With a blue plaid button-up shirt tucked in his jeans and a pair of ballpoint pens protruding from his front pocket, Chris Drew doesn't look much like a farmer until he puts on a pair of dirt-caked, orange leather gloves and begins trouncing through rows of 3-foot-tall artichoke plants. "Do you like big ones or small ones?" Drew, a production manager for Sea Mist Farms, shouts through a light mist. "Doesn't matter," I call back to him, wriggling my black patent-leather heels from a suction cup of thick mud. "But the bigger the stem, the better. That's the best part." Forging a path ... Read More
The Danger of Fat-Think
August 31, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
Obesity causes severe health problems. It's also a source of severe shame. Just perceiving oneself as fat, in fact, may produce greater emotional damage than actually being overweight. A German study by Bärbel-Maria Kurth and Ute Ellert in the June Deutsches Ärzteblatt International finds that young people who think they're fat suffer a poorer quality of life than truly fat people. In their study — "Perceived or True Obesity: Which Causes More Suffering in Adolescents?" — Kurth and Ellert asked 6,654 German boys and girls, aged 11 to 17, questions about six aspects of their quality of ... Read More
No Weighting
August 14, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
If an alien were to tune in to an Earth television broadcast, it would gain an impression of humans as very thin yet very muscular, with prominent cheekbones and jaw lines, sculpted torsos and long, shapely legs. If the alien then landed on the street of nearly any American city, it would be in for the shock of loose clothing and guts peeking out from under T-shirt hems. This extreme discrepancy — between the norm of form and figure and what our culture and media offer up as the ideal — is the source of much emotional pain and huge social costs. Related story: The Danger of ... Read More
