-Sometimes, without knowing precisely what goes on at one, I'll announce my desire to run off to a spa. It sounds pleasant, right? Maybe they'd, like, paint my nails?
"You have to stay a minimum of six days, you don’t eat too much—you eat 600 calories a day—you do some baths and some treatments all day long. You do yoga, and all day long they do blood tests, and they put some oxygen in your blood…"
If you thought people who voluntarily signed up for surgical procedures in the name of vanity had a screw loose, consider that there are still others getting medical treatments for the heck of it, and not even emerging a cup size larger or schozz size smaller. I'm now officially spa-phobic.
-I'm not sure where Dan Savage came up with the idea that the typical 22-year-old woman wants to hear that her male partner's fantasy is: "'I want to sprinkle rose petals on the bed and light a thousand tea candles in the apartment.'" He might be thinking of what an especially immature high school freshman would claim to want from her crush.
-Nicholas Kristof takes on the food industry, specifically the Egg Industrial Complex, bringing food concerns up to the level of child prostitution and other genuine concerns. Pollan, Bittman, consider your turf invaded.
Eggs, of all things, strike me as the best example of where governmental regulation, and not consumer activism/boycotts/fussiness would be needed. Sure, you can make sure to only buy "cage-free" eggs. But who knows if that means anything significant, and more to the point, a great deal of the "egg" we consume is in the form of products (baked goods, etc.) in which egg is an ingredient. All but the most thorough vegans, all but those with severe egg allergies, are sometimes eating food from the outside with bits of egg of unknown provenance. Even those who raise their own chickens in their Brooklyn backyards, or who proudly announce that they are willing to pay $6 for a dozen of the most reputable eggs, have no idea where many of the eggs they consume come from.
Inasmuch as Kristof is asking the government to step in, I'm with him. But the way he frames his op-ed, trying to make individual consumers feel guilty about eating eggs for breakfast, without suggesting an ethically- and nutritionally-viable alternative, is a problem for several reasons. It demonizes the person in the family who does the grocery shopping (and draw the obvious gender conclusions). It suggests that the solution is to be found in making grocery-shopping a research project, and not in making sure that the truly objectionable isn't in stores to begin with. It encourages people to feel they've done their part in making the world a better place by purchasing something that cost a bit more but had the right thing stamped on it. I get that we need consumers to care enough to advocate for the government to step in, but this is a different kind of caring than the one that elicits - just take a look at the comments - smug personal accounts of buying the right eggs for one's family.
Women, eggs
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