Junk food and obesity in Brazil

This is a disturbing profile of how junk food companies are inserting themselves into developing countries to bring low-income consumers into their fold of loyal clients.  It focuses on the example of Nestle in Brazil as an archetype of what's happening worldwide.  Poor people who weren't eating a diet sufficient in quality or quantity to prevent stunting and cognitive impairment in themselves and their children, are now bombarded with junk food, which adds a bunch of calories that lead to obesity, diabetes, and a whole host of new problems, in addition to the stunting and cognitive impairment that still persist (since the junk food doesn't have the vitamins, minerals, fiber, protein, and other components essential to healthy growth and development).

American culture and international development: a primer by J.

This is a series of four articles written a few years ago by J., the leading author/blogger/bard of international development workers.  The first article alleges that something in US culture makes it difficult for us not to focus on the donor but rather on the needs of poor aid beneficiaries.  The second article expands on this idea, claiming that we are inclined to see as paramount the right or even destiny of Americans to offer aid to others, even if that aid is ineffective or harmful.  We are more concerned about this right to give (and to feel good about giving) than the right of the recipient to dignity and effective help.  The third article looks specifically at donation of gifts-in-kind by regular people, from giving your old clothes to Goodwill for someone else to buy, to packing up nasty old socks or shoes or whatever to send to hurricane victims that don't really need them.  I am embellishing a bit on J.'s thesis here, but the problem is basically that this type of aid is usually more about my need to get rid of stuff (and not feel wasteful about it) than about meeting the real needs or desires of anyone else.  The last article is a bit of a departure from the thread of the prior three, but I think it's the most important for those of us who are serious about doing good development aid (or really good policy-making or governance or anything).  In it, J. discusses the American penchant for seeking simple explanations, and regarding with suspicion any explanation that seems too nuanced, or even the acknowledgement that something is complex.  We seek easy answers, and love to flock to the seeming straight-shooter with a quick, confident answer, even to the point of going for snake oil salesmen over scientists (witness our political preference for people who are totally unqualified, immoral, and corrupt, as long as they seem to shun complex thought and the ever-dreaded political correctness).  But this is not the way to get good results in any field.  The world is complex, increasingly so as we become more socially and technologically advanced.  Would you want someone inexperienced to offer a "simple" fix to your computer bugs?  Or a qualified, thoughtful technician who can recognize complexity and work with it?  Why would we answer any differently when the issue at hand isn't our computer but rather the wellbeing of the poor or the social ills of our society?

Anyway, I would highly recommend these four quick pieces as a great primer for anyone interested in how international development should work, and why it often falls short of this ideal.

Profile of a man from Wrigleyville

This is a cool profile of a friend of my mother's, from my neighborhood of Wrigleyville, Chicago.

Virtue signaling

I have written in past posts about the perverse tendency in much public discourse to label as bad things that are in fact honorable, like honesty, inclusion, and the pursuit of the common good.  While I knew this existed, and had an inkling that it was due to an odd mix of cynicism and contrarianism and antipathy, I have only recently discovered a term that encapsulates this twisting of the honorable into something reprehensible:  "virtue signaling".  I had never heard this before, but it perfectly captures the charge of those who would ridicule any advocacy for good things.  Anyway, here is an article that I agree with, which argues that the problem with our modern discourse is not in fact virtue signaling but rather the cynicism that insists that any sincerely held position is merely "virtue signaling" (while lauding as honorably forthright any advocacy of the basest, most incoherent instincts like racism and oppression).

A book by Sherman Alexie

Another book I read recently is Sherman Alexie's Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  It's a young adult novel with a fair dose of funny drawings.  It is a really great coming of age story, and a portrait of life on a modern impoverished Indian reservation.  A challenging thing for me was that the essential thesis of the book is that reservations are such toxic places that the only way for Indian people to live a dignified, decent life is to get off the reservation and away from their people.  This is a theme also present in a lot of writing and talking and thinking about the black American ghetto--the debate around whether it is more desireable (or possible) for low-income black Americans to improve their lot by removing themselves from the ghetto, or rather to develop and improve the ghetto itself, in situ.

I don't know exactly where I stand on this latter debate--given my professional and personal proclivities towards community development, I would like to think the best solution for any impoverished place is to make the place better, such that the community remains intact but now more healthy and prosperous.  At the same time, ghettos (like reservations) are by definition a forced concentration of desperate people into a place separate from the rest of society, and certainly from society's prosperity.  So it makes sense when you see studies that indicate that the only way for poor children of any color to truly prosper is to integrate them with more economically prosperous people, thus opening up similar opportunities (cultural, economic, professional, etc.) to the poor kids as their better-off counterparts.  For instance, there is a pretty robust body of evidence that indicates that the only successful innovation in US public education was desegregation.  None of the innovations of the past twenty years (small schools, charter schools, Classical schools, more tests, fewer tests, etc.) that maintain our resegregated status quo have been consistently successful at closing the gap between rich and poor students.  There just isn't a good way to enable people to prosper if they are only around other poor people and the pathologies of poor communities.  (All this said, a recent study seems to call into question the importance of elementary school quality at all in terms of improving economic wellbeing in poor students).

In any case, the dichotomy that Alexie presents, between remaining with your people and your culture (while remaining mired in poverty, violence, and substance abuse) or leaving them in order to prosper, to me seems less pronounced for other ethnic communities with high poverty rates, because due to their sheer size, there exist large communities that are predominantly Latino or black and thoroughly middle or upper-class.  So you can get out of the impoverished ghetto but still be around people of your ethnic group.  But I don't know of many places in the US where an Indian can be around mainly Indians and yet not be surrounded by poverty.  At the very least, the context Alexie presents doesn't offer this option. So his book challenges all of us to think about those lines and tradeoffs between individual success and ties to family and community.

I'm back with a book recommendation

I've been gone from this blog for a while, I know.  Sorry about that.  Among other things I was busy reading a lot.

One trashy thing I devoured during a week when my wife was out of town and I had no one to talk to after tucking in the boys is a thriller novel (what I refer to as airport books since they always sell them in airport bookstores) called "The Third Secret", by Steve Berry.  It is a tale of murder and mystery and action, centered on the Vatican and the secrets revealed at Fatima by the Virgin Mary.  It's like a thinking man's DaVinci Code, with a lot more actual history, better character development, and a lot less New Age Gnostic speculation (though its essential message is sort of New Age Gnostic).