round-up: 3/22
recommendations, quotations, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
What I’m listening to:
What I’m reading:
Ultra-Processed People, Chris van Tulleken
Quotations:
Absurdism to me means possibility. That’s how writing often feels to me when it’s really flowing. I can see a spectrum of possibilities, a magnitude of ideas and thoughts that could power a narrative. It’s allowing the joke to get as weird as possible, which also allows the narrative to truly get strange, something I always want. Maybe that’s the Florida in me jumping out, but the thing that’s the most interesting to me, in terms of storytelling, is exploring the trail off the beaten path, where the weirdest possible shit can happen.
I have an understanding that many things can be true at once: Florida can be beautiful and wild and exciting, but it can also be full of a lot of horrible shitty problems. We have a terrible government here, but that doesn’t mean that’s all we are. I constantly have to remind people, as a person who is not only from Orlando but still lives in Orlando, that I don’t live inside of a theme park. There are queer and trans people who live here, just like there are queer and trans people that live in every single state. I would also say that it’s a form of privilege to try and tell people that they should just abandon their home and go somewhere else that would be more welcoming to them. It implies that people have the kind of funds and support that would be necessary to do something like that. Many don’t. I think that people see things on the internet and on television and form a caricature of Florida. They create a cartoon of a space instead of thinking about the real, actual people that live here. Florida is a beautiful, natural space with a ton of wildlife and incredible people.
There’s so much I (don’t) remember
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I can’t remember the names of all of the boys that I messed around with – if that is even the appropriate language to use when you’re too high and drunk to consent – between the ages of 14-20.
I do not know how it started. How did we communicate our shared desire to one another? Was there a knowing glance between us? Were we, perhaps, sitting beside each other on the couch, legs touching?
I love the idea that memory can be detached from recollection. Memory as something embodied, that defies language, and defies capture – which are more or less the same thing.
Memory: If there’s anything I know, it’s that knowing is fallible – because it is shaped by history, culture, politics, which are controlled by those with Power, and – most importantly – the body.
What I know is that my story wouldn’t be true if I tried to fill in all of the gaps, if I questioned everything that I feel to be true. My brain has too many dark holes. I remember in bursts of light, forcing their way through the cracks in the walls. One part of me wants to honor the holes, to keep them empty. The story, this story, feels truer that way. And then another part of me wants to try to fill them in, to make some sense out of the fragments. I’ve never been a fan of either/or’s.
…notice what makes you feel good and what you are curious about; learn ways you can increase the amount of feeling-good time in your life, to have abundant pleasure; decrease any internal or projected shame or scarcity thinking around the pursuit of pleasure, quieting any voices of trauma that keep you from your full sacred sensual life; create more room for joy, wholeness, and aliveness (and less room for oppression, repression, self-denial and unnecessary suffering) in your life; identify strategies beyond denial or repression for navigating pleasure in relationship to others; and begin to understand the liberation possible when we collectively orient around pleasure and longing. Bonus: realize you are a pleasure activist!
-adrienne maree brown
The thought of misrepresenting someone or burning down his house with shitty recall wakes me at night. I always tell my students that doubt runs through me every day I work, like the subway’s third rail. So when people ask in challenging tones how I can possibly recall everything I’ve published, I often fess up, Obviously I can’t. But I’ve been able to bullshit myself that I do. By this I mean, I do my best, which is limited by the failures of my so-called mind.
-Mary Karr
This country feels inhospitable right now. How can we, in communities, and in our own spaces as artists, create hospitality for ourselves and for the creative work to come through?
I'm not an ACLU lawyer. I'm not a social worker. I am not bandaging wounds. A poem is not a tourniquet. A poem is not HIV medication. What can paralyze us in these moments is feeling like what we do doesn't matter because it can't save-- "You who I could not save." But I think it can. It's not a tool in the way that we think of tools. And yet poems do transform us. You come across a piece of writing or or a song, and even if it just gets you through the next three hours, that's not nothing.
I think poetry does the job of saying the unsayable.
My relationship to my poems is standing in the open field, holding out my open palm, trying to coax these creatures out of the trees and not spook them back in. And how do we spook art away from us? With ego. Thinking we know what we're doing-- wrapping our white-knuckled fists around a thing and trying to get it to do what we think it wants to do, rather than instead of staying open and letting it come through us.
So many young people want to know what poems mean-- that's what they're asked to write essays on, right? If you ask me what a poem of mine means, I would have no idea how to tell you. I can tell you what its concerns are, or what the speaker is grappling with. But I couldn't give you a synopsis.
My daughter came home from school and was like, "We had to say what these poems mean." I said, "Tell your teacher the poem means the poem." Our job is not to extract some sort of fortune cookie slip from it. You've killed the thing once you've done that.
It actually kills the pleasure of reading poetry. So many people were taught poetry was a riddle they had to solve, and they were not smart enough to know what the writer was trying to say.
The reality is the poet probably couldn't tell you that answer that's supposed to be on that test. What if we approached poetry from the perspective of: What do you notice? How does it make you feel? What does it make you want to go do? Some poems make you want to take a walk. Some make you want to call a friend.
I feel most attached to poems where I can sense a human being behind them.
Women especially are taught to restrain their desires. Denying ourselves pleasure is a way to remain chaste, pure, and good. Exercising self-control over our body, sexuality, personality, and ambition is a virtuous act.
I think desire is best harnessed as a driving force. Growing up, I used to hear the same saying all the time: you always want something more than you'll actually enjoy it once it’s yours. The act of desiring is powerful. Wanting a boyfriend can make you more outgoing, open-minded and willing to try new things. Wanting to buy a new home can make you more disciplined, ambitious, and creative at work. Desire has inspired endless art, film, literature, and music.
UPF has a long, formal scientific definition, but it can be boiled down to this: if it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t usually find in a standard home kitchen, it’s UPF. Much of it will be familiar to you as ‘junk food,’ but there’s plenty of organic, free-range, ‘ethical’ UPF, too, which might be sold as healthy, nutritious, environmentally friendly or useful for weight loss.
-Chris van Tulleken
Many of the health outcomes associated with obesity are a direct result of stigma: research shows that anti-fat bias is more ingrained among doctors and other healthcare professionals than prejudice against almost any other form of bodily difference. This is a huge barrier to care.
-Chris van Tulleken
Stabilisers, emulsifiers, gums, lecithin, glucose, a number of different oils. . . these are the hallmarks of UPF.
-Chris van Tulleken
Usually the aim of UPF is to replace the ingredients of a traditional and much-loved food with cheaper alternatives and additives that extend shelf life, facilitate centralised distribution and, it turns out, drive excess consumption.
-Chris van Tulleken
Any discussion of food descends quickly into a quagmire of snobbery because, typically, people with more money to spend on food eat different types of food and a wider variety of foods from people with less disposable income.
-Chris van Tulleken
A number of good studies had identified foods, such as whole grains, nuts, olives and oil fish, that seemed to reduce chronic disease risk, but that the benefit of the relevant nutrient—beta-carotene, fish oil, vitamin B, etc—vanished as soon as they were extracted from the food and taken instead as a supplement.
-Chris van Tulleken
Rachel [Batterham] took over […]: ‘Some people think that UPF is just lousy food in terms of nutrition and that it’s eaten by people who eat generally poor diets. But when you correct for all that, the effects on death and depression and weight and heart attacks remain the same.’ It is the ultra-processing, not the nutritional content, that’s the problem.
-Chris van Tulleken
Shame and outrage are clearly inadequate to limit the survival of companies that are complicit in atrocities.
-Chris van Tulleken
A 2015 paper proposed that humans are the only cucinivores—animals obliged to cook. In fact, we are the only processivores: we don’t just need to cook food, we also need to process it. Since pre-history, we’ve been grinding, pounding, fermenting, drying, salting, cooling and burying food. Our bodies bear witness to the long history of food processing.
-Chris van Tulleken
Food intake is under little more conscious control than breathing or drinking, and this is why it is nearly as hard to limit food intake as it is to limit water or oxygen intake. What, when and how we eat is determine by complex systems that operate far below our conscious level.
-Chris van Tulleken
Powerful signals inside and outside the body influence food intake and energy balance far, far below the level of consciousness, involving slippery related ideas like salience, wanting, motivation and reward. We smear a conscious layer over all this, but eating is far less of a choice than it appears.
-Chris van Tulleken
We don’t just get hungry and eat. We’re controlled by ancient neuroendocrine feedback systems, which evolved to ensure we consume everything we need to pass on a few genes. The system is intricate, complex and in some senses extraordinarily robust. But for many of us, it is unable to cope with novel food presented constantly in a novel way. The system didn’t evolve to handle the concoctions that arrived with the third age of eating.
-Chris van Tulleken
Food environments determine what we eat far more than conscious choice.
-Chris van Tulleken
Stress, from any source, but especially the chronic stress of poverty, has dramatic impacts on those hormones that regulate appetite, increasing the drive to eat. The exact mechaniss aren’t clear, but when you’re stressed you secrete more of the hormone cortisol; this seems to drive increased intake of calorie-dense UPF through effects on many of those hormones involved in the energy-intake regulation system. Cortisol may also lead to fat accumulation around organs, known as visceral fat, which is associated with worse health outcomes.
-Chris van Tulleken
The difference in people’s weight has nothing to do with willpower. It’s simply a collision of genes and the constraints of the food environment.
-Chris van Tulleken
There is a growing body of brain-scan data showing that energy-dense, hyperpalatable food (ultra-processed but probably also something a really good chef might be able to make) can stimulate changes in many of the same brain circuits and structures affected by addictive drugs.
-Chris van Tulleken
If you know someone who struggles with substance misuse, it may seem offensive to compare it with excess food consumption, but there is a growing literature suggesting that it’s a valid comparison.
-Chris van Tulleken
Drug addiction and food addiction share risk factors like family history of addiction, trauma and depression, indicating that UPF may be performing the same function as the drugs in those people.
-Chris van Tulleken
Neuroimaging has shown similar patterns of dysfunction in reward pathways for both foo and substance misuse. These foods also appear to engage brain regions related to reward and motivation in a similar manner to addictive drugs.
-Chris van Tulleken
We may be eating more food to compensated for becoming increasingly deficient in micronutrients. Ultra-processing reduces micronutrients to the point that modern diets lead to malnutrition even as they cause obesity.
-Chris van Tulleken
"When we taste something sweet, it's not just the sugar we're consuming — it's triggering a system in the brain that associates that sweet taste with pleasure, which makes us want to keep eating," says Dr. Paule Joseph, a researcher who studies metabolism at the National Institutes of Health and was not associated with the study.
Other research has found a link between sugar consumption and the dopamine system in our brain; some research even suggests sugar's effect on the brain in the long-run can be similar to addictive drugs.
It was quiet. Dead leaves.
My name. Wind through dry grasses.
Sometimes we get energy from very small things. On the Happier podcast, I often talk about something called the "one-minute rule." This is the idea that if you can do something in a minute without delay, you should just go ahead and do it. It gets rid of the clutter that's on the surface of life. And sometimes getting that little stuff out of the way makes you feel more prepared to take on the big stuff.
-Marielle Segarra, Sam Yellowhorse Kesler
Thinking there's one right way to go about making our lives happier, that there's a magic, one-size-fits-all solution. The fact is, no tool fits every hand. Each of us needs to figure out what is right for us.
That's where self-knowledge comes in. For example, many people swear by meditation. I have tried meditation. Doesn't work for me. I also tried keeping a gratitude journal. [Some scientific evidence shows keeping one can improve well-being.] I was deeply annoyed by it. But for some people, it's an important tool.
-Marielle Segarra, Sam Yellowhorse Kesler
This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to “live as domestic a life as far as possible,” to “have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” as long as I lived. This was in 1887.
I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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