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Two pieces I love

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these two pieces over the last week or so:

A Woman’s Guide to Hasidic Street Harassment by Lilit Marcus over at Heeb Magazine and The Terrible Tragedy of the Healthy Eater by Erica over at NW Edible.

The first one has me thinking about how we police people within our own communities. I agree with Lilit Marcus, that I get even more angry misbehavior when it comes from within my community. Part of it is anger at hypocrisy when it comes from people who claim to be religious. But I think part of it is both shame and a bit of fear. Is this what people will think of when they think of Jews? How will that affect my own life and safety? And then, along those lines, what are the most effective methods for getting them to stop. The article also has me thinking about separating of the sexes. I know that this isn’t new! feminist! news! but I’m pretty convinced that the deep sexism that is present in the most extreme Jewish sects has a lot to do with rigid gender roles and, most of all, from the constant separation of men and women, even from childhood.

The NW Edible article is heartbreaking, because I know so many people, myself included, trying to navigate the clusterfuck that is our current understanding of nutrition. People want the best lives for themselves and their families, but at what cost? I think that, at a certain point, we need to just eat what we eat and understand that no food or diet is a panacea. No food or diet is going to save us from death or illness. We just do the best we can with the knowledge that we have, and that has to be sufficient. In part, I blame media outlets for reactionary reporting and not considering nuance in scientific writing. And article that says that food x is correlated with y condition with a careful discussion of the experimental parameters and a caution that this conclusion isn’t shared by other studies does not necessarily make for an exciting article. But it does make for a more informed public.


12 thoughts on Two pieces I love

  1. Okay, having gone and read it all now:

    My philosophy towards eating “right” is that we should try to make whatever healthier changies to our diets we feel we can stand, just as long as we’re not adopting changes that are actually more harmful to us or the planet than what we did before. I mean “we” as individuals, of course – there’s no way our food production system can be changed as much as it needs to be solely by voting with our dollars. There will need to be a complete overhaul driven by legislation/regulation. Not that I know how to do this.

  2. Gah, sorry y’all. Clearly I fail when it comes to html tags. My computer says that both links are working now.

  3. The thing I wonder about nutrition is this:

    most places on the planet don’t provide for complete nutrition. I ship in food from all over the country and the world to fulfill my complete nutritional needs. This wasn’t feasible a hundred years ago or 20,000 years ago. Humans aren’t meant to have complete nutrition or complete diets, our bodies are built to survive on much lower than the optimal level of nutrients, vitamins, and the like.

    So, I can’t help but wonder what it’s doing to my body to have this perfectly nutritional diet. I mean, it’s cool and all, but my body never really expected to get three servings of vegetables a day, and I wonder what kind of effects this is actually having on me (besides, you know, being taller and living longer, which is pretty mind-blowing when you actually think about it).

  4. Karak, I’ve had similar thoughts about what we “need” in terms of nutrition. I really wonder how that’s been determined.

  5. As someone who’s been vegan for over a decade and recently developed diabetes (in my 30s!), the ‘healthy eater’ post really resonated with me. Sometimes I wish I’d indulged a bit more in (non-animal-derived) ‘pleasure foods’ while my glucose levels still allowed me to. :-/

  6. The separation of the sexes: I don’t think that phrase really captures what’s going on. Women and men are not being separated from each other (which suggests an equalness that is not there) so much as women are being removed from public life, and denied participation. Men still get to have unencumbered access to, and full participation in, all aspects of life – public life, work life, family life. They’re not being separated from anything. Looked at this way, street harassment is not some byproduct of a steady diet of sexism; it is a direct expression/ enforcement of this: “How dare she enter man’s space. She must be punished.”

  7. When little girls and women are blurred out of pictures, when uncovered three year old girls are considered to be sexually immodest, when men are wearing special glasses to avoid ever seeing a woman?

    It’ll never stop.

  8. Some of the comments on that first piece are just depressing. “You’re dressing to attract their attention! You’re in THEIR neighborhood, how dare you complain when they harrass you! You need to cover up! You’re a self-hating Jew!”

    Of course, I should have known better than to read the comments.

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