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| Screenshot of one of Logan Fazio's photos at Miami New Times. |
The photos reminded of the excellent independent lens film on NPR/WPBT, "Soul Food Junkies".
The film addresses the legacy through which big, black men and women have an outsized cultural influence in African American life. "Filmmaker Byron Hurt explores the upsides and downsides of soul food, a quintessential American cuisine. Soul Food Junkies explores the history and social significance of soul food to black cultural identity and its effect on African American health, good and bad. Soul food will also be used as the lens to investigate the dark side of the food industry and the growing food justice movement that has been born in its wake."
Urban Beach Week is just a resting place for the conversation about obesity: at any train station, bus terminal or airport in the US, the state of America's weight problem is open to view. It's ubiquitous and crosses every ethnic and racial line.
But there is something more to the food deserts that dot the American landscape of the poor. (Here is what Wendell Pierce is doing in New Orleans, to answer the problem.) Denying healthy food choices in supermarkets serving the poor is a form of slavery. Slavery to fats and sugar. These are the cheapest calories, a kind lowest common denominator, and they come at an extraordinarily high price to public health.
Showing it off is all good when you are young and beautiful, but when you forty-five, larded and wheezing, obesity is very, very expensive.
It would be a good thing, if the next Urban Beach Week included an anti-sugar campaign. I'd drive to the beach, to see that.
4 comments:
Last time I went to Disney World, I had a big fat reality sandwich of the obesity problem in the United States. Yuk!
It looks like a much older crowd. Maybe the younger people don't attend the weekend any more.
Sir Mix-a-lot would be proud
We hear many employers refuse to hire and/or promote the obese. Employers state they want disciplined healthy workers. not addicts.
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