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Just as a community needs a variety of personalities to have a healthy discourse, a diet needs a variety of options to be healthy for the body. The Superintendent’s Office of the Amherst public schools thinks differently, apparently, and feels that they ought to ban nuts. While the nuts in Amherst are regularly a cause for frustration, and there are some people who can’t even deal with having nuts in the same room as them, I think this was a foolish policy decision.

I have two teacher friends in Amherst who used to bring nuts to school as their primary snack (teachers need protein because dealing with kids takes a lot of energy) and now they can’t anymore. They don’t really have any good replacements.

Furthermore, how can something so commonplace and inconspicuous be effectively banned? Is the policy actually practical at all? Teachers aren’t roaming the cafeteria with riding crops and trash bags examining kids’ lunch boxes, are they? If they are, there are probably nuts in other places that they should be on the look out for, including the Superintendent’s Office.

To so dramatically force changes to the diet of so many students and staff, the School Committee, Superintendent’s Office, and Wellness Committee need to show us all numbers of how many members of the school community are seriously allergic to nut products. How many students have an anaphylactic allergic reaction just from having nut products nearby? Are we talking about two hundred students? Fifty? One? I don’t know where the cut-off is, but it certainly appears as if this decision was made without much consideration of the implications. It’s okay to acknowledge fault and reverse course; I think that would show more strength of leadership in this case than sticking to their guns.

I’m a big supporter of Maria Geryk, and I think she’s generally doing well with a very difficult job. But this is outlandish. Amherst thrives on nuts; to attempt to quash such a nut-ritious part of the diet is little more than nutty.

I’ve never been quite as ardent a listener of American Public Media’s program Marketplace as I have been to other public radio programs, but I do appreciate it as a well-produced program with the laudable mission of making dense and esoteric topics understandable and sexy. I also greatly enjoyed host Kai Ryssdal’s collaboration last year with PBS Frontline on campaign finance in Montana, “Big Sky, Big Money“. I also enjoyed listening to last night’s episode of Marketplace, especially the segment “How Doctors Die“.

BUT

My understanding that Marketplace revels in hippie-punching was reinforced last night. It is common for Ryssdal and others on the program to be flippant or sarcastic about initiatives and topics that are important and serious. Last night there was a piece on new labeling laws for meat in the US, and it followed in this trend:

Bad for industry, consumers don’t care

There a lot of implications I take issue with in this report.

1. Ryssdal leads by implying that knowing where your food comes from is mainly valuable if you’re “the curious type” rather than interested in local & ethical food sourcing.
2. After describing the new rule, he jumps straight to how meat-packers don’t like the rule. That implies we should be concerned about industry’s aversion to regulation before we think about the reasons for the regulations. Of course they don’t like having to reveal the details of their operation! There’s a lot of unethical stuff going on; that’s why it needs to be regulated.



3. “But really, are the rest of us really going to notice?” Ryssdal implies that it’s not worth it, because consumers don’t care. But putting the information out there means that people will start thinking about it more, which can make them care more.
4. The first interview they play is with a lawyer for grocery stores, who focuses on how the language required by the regulations is “unappetizing”. If people have forgotten that an animal was slaughtered to create their meat, they absolutely should be reminded of it.
5. The second interview is with an economist who says there’s little evidence people will pay more for better products. I would respond that it’s still worth doing even if it doesn’t lead to higher profits.
6. The reporter closes with a flippant “Even if the new labels are more prominent, they probably won’t affect shopping for Thanksgiving dinner. They hit beef, chicken, pork, lamb and goat. But turkey gets a pass.”
7. And that’s it! There’s no defense of why these regulations are a good idea, just “oh look at that silly government, imposing unnecessary and ineffective rules on the meat industry.”

Recycling is stupid

Then there was the report about recycling, called “Recycling? Don’t overdo it.”

This one is just as bad. It focuses on how recycling is more expensive than throwing things away. It even warps what an interview subject says:

“These external benefits are actually very substantial,” [Bucknell economist Thomas Kinnaman] says. As in: They do make recycling a good deal for the planet, even if it’s a money-loser for cities.

First of all, Kinnaman seems to be saying that a holistic view of recycling costs is not as clear cut as Marketplace is making them out to be. My own town is facing the reality of our landfill (and all those near us) filling up, which creates gargantuan costs as our trash needs to be shipped farther and farther away.

Also, every time a reporter talks about “good for the planet” my alarm bells go off. The planet is not the issue. The issue is how our culture’s ravaging of the world around us makes life worse for humans. The biocentrism of 1970s framing of environmental issues is outdated, and reporters should get with the picture. Waste is a problem for people and reducing it is good for everyone; that’s why we pay more for it.

The implication is that recycling is not worth it and liberals who fetishize recycling are deluded. Marketplace, get your act together. While you’re punching hippies, you’re ignoring good policy and harming our future.

As I stated above, I think it’s great that Marketplace works to make dull topics more fun and accessible. But some journalistic standards of balance and a perspective that acknowledges the problems with the status quo would not go amiss.

Nothing is quite as unsettling as realizing that the vision you have for your future is a fantasy. And in our society, with so much designation of worth reserved for the employed, reminders that the employment landscape is not very rosy can really shake our confidence in the system.

I think that discontent is the foundation of making the change our broken system needs. That’s why I love this article on Al Jazeera English writer Sarah Kendzior. My favorite section of the elegant writing is the following:

We live in the tunnel at the end of the light.

If you are 35 or younger – and quite often, older – the advice of the old economy does not apply to you. You live in the post-employment economy, where corporations have decided not to pay people. Profits are still high. The money is still there. But not for you. You will work without a raise, benefits, or job security. Survival is now a laudable aspiration.

She makes this case based on trends of increasing conversion of former permanent full-time work to lower pay and lower security work. The trend is most visible in the adjunctification of higher education, but is pervasive throughout the American economy.

Please read the article, and get angry. We can only change this sort of problem when we stop internalizing the economy’s failures and call for something better.

The way our society implicitly teaches young girls how to behave and think about themselves is messed up. Just see Miss Representation or observe the focus the White House places on boosting the percentage of women in STEM fields (24% in 2009).

The solution to this problem begins with how we talk to these young girls. I enjoyed a Huffington Post article a few years ago on this topic, which influenced me to shift focus from praising girls (and women) for their appearance (“cute” being a prime example) to praising them more for other more substantial parts of their personality.

I recently saw another piece on the topic, a KQED report from April highlighting the research of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck. Dweck’s research is on how best to praise kids so that they persist with difficult tasks, and one of her findings is most true for young girls:

What we’ve shown is that when you praise someone, say, ‘You’re smart at this,’ the next time they struggle, they think they’re not. It’s really about praising the process they engage in, not how smart they are or how good they are at it, but taking on difficulty, trying many different strategies, sticking to it and achieving over time.

That makes a lot of sense! It’s great finding out about little ways we can change our behavior to move away from being “part of the problem” and toward being “part of the solution”.