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Created: February 16, 2004
Latest Update: February 17, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

To Eat or Not to Eat The Banana Split

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, February 2004.
"Fair use" encouraged.

We Ate the Banana Split:

The frog made me do it. You can tell by the way he's dressed and his body position that he's mischievous. That fly better watch out. It's not long for this world. Arnold tried to stop me. It was our first meal out since we got back from the Queen Mary 2. Of course, I didn't need it, the banana split, I mean. But who wants to come back to the cold and dull realities of veggies after a month of mousses and truffles and flourless cakes besmirched with chocolate goo. Life is balance. And so the frog hung Arnold out to dry, probably ate the fly, and I asked for a banana split, with all chocolate sauce. I did not drool.

The waitress brought it with two spoons and sat it between was. Frog won. Arnold quit kicking and screaming and ate some of it. But being mature, reasonable adults, we left half of it, well, almost half of it on the plate. The frog never said I had to make a pig of myself; he just reminded me that life is about living and enjoying the moment, carbs or no carbs, calories or no calories. Oh, and then while Arnold paid the bill, I drew this sketch on the placemat. Original files for posterity. jeanne

The Sociological Moral:

People are complex. What works for one may not work for the other. What works today may not work tomorrow. Yet we seem to believe that there are "rules" that if we follow them without fail, they will work for us all the time in every situation. As sociologists, we know that context matters. We understand the social construction of reality in so far as we understand that we are the ones who make the rules and the rules in turn shape us. The wonderful gift of being human allows us to examine the rules contextually to see if they make sense as we are following them. That was Weber's message: that the rules and structure of bureaucracy were inadequate to the task of leadership. We speak of people falling through the cracks. They really do. Rules and structure tend to be inflexible and to operate as though they made us instead of us having made them. Weber's solution was political. He said that we need leaders with the sense to keep the inflexible inhuman aspects of bureaucracy under control, to prevent it's becoming an "iron cage."

The Banana Split story reminds us that health and overweight are serious issues in our social world today. Fast food is everywhere, and we are all on a fast track that leaves us little discretionary time to sit around the dinner table. This is health and nutrition in a whole new social context. But that shouldn't surprise us. Social contexts are about change and about adapting to those changes. We shouldn't despair; we should simply rethink the context.

When you deny yourself the taste of pleasure, you feel deprived. Remember relative deprivation? When you deny yourself nutrition on the grounds of calories or carbs, you are sometimes denying your body the fuel it needs. It may need that fuel because it has adjusted to an overconsumption of fuel, but it's taken years to do that. You can't just tell it "No more food for now. Food is bad." Your body will simply switch it's metabolic responses to the lower consumption, and may even refuse to lose weight. We are human. We are complex.

I lost a pound or two last week, with the banana split. But I left a chunk of the banana split there. It was wasted, yes. But it wouldn't have done much for the starving children of India by the time it got there. The starving children of India is a separate social issue, best addressed in a better social context than my left-over remnants of a banana split. We do need to learn not to clean our plates. Smaller portions are a big part of the answer. But that's not an easy answer. Some people on the Queen Mary 2 left our dining room, which served relatively small portions, to head for the Carvery, which served much larger portions. Americans have learned, both to clean their plates in respect to the starving children of the world and to demand large portions. We need to rethink our approach to charity, and our habits created during the age of large extended families. When families were large, much had to be offered at the table, for there were many to feed. Today, with far fewer members in most families, smaller amounts are more appropriate for cooking. And in this age of fast foods, snacks are available all day long. Portions may have needed to be larger when, if you didn't have enough at one meal, there was little available to snack on till the next. But today even healthful snacks are available (depending on where you find yourself, of course. Social context still counts.)

Before the banana split, I ate only half of my Reuben sandwich. I took the other half home for lunch the next day. Arnold ate only half his chicken soup dish, and took half home for lunch the next day. We preferred dessert to a whole sandwich or soup dish. Someimes you may want the whole sandwich and the banana split. All depends on the context. But eating reasonably simply means thinking about the context and following your own rules, flexibly, as you need to. Don't let rigid bureaucratic-like rules become ways of punishing yourself for pounds gained. The whole country is dealing with this issue, not just you and me.

The important thing is to feel good about yourself and what you eat, and to not get caught in the cracks of a bureaucratic diet regime that doesn't know who you are and what's happening to you. This is sometimes respected in diet support groups, which, because they come together, come to know one another as human beings, so that reactions and results can be adapted to real people in a real world with real issues. As in most pursuits, good nutrition is easiest to maintain when you are not locked in an anomic, isolated position that leaves you alone as you cope with daily contexts. Eating is simply one part of human interaction and is interdependent with that interaction.

Sociological Sources:

• Weber on the dangers of bureaucracy and the need for leaders within other systems - mainly political as he describes them, but also religious. Weber was describing the extent to which the bureaucracy fails to respond to the social context in which the rule is being applied. For the bureaucracy, a rule is a rule is a rule. Consider the death penalty. You did it. You die.

  Weber maintained that political leaders, civic leaders should be able to soften that inhumanity of bureacracy through their moral leadership. Consider ethnic imbalance in application of the death penalty. You did it. But your doing it may have been the result of an infrastructure that is failing. In that case, whether you die or not, the incident alerts us to a real need to fix the failing infrastructure.

  Because such political considerations are ethical considerations also, they overlap naturally into the interests of religion. Religion can take a more purely moral stance on the death penalty issue, for example. Thou shalt not kill, and that includes the State.

• Durkheim on anomie and isolation as harmful in any endeavor. We eat a lot alone. Sometimes that enhances depression, so that we're likely to eat even more in consoling ourselves for being so alone. We eat a lot in a hurry. That limits our choices. We tend not to talk about what we eat. That limits our sharing of very real concerns. Durkheim insisted that we need social interaction. We certainly need support. And it's easiest to get when we try not to be so alone. So what do I think of the new diet programs where you can order them right from your computer or phone, have them delivered, and never have to go to any support group? Let's talk about anomie and isolation. Then we'll talk about food.

• Classic Sociology - The American Soldier - Merton - relative deprivation. We feel deprived in comparison to others, so it matters to whom we are comparing ourselves. If we compare ourselves to a group of children who eat candy freely, we may feel deprived that we can't have that candy. But if we compare ourselves to other adults conscious of their health and weight concerns, we may not feel deprived.

  Bodies are different. Bodies are beautiful. If we acknowledged that beauty is more complex that big boobs, small waist, huge horsepower, and athletic wins would we experience the same relative deprivation? Relative deprivation may sell, but I suspect it also kills, through dismay that might never be discovered if it were not falsely created through commodity advertising. Free speech. Right to advertise. Right to kill? Relative deprivation.

• Fellman brings up the concern of the extent to which our society has become competitive to the exclusion of cooperation. This is another direction this discussion could take. Am I so competitive that at 68 I must look like 24-year-olds? Or do I live in a social context that leads me to believe through commodity advertising that I should? Would my wrinkles make me feel relatively deprived if I lived in a world that respected wrinkles?

  By commodity advertising I refer to what Marx called false consciousness, an appeal that seems to include you with those who have access and power, when, in fact, you are not included except superficially. Maybe "steel magnolias" is a good example. Women are shown to have deep and admirable character and individual strength in coping with life's issues. But that power is shown to operate principally in the domestic sphere.

  Big, powerful cars are shown to attract the "desirable woman." Yet in reality such attractions are complex, and the "desirable woman" you get with the car may prove to be no more desirable than the male without the car. Oops. Visual icons tend to sell, but the real interdependent relationship is complex. If a jerk buys a great car, he's still a jerk. He's just a jerk with a great car. And jerk trying to sell himself as "great man" is competitive - he's trying to portray himself as more than he is because he has the car. That's the kind of competitiveness that harms us - his competitiveness with other guys; the women's competitiveness to get the guy with the great car, on the assumption that he's a great man. False consciousness. He's still a jerk.