To hear more about Osaki’s story and the origin of fortune cookie, download our episode here. Also on that episode, don’t miss Tom Philpott’s interview with author Valerie Imbruce on how Chinatown markets have been sources of fresh produce since before the days of big supermarkets, and why they’ll continue to flourish.

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You’ve Been Wrong About Fortune Cookies Your Whole Life

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This Genius Lawyer Is Our Best Hope Against Deadly Food Poisoning

by MarcelFalk49809 Posted on May 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Listeria in frozen foods. E. coli at Chipotle. Salmonella-laced pistachios. Practically every week there’s a new tainted food to avoid—and as a result, foodborne illness sickens 1 in 6 Americans, hospitalizes 128,000, and kills 3,000. The problem of bugs in food has stumped government agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the United States Department of Agriculture.

But there’s one guy who has arguably won more battles against foodborne illness than anyone. This week’s Bite podcast guest is Bill Marler, a Seattle-based attorney who represents victims of food poisoning.

In a landmark 1993 case, Marler sued Jack in the Box over its infamous E. Coli outbreak—and won. Since then, he’s gone up against dozens of food industry giants: McDonald’s, KFC, Cargill, Taco Bell, Odwalla, and most recently, Chipotle, to name but a few. In addition to his work as a lawyer, Marler also fights for our government to tighten the rules that food suppliers have to follow. He runs the website Food Safety News, and he blogs at marlerblog.com.

We talked to Marler about why he insists on washing his own lettuce, how Chipotle became a victim of its own success, and tips on avoiding contaminated chow.

Also in this episode, Tom tells us how the giant poultry company Perdue is leading the way in ditching antibiotics (and what oregano has to do with it). And Maddie solves the mystery of how food behaves at 32,000 feet (and what sichuan peppercorns have to do with it). Have a listen!

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This Genius Lawyer Is Our Best Hope Against Deadly Food Poisoning

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