It's also hard out here for a Huckabee

I've already  heard some muttering that yesterday's NYT feature on Mike Huckabee, the newly trim gov of Arkansas, labored to find an angle on a feel-good story -- gov loses over 100 lbs, saves life, encourages constituents to do the same. But in Timesland, it is not so simple:

In the South, the fight against obesity is essentially a culture war. And while the campaign may have raised Mr. Huckabee’s national profile, not everyone here appreciates a governor whose policies include weighing schoolchildren and sending home report cards on their body mass index.

Mr. Huckabee, a teetotaler who now rises before dawn to jog five miles, has been accused of nagging the populace, banning birthday cakes in schools (not true, he says) and trampling the personal freedoms of smokers with an indoor smoking ban. While he says he uses the carrot, not the stick, to encourage better health, his virtue alone has a way of making people like Pearletha David, the owner of David Family Kitchen, a soul food restaurant here, feel henpecked.*

After the governor’s nutritional guidelines for school lunches took effect, one girl wrote a letter to him demanding “real food” like nachos and pizza. A columnist for The Baxter Bulletin imagined a future of diners picking at their “sautéed soybeans with flavor-free dressing” and discussing the criminalization of cheese curls.

Mr. Huckabee knows what he is up against, namely all-you-can-eat buffets, cheese grits and a local ice cream flavor called Woo Pig Chewy. One of his own family dogs is named Sonic, after the fast-food chain whose cherry limeades are favored by his wife, Janet.

To paraphrase Clara Peller, where's the Kulturkampf? The notion that obesity is part of southern culture is problematic. It is a national pathology. The author seems to hope to find militant southerners defending the sausage gravy spring, and finds instead a schoolgirl lobbying for traditional southern staples like pizza and nachos. To be sure, cheese grits, BBQ, and other regional specialties are calorie-dense, as opposed to NY specialties like, uh, pizza, bagels and cheesecake. I am not from the south, but I enjoy eating and cooking the food, and I will bet my copy of Charleston Receipts that it is shit like this - Cheetos you can pound with one hand while you steer with the other, rather than shrimp and grits that is making folks so fat. As the map indicates, the +25% obese states overlap with SEC territory pretty closely, but there is considerable regional variation south of the sweet tea line, and states in the icefishing belt with citizens who must be gorging on lutefisk and cheddar. Obesity is a national epidemic, and conceiving of it as an exponent of  southern  culture does no one any favors.

Comments

[Jette]

I love that term "the sweet tea line." It's perfect.

[punisher]

Obesity in the United States is in part an economic issue, according to a review paper on the relationship between poverty and obesity published in the January 2004 edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The article suggests that the very low cost of energy-dense foods may be linked to rising obesity rates...

"It's a question of money," Drewnowski said. "The reason healthier diets are beyond the reach of many people is that such diets cost more. On a per calorie basis, diets composed of whole grains, fish, and fresh vegetables and fruit are far more expensive than refined grains, added sugars and added fats. It's not a question of being sensible or silly when it comes to food choices, it's about being limited to those foods that you can afford."

Huckabee's solution is a new "Just say no" campaign. Brilliant.

[Fesser]

Jette- There are academicians who actually map such things.
Punisher- I think you may be unfairly reductionist in the "just say no" assesment. The link between poverty and obesity is not innate, and is in fact a fairly recent historical development. What I think Huckabee is attempting to address on the state level, is a broader culture of obesity. I don't think that "eat less crap, and get off your ass once in a while" is Nancy Reagan redux.

[punisher]

In 2006, DHHS set poverty guidelines for a family of four at $20K per year. That's $412 per month per person in that family of four. That's $14 per day to cover E-VER-Y-THING. Shelter. Clothes. Energy. Medical. And food.

12.7% of Americans exist beneath that line.

If you don't eat, you stay thin. So one might say that the diet of the American poor is better than it was in the past, when they were starved.

It's nice that Huckabee now gets up early to run 5K, and keeps an igloo cooler of healthy snacks with him whereever he goes.

The affordable, palatable food options for many Americans are the fattening ones.

"Just say no" might be a bit reductionist. I'll amend it with a "let them eat sashimi, and a Bally's Fitness membership."

[punisher]

Huckabee's been Arkansas' Governor since 1996. According to the article, his health obsession started in 2003.

From United Health Foundation 2005 data:

Prevalence of Obesity in Arkansas
2005 Percent of population: 26
2005 Rank in US: 45th

2004 Percent of population: 25.2
2004 Rank in US: 43rd

1990 Percent of population: 13.2
1990 Rank in US: 41st (Governor Clinton)