Had I Known

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  As long as people want to lose weight, we’ll probably have dueling diet doctors. But now that it’s apparent that the prevailing low-fat wisdom is bunk, why would anyone opt for a diet with a mouthfeel that mimics sawdust?

  Perhaps because facts don’t matter when a dogma so flattering to the affluent is at stake. In the last couple of decades, the low-fat way of life has become an important indicator of social rank, along with whole-grain—as opposed to white—bread and natural fibers versus polyester. If you doubt this, consider the multiple meanings of grease, as in greaser and greasy spoon. Among the nutritionally correct upper-middle-class people of my acquaintance, a dinner of French bread and pasta has long been considered a suitable offering for guests—followed by a plate of bone-dry biscotti. And don’t bother asking for the butter.

  What has made the low-fat dogma especially impervious to critique, though, is the overclass identification of low-fat with virtue and fat with the long-suspected underclass tendency to self-indulgence. Low-fat is the flip side of avarice for a reason: Thanks to America’s deep streak of Puritanism—perhaps mixed with a dollop of democratic idealism—ours has been a culture in which everyone wants to be rich but no one wants to be known as a “fat cat.” We might be hogging the earth’s resources, the affluent seem to be saying, but at least we’re not indulging the ancient human craving for fat. So the low-fat diet has been the hair shirt under the fur coat—the daily deprivation that offsets the endless greed.

  I wouldn’t go so far as to blame the financial shenanigans of the last few years on Brody, but clearly there is a connection. The long-term effects of a low-fat, low-protein diet are easy to guess—a perpetual feeling of insatiety, a relentless, gnawing hunger for more. No doubt, for many thousands of low-fat, high-earning people, money became a substitute, however unfulfilling, for dietary fat. The effect was naturally strongest in Silicon Valley, where dot-commania collided with the northern California, Berkeley-based carbo cult, to disastrous effect. That “irrational exuberance” of the late nineties was in fact the giddiness of hypoglycemia, induced by a diet of boutique muffins and $5-a-loaf “artisan bread.”

  My advice to the fat-deprived execs: Take a break from the markets and go out and get yourself a bacon cheeseburger and fries or, if you still have a few bucks to toss around, a nice pancetta-rich plate of spaghetti carbonara. Eat every last drop. Then lean back, with the grease dripping down your chin, smile at the people around you, and appreciate, perhaps for the very first time, what it feels like to have enough.

  Our Broken Mental

  Health System

  The Nation, 2007

  On April 16, 2007, a withdrawn, silent kid named Cho Seung-Hui opened fire on the Virginia Tech campus, killing thirty-two people. Leaving aside the issue of WMM (Weapons of Mass Murder, aka guns), the massacre has something to teach us about the American mental health system. It’s farcically easy for an American to be diagnosed as mentally ill: All you have to do is squirm in your fourth-grade seat and you’re likely to be hit with the label of ADHD and a prescription for an antipsychotic. But when a genuine whack job comes along—the kind of guy who calls himself “Question Mark” and turns in essays on bloodbaths—there’s apparently nothing to be done.

  While Cho Seung-Hui quietly—very quietly—pursued his studies, millions of ordinary, nonviolent folks were being subjected to heavy-duty labels ripped from the DSM-IV. An estimated 20 percent of American children and teenagers are diagnosed as mentally ill in the course of a year, and adults need not feel left out of the labeling spree: Watch enough commercials and you’ll learn that you suffer from social phobia, depression, stress, or some form of sexual indifference (at least I find it hard to believe that all this “erectile dysfunction” is purely physical in origin).

  Consider the essay “Manufacturing Depression” that appeared in Harper’s. Hoping to qualify for a study on “Minor Depression” at the Massachusetts General Hospital, the author, Gary Greenberg, presented a list of his problems, including “the stalled writing projects and the weedy garden, the dwindling bank accounts and the difficulties of parenthood,” in other words, “the typical plaint and worry and disappointment of a middle-aged, middle-class American life.” Alas, it turned out he did not qualify for the Minor Depression study. “What you have,” the doctor told him, “is Major Depression.”

  A number of psychiatrists have pointed out that the real business of the mental health system is social control. Normal, physically active nine-year-olds have to be taught to sit still. Adults facing “dwindling bank accounts” have to be drugged or disciplined into accepting their fate. What therapy aims to achieve is not “health” but compliance with social norms. The idea still rings true every time I’ve been confronted with a “pre-employment personality test” that reads like a police interrogation: How much have you stolen from previous employers? Do you have any objections to selling cocaine? Is it “easier to work when you’re a little bit high”?

  Then there is the ubiquitous Myers-Briggs test, which seems obsessed with weeding out loners. Presumably, someone in the HR department can use your test results to determine whether you’re a good “fit.” (Incidentally, Myers-Briggs possesses no category for and no means of detecting the person who might show up at work one day with an automatic weapon.)

  But for all the attention to “personality” and garden-variety neurosis, we are left with the problem of the aforementioned psychotics, and the painful question remains: If Cho Seung-Hui’s oddities had been noted earlier—say, when he was still under eighteen—could he have been successfully diagnosed and treated? Journalist Paul Raeburn’s 2004 book, Acquainted with the Night: A Parent’s Quest to Understand Depression and Bipolar Disorder in His Children, suggests that the answer is a resounding no.

  When his own children started acting up, Raeburn found that there are scores of therapists listed in the Yellow Pages, as well as quite a few inpatient facilities for the flamboyantly symptomatic. But nothing linked these various elements of potential care into anything that could be called a “system.” The therapists, who all march to their own theoretical and pharmaceutical drummers, have no reliable connections to the hospitals, nor do the hospitals have any means of providing follow-up care for patients after they are discharged.

  Then there is the matter of payment. As managed-care plans gained ground in the health care system in the 1990s, Raeburn reports, they cut their spending on psychiatric treatment by 55 percent, putting mental health services almost out of the reach of the middle class, never mind the poor. Hence, no doubt, the fact that three-quarters of children and teenagers who receive a diagnosis of mental illness get no care for it at all.

  If we have no working mental health system, and no means of detecting or treating the murderously disturbed, then here’s yet another argument for doing what we should do anyway: Limit access to the tools of murder, end the casual sale of handguns.

  Liposuction: The Key to Energy Independence

  The Nation, 2008

  Everyone talks about our terrible dependency on oil—foreign and otherwise—but hardly anyone mentions what it is. Fossil fuel, all right, but whose fossils? Mostly tiny plants called diatoms, but quite possibly a few Barney-like creatures went into the mix, like stegosaurus, brontosaurus, or other giant reptiles that shared the Jurassic period with all those diatoms. What we are burning in our cars and using to heat or cool our homes is, in other words, a highly processed version of corpse juice.

  Think of this for a moment, if only out of respect for the dead: There you were, about a hundred million years ago, maybe a contented little diatom or a great big brontosaurus stumbling around the edge of a tar pit—a lord of the earth. And what are you now? A sludge of long-chain carbon molecules that will be burned so that some mammalian biped can make a CVS run for Mountain Dew and chips.

  It’s an old human habit, living off the roadkill of the planet. There’s evidence, for example, that early humans were engaged in scavenging before they figured o
ut how to hunt for themselves. They’d scan the sky for circling vultures, dash off to the kill site—hoping that the leopard that did the actual hunting had sauntered off for a nap—and gobble up what remained of the prey. It was risky, but it beat doing your own antelope tracking.

  We continue our career as scavengers today, attracted not by vultures but by signs saying Safeway or Giant. Inside these sites, we find bits of dead animals wrapped neatly in plastic. The killing has already been done for us—usually by underpaid immigrant workers rather than leopards.

  I say to my fellow humans: It’s time to stop feeding off the dead and grow up! I don’t know about food, but I have a plan for achieving fuel self-sufficiency in less time than it takes to say “Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” The idea came to me from reports of the growing crime of french-fry-oil theft: Certain desperate individuals are stealing restaurants’ discarded cooking oil, which can then be used to fuel cars. So the idea is this: Why not skip the french-fry phase and harvest high-energy hydrocarbons right from ourselves?

  I’m talking about liposuction, of course, and it’s a mystery to me why it hasn’t occurred to any of those geniuses who are constantly opining about fuel prices on MSNBC. The average liposuction procedure removes about half a gallon of liquid fat, which may not seem like much. But think of the vast reserves our nation is literally sitting on! Thirty percent of Americans are obese, or about 90 million individuals or 45 million gallons of easily available fat—not from dead diatoms but from our very own bellies and butts.

  This is the humane alternative to biofuels derived directly from erstwhile foodstuffs like corn. Biofuels, as you might have noticed, are exacerbating the global food crisis by turning edible plants into gasoline. But we could put humans back in the loop by first turning the corn into Fritos and hence into liposuctionable body fat. There would be a reason to live again, even a patriotic rationale for packing on the pounds.

  True, liposuction is not risk-free, as the numerous doctors’ websites on the subject inform us. And those of us who insist on driving gas guzzlers may quickly deplete their personal fat reserves, much as heroin addicts run out of usable veins. But the gaunt, punctured look could become a fashion statement. Already, the combination of a tiny waist and a huge carbon footprint—generated by one’s Hummer and private jet—is considered a sign of great wealth.

  And think what it would do for our nation’s self-esteem. We may not lead the world in scientific innovation, educational achievement, or low infant mortality, but we are the global champions of obesity. Go to http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_obe-health-obesity and you’ll find America well ahead of the pack when it comes to personal body fat, while those renowned oil producers—Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Iran—aren’t even among the top twenty-nine. All we need is a healthy dose of fat pride and for CVS to start marketing home liposuction kits. That run for Mountain Dew and chips could soon be an energy-neutral proposition.

  The Selfish Side of Gratitude

  New York Times, 2015

  This holiday season, there was something in the air that was even more inescapable than the scent of pumpkin spice: gratitude.

  In November, NPR issued a number of brief exhortations to cultivate gratitude, culminating in an hourlong special on the “science of gratitude,” narrated by Susan Sarandon. Writers in Time magazine, the New York Times, and Scientific American recommended it as a surefire ticket to happiness and even better health. Robert Emmons, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies the “science of gratitude,” argues that it leads to a stronger immune system and lower blood pressure, as well as “more joy and pleasure.”

  It’s good to express our thanks, of course, to those who deserve recognition. But this holiday gratitude is all about you, and how you can feel better about yourself.

  Gratitude is hardly a fresh face on the self-improvement scene. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Oprah Winfrey and other motivational figures were promoting an “attitude of gratitude.” Martin Seligman, the father of “positive psychology,” which is often enlisted to provide some sort of scientific basis for “positive thinking,” has been offering instruction in gratitude for more than a decade. In the logic of positive self-improvement, anything that feels good—from scenic walks to family gatherings to expressing gratitude—is worth repeating.

  Positive thinking was in part undone by its own silliness, glaringly displayed in the 2006 best seller The Secret, which announced that you could have anything, like the expensive necklace you’d been coveting, simply by “visualizing” it in your possession.

  The financial crash of 2008 further dimmed the luster of positive thinking, which had done so much to lure would-be homeowners and predatory mortgage lenders into a speculative frenzy. This left the self-improvement field open to more cautious stances, like mindfulness and resilience, and—for those who could still muster it—gratitude.

  Gratitude is at least potentially more prosocial than the alternative self-improvement techniques. You have to be grateful to someone, who could be an invisible God, but might as well be a friend, mentor, or family member. The gratitude literature often advises loving, human interactions: writing a “gratitude letter” to a helpful colleague, for example, or taking time to tell a family member how wonderful they are. These are good things to do, in a moral sense, and the new gratitude gurus are here to tell us that they also feel good.

  But is gratitude always appropriate? The answer depends on who’s giving it and who’s getting it or, very commonly in our divided society, how much of the wealth gap it’s expected to bridge. Suppose you were an $8-an-hour Walmart employee who saw her base pay elevated this year, by company fiat, to $9 an hour. Should you be grateful to the Waltons, who are the richest family in America? Or to Walmart’s chief executive, whose annual base pay is close to $1 million and whose home sits on nearly 100 acres of land in Bentonville, Arkansas? Reflexively grateful people are easily dismissed as “chumps,” and in this hypothetical case, the term would seem to apply.

  Perhaps it’s no surprise that gratitude’s rise to self-help celebrity status owes a lot to the conservative-leaning John Templeton Foundation. At the start of this decade, the foundation, which promotes free-market capitalism, gave $5.6 million to Dr. Emmons, the gratitude researcher. It also funded a $3 million initiative called Expanding the Science and Practice of Gratitude through the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, which coproduced the special that aired on NPR. The foundation does not fund projects to directly improve the lives of poor individuals, but it has spent a great deal, through efforts like these, to improve their attitudes.

  It’s a safe guess, though, that most of the people targeted by gratitude exhortations actually have something to be grateful for, such as Janice Kaplan, the author of the memoir The Gratitude Diaries, who spent a year appreciating her high-earning husband and successful grown children. And it is here that the prosocial promise of gratitude begins to dim. True, saying “thank-you” is widely encouraged, but much of the gratitude advice involves no communication or interaction of any kind.

  Consider this, from a yoga instructor on CNN.com: “Cultivate your sense of gratitude by incorporating giving thanks into a personal morning ritual, such as writing in a gratitude journal, repeating an affirmation, or practicing a meditation. It could even be as simple as writing what you give thanks for on a sticky note and posting it on your mirror or computer. To help you establish a daily routine, create a ‘thankfulness’ reminder on your phone or computer to pop up every morning and prompt you.”

  Who is interacting here? “You” and “you.”

  The Harvard Mental Health Letter begins its list of gratitude interventions with the advice that you should send a thank-you letter as often as once a month, but all the other suggested exercises can be undertaken without human contact: “Thank someone mentally,” “Keep a gratitude journal,” “Count your blessings,” “Meditate” and, for those who a
re so inclined, “Pray.”

  So it’s possible to achieve the recommended levels of gratitude without spending a penny or uttering a word. All you have to do is to generate, within yourself, the good feelings associated with gratitude, and then bask in its warm, comforting glow. If there is any loving involved in this, it is self-love, and the current hoopla around gratitude is a celebration of onanism.

  Yet there is a need for more gratitude, especially from those who have a roof over their heads and food on their table. Only it should be a more vigorous and inclusive sort of gratitude than what is being urged on us now. Who picked the lettuce in the fields, processed the standing rib roast, drove these products to the stores, stacked them on the supermarket shelves, and, of course, prepared them and brought them to the table? Saying grace to an abstract God is an evasion; there are crowds, whole communities of actual people, many of them with aching backs and tenuous finances, who made the meal possible.

  The real challenge of gratitude lies in figuring out how to express our debt to them, whether through generous tips or, say, by supporting their demands for decent pay and better working conditions. But now we’re not talking about gratitude, we’re talking about a far more muscular impulse—and this is, to use the old-fashioned term, “solidarity”—which may involve getting up off the yoga mat.

  MEN