Claims and Clichés

"It (sic) accelerating basic trends — recognizing that food at home is healthier, there is better control of the calories, content of food, less expensive and in tune with family values," [Tim Hammonds, president and CEO at the Food Marketing Institute, an industry trade group] said.
"More are eating out at the grocery store"

Just in case "family values" hadn't quite made it onto the list of "terms so clichéd that they're basically meaningless" yet, now it's being applied to - picking up prepared food from the grocery store, and eating it at home. I also suspect that Mr. Hammonds is trying to push "healthy" into the category as well. How is eating food prepared somewhere else at home any healthier than eating it where it was prepared? I can see how one might make the case that picking up a rotisserie chicken from a grocery store is healthier than getting, say, the 10-piece bucket of Original Recipe from Kentucky Fried - but that's a completely different issue than whether or not the same food is more healthful if I eat it at home than it would be if I ate out.

As for the rest of it, I suspect that only "less expensive" really holds up in the real world. Why does buying prepared food and bringing it home control calories or the content of food better than eating out? I doubt that food leaks calories while you're taking it home. I suppose that there might be research that shows that people tend to eat larger portions when they eat out, so that I'm not quite sure of. And as for content of food - where you eat it doesn't change that - it's who prepares it. I don't have any more control over what went into food I bring home than I do over food I eat in a restaurant. In fact, given that many casual or formal dining establishments do allow you to make certain requests concerning preparation, I'd bet that I have more control than I would in a grocery store, where the food is pre-prepared.

Hammonds is indulging in a common industry pastime - conflating two things that seem similar by describing one as having all of the positive traits of the other by linking them through a common characteristic that is unrelated to the traits in question. Going to the grocery store and preparing my own food from basic ingredients is usually (depending on what I cook, and how well I cook it) more healthful, gives me exact control of what goes into it and allows me to better control the calorie count than eating out. But that's because I prepared the food myself. Buying prepared food removes that factor. The fact that I picked it up from Safeway or Dominic's on my way home, rather than eating it at Olive Garden doesn't replace it.

Not There Yet

While it's important to understand that there are many other things in the world than taxes (like Death); if I were a single-issue voter, solely concerned with lowering my federal income tax bill, even though I am supposedly in the top 1% of worldwide annual income, I still don't make enough money in a year to vote Republican. Of course, it's never really that simple. While I like the fact that (all else being equal - which is kind of a stretch) that Senator Obama's plan would result in a lower deficit, I don't know that I care for the hint of class warfare that it brings.

Crazy

Monica Guzman is a reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who's a frequent contributor to their "The Big Blog" feature. One of her recent posts is a great little rant about recent shootings north of the Seattle area: "Skagit County shooting: 'Whatever happened to crazy?'" In it, she rips off a few paragraphs about what does happen to Crazy, at least here in Washington. It's actually really good. Judging from the relative lack of comments (and complete lack of partisan hate-mongering that P-I blogs tend to attract), it wasn't widely read. Which is a pity.

For my part, I would like to have seen "crazy" capitalized, is if it were a name. I think that would have made the idea that we're talking about people, as well as a state, more clear. But that's a minor quibble. What really caught may attention came near the end of the peice, when she said, of the shortcomings in Washington state's mental health system:

"But you probably won't read much about them again until the next tragedy, when crazy gets away from us again."

And that made me think.

Guzman is right, we won't hear much about them. Because the Post-Intelligencer, and the broader "media machine" in general, don't think that we're really all that interested in the problem. And so, in the name of keeping expenses low, and advertising revenue high, they're going to stick with stories that have a better chance of getting people to pick up a newspaper, or click over to the website. Or watch the program, or download the podcast. After all, their job is to generate audience. So nothing will be said, and we won't complain about it, because this is the way that we handle problems, isn't it? We adopt passivity as a strategy, hoping that the issue will somehow fix itself, or that some other idiot will take it upon themselves to fix things for us. And so we wait until the situation blows up in our faces, like it has recently. And then we go hunting for Someone to Blame.

There will be a frenzy around how a man who claims that he kills for God managed to avoid being treated, even while his mother was going out of her mind trying to get something done. The Blame Game will swing around to the managers of the state's mental health system, whose first priority will be to make sure that no matter what else happens, their exposure to liability is limited. Their second task will be to lie low long enough for next week's crisis, which has been steadily brewing while we studiously ignored it, too, suddenly detonates. Then we, the public, will take our torches and our pitchforks, and we'll start another witchhunt, chasing after a new Someone to Blame, and this problem will go back to being out of sight and out of mind.

Crazy will be back. It always is. And we'll ignore it - the public, the press, the politicians. Yeah, there will be activists of various stripes, that will try to rouse people to action. But their fight against public apathy will eventually mean that they'll sacrifice the truth in the name of action, and someone will call out their falsehood, and we'll prefer to think that everything they said was a lie, rather than try to understand why they were so desperate. And when Crazy gets away from us again, we'll clamor to be lead to safety, and then quietly forget again.

We always do.

Private Lives

"It's a private family matter. Life happens in families," Schmidt* said. "If people try to politicize this, the American people will be appalled by it. The fact is that the American people, who are decent people, don't appreciate intrusions into the private space of good families."
"McCain campaign's scrutiny of Palin called into question"

There is a certain irony in the fact that when I read this story, in the sidebar, immediately adjacent to this statement, "Palin says daughter, 17, is pregnant" was listed as #1 in the list of most read stories in the Seattle Times for the day. It outranked the coverage of Hurricane Gustav, and the fact that a local school district was out from a teachers strike. Clearly, to a number of folks the sex lives of the teenage children of politicians is more compelling than a low-grade natural disaster.

But beyond that, I would recommend that Schmidt spend some time in a grocery store checkout line, where entire magazines are devoted to the goings-on in the private spaces of many good families who just happen to be famous. Perhaps Schmidt really does believe that whatever it is that people do to be at the point where the paparazzi dog their every move disqualifies them from being members of "good families," but I suspect that he's simply looking to enlist the help of a public that is uncomfortable admitting to the spirit of voyeurism that thrives within it to somehow shame the media into dropping the story. Good luck with that.

* "Schmidt" appears to be some high-ranking McCain adviser. The article, which was compiled from McClatchy Newspapers, The New York Times and The Associated Press doesn't establish who they are, as is normally the case. I expect this was simply an editing oversight.

That's Not a Knife

Thai pro-government protestors wield a sling and a knife against anti-government demonstrators near the Government House, in Bangkok early morning Tuesday.
World News in Pictures

Uhmm... I think, that once it's as long as your arm, the word "knife" no longer qualifies.