What We Talk About When We Talk About Food

In her recent post on the New York Times health blog “Well,” Roni Caryn Rabin reported on a study suggesting that watching four hours of TV per day might not just be boring, anti-social, or mindnumbing, but actually dangerous: Scottish researchers discovered that heart attacks and other heart problems doubled in subjects who spent two or more hours everyday in front of a screen compared with those who don’t. And that’s not the only study to advance a correlation between TV habits and health problems. Scientists think that the body undergoes damaging metabolic and enzyme transformations after habitual episodes of, what Rabin calls, “extended sitting.”

Sure, we should get off the couch and kids should start eating carrots (in season!). But even if almost everyone changed the way they exercised or ate, there would still be an unsustainable industrial food system exploiting workers and putting the bottom line before public health. 

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