It’s not particularly news to say that much contemporary music, popular or otherwise, is constructed through assemblage, put together from pre-existing pieces in what Lévi-Strauss called bricolage (and which he associated especially with mythic rather than scientific thinking) – creating something new out of assorted odds and ends of things already there. This is especially clear with hip hop and its heavy use of sampling previously existing music and sounds, though the use of sampling and re-mixing is not confined to that genre.
To say this is to neither praise nor criticize – it is simply to make a comment on a key quality of much if not most contemporary music. Such musical bricolage can be highly creative (to pick just one example I’m fond of, System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian’s “Bird of Paradise (Gone)” from Bird Up – the Charlie Parker Remix Project uses Parker’s “Bird of Paradise” and other musical odds and ends as source material for something that’s really less a remix than a truly new piece of music), tedious (with many hip hop and pop songs, the most interesting thing is trying to remember which previous bland pop song it is that’s being so obviously sampled), and/or an attempt by record labels to cash in on back catalogue material with remix projects (the Bird Up album I mention above is overall pretty good – but it’s also a crass attempt by Savoy Jazz to make more money from a catalogue that’s been marketed many times over).
Musical bricolage didn’t start with hip hop. One of the key antecedents of remixing and sampling in hip hop is Dub, which in the 1970s essentially involved reformulating the elements, i.e. early remixing, of reggae songs.
One of the earliest instances of music produced through bricolage in a popular genre was the work of Miles Davis and producer Teo Macero on albums like Bitches Brew and A Tribute to Jack Johnson. What they did on these albums in the late 1960s and very early 1970s was, of course, not completely unprecedented. Structurally, what they did was anticipated by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen – an influence Davis explicitly acknowledged at the time.
What made their work at the time quite different from most everything else done in jazz up until that point was the way in which the final songs appearing on the albums were constructed from multiple takes of different tracks recorded in the studio (as opposed to the standard jazz practice of releasing whole takes, even if multiple takes of a song were recorded, with the best take being the one released).
Even before this, there had been much use of overdubbing in the production of pop and rock recording. Also, in classical music there had been instances of taped material being incorporated alongside conventional instruments in the performance of a musical work. What Stockhausen and Davis and Macero were doing was structurally a bit different.
Conventional overdubbing allows for a finished recording to be constructed from elements recorded in separate instances. However, this isn’t bricolage. The piece of music is pre-planned, a structure is designed and then carried out – i.e. this is an instance of “engineering” (to invoke Lévi-Strauss’ contrast between the engineer/scientific thought and the bricoleur/mythic thought). Overdubbing simply allows a designed structure to be implemented by breaking a task down into constituent parts (a classic “scientific” maneuver) before putting each in its proper place. Earlier classical pieces that incorporated taped material tended to be of the same sort of “engineered” music.
What was different with Davis recordings beginning in the late 1960s was that the tracks that were recorded were not constituent parts of a designed piece. Instead they were freely improvised works in their own right that were recorded with the sole intent of serving as raw material (something that has by no means kept Columbia records from cashing in on all these recordings by releasing them recently in a series of massive box sets – and frankly, much of the material is well worth listening to in its own right, even if it was never intended for release as is), as previously existing odds and ends out of which finished songs were constructed out of bits and pieces from here and there in a true process of bricolage. (If one wanted to qualify, this could be called engineered bricolage, insofar as the oddments for assembly were themselves intentionally designed to serve as such, unlike the found odds and ends of dub producers or more recent remixers.)
There are numerous partial examples of musical bricolage from earlier periods. That’s essentially what musical quotation is, but such wholesale bricolage, where entire works are constructed of previously existing material is fairly new in the history of Western music.
In a variety of his works, Lévi-Strauss drew parallels between the structure of myth and music. One parallel is the co-dependence of the synchronic and diachronic in both myth and music. Myth narratives and musical pieces unfold through time, and without this diachronic element, there is no narrative, whether mythic or musical, but all the while, the experience of the unfolding chain of events is filtered through synchronic structure – there is not simply a random unfolding of events, but things happening in relation to what has happened prior and expectations of what will happen now and in the future, without which there is only noise.
At the same time, Lévi-Strauss strongly associated mythic thought with bricolage. Mythic thinking involves understanding the world through taking the already there and reassembling it. (He was also rightly aware that even at our most “scientific,” we never impose structure on the world without constraint or without precedent.) But here (until recently, at least) a full parallel with music breaks down. For several centuries, western music, especially western art music, worked in an engineering mode. For example, think about the sometimes mechanistically imposed structure of canon or sonata form, or later serialism.
In Myth and Meaning, Lévi-Strauss made an interesting conjecture. He noted that western art music rose to prominence at roughly the same time that mythic thinking was more and more giving way to scientific thinking in scholarship and western discourse generally. He conjectured that some of the organization of experience typical of mythic thinking was transposed onto thinking through music with its new prominence.
Regardless of the value of that conjecture (I’m not sure how to go about proving it one way or another), I think it’s important to note that music and myth are structurally similar in some ways (e.g. the organization of the experience of time), but until recently, the quality of bricolage so typical of myth has not been characteristic of music. What’s new about Stockhausen, Davis’ and Macero’s experiments in the late 1960s and 1970s, dub, and hip hop is the creation of music in a fully mythic mode.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Friday, November 2, 2007
An Appreciation of Dizzy Gillespie
I just ran across an interesting appreciation of Dizzy Gillespie (on what would have been his 90th birthday) by Doug Levine in Contacto magazine. I encountered it serendipitously: I was doing a news search for articles on the Middle East, including Tunisia, and this article popped up because of its mention of the Gillespie song “A Night in Tunisia.”
For what it’s worth, I’d like to add my own appreciation of Gillespie. He’s certainly not a forgotten or unappreciated figure in the history of jazz or western music in general – with his chipmunk cheeks and distinctive 45 degree trumpet bell, his is one of the most recognizable images in jazz history.
Still, I think an argument could be made that his significance has been underappreciated, and that he’s been taken a bit less seriously than some of his contemporaries.
He was an important jazz innovator, particularly for his contributions to the creation of bebop in the 1940s and Afro-Cuban jazz in the 1950s, though here his reputation is often overshadowed by that of bebop co-creator Charlie Parker or later innovators like Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He was important in maintaining the vitality of the jazz big band in the 1950s, though here he’s often overshadowed by Duke Ellington, who continued to be the biggest name in big band, or the collaborations between Davis and Gil Evans. He was an important jazz songwriter, though here often overshadowed again by Ellington, but also Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and others. Where he’s gotten the most due credit is with regard to his individual virtuosity on the trumpet (other names may be mentioned as equals here, but rarely have I encountered arguments to the effect that so-and-so was a more virtuosic talent than Gillespie) and as a popularizer and ambassador for the music.
What’s most amazing about Gillespie is that he was all these things at once and at the height of his career – an important innovator, band leader, songwriter, virtuosic soloist, and popularizer and good will ambassador for jazz.
What his career lacked was a touch of the legendary or a heavy dose of pathos – and it does seem that jazz legends are supposed to be tragic figures. While the quality of their music speaks for itself and is in little need of elaboration, Parker, Davis, or Coltrane are jazz legends in large part because of the narratives associated with them, the personal battles of each with drug addiction, the too early deaths of Parker and Coltrane, the at-times prickly personality of Davis, etc. Gillespie was, as far as I can tell, a universally loved figure, but given a general lack of pathos and the tragic in his public personal narrative, alongside his stage persona as affable (and admittedly at times corny) entertainer, he’s treated less seriously by many jazz fans than Parker, Davis, Coltrane, and others.
For what it’s worth, I’d like to add my own appreciation of Gillespie. He’s certainly not a forgotten or unappreciated figure in the history of jazz or western music in general – with his chipmunk cheeks and distinctive 45 degree trumpet bell, his is one of the most recognizable images in jazz history.
Still, I think an argument could be made that his significance has been underappreciated, and that he’s been taken a bit less seriously than some of his contemporaries.
He was an important jazz innovator, particularly for his contributions to the creation of bebop in the 1940s and Afro-Cuban jazz in the 1950s, though here his reputation is often overshadowed by that of bebop co-creator Charlie Parker or later innovators like Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He was important in maintaining the vitality of the jazz big band in the 1950s, though here he’s often overshadowed by Duke Ellington, who continued to be the biggest name in big band, or the collaborations between Davis and Gil Evans. He was an important jazz songwriter, though here often overshadowed again by Ellington, but also Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and others. Where he’s gotten the most due credit is with regard to his individual virtuosity on the trumpet (other names may be mentioned as equals here, but rarely have I encountered arguments to the effect that so-and-so was a more virtuosic talent than Gillespie) and as a popularizer and ambassador for the music.
What’s most amazing about Gillespie is that he was all these things at once and at the height of his career – an important innovator, band leader, songwriter, virtuosic soloist, and popularizer and good will ambassador for jazz.
What his career lacked was a touch of the legendary or a heavy dose of pathos – and it does seem that jazz legends are supposed to be tragic figures. While the quality of their music speaks for itself and is in little need of elaboration, Parker, Davis, or Coltrane are jazz legends in large part because of the narratives associated with them, the personal battles of each with drug addiction, the too early deaths of Parker and Coltrane, the at-times prickly personality of Davis, etc. Gillespie was, as far as I can tell, a universally loved figure, but given a general lack of pathos and the tragic in his public personal narrative, alongside his stage persona as affable (and admittedly at times corny) entertainer, he’s treated less seriously by many jazz fans than Parker, Davis, Coltrane, and others.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Washoe
The chimpanzee Washoe has died. Probably one of the most famous non-human individuals, Washoe, along with several other individual apes, played an important role in ape language and communication research.
Washoe learned around 250 American Sign Language word signs. Though there is debate about the extent to which Washoe could be regarded as using language, the research involving her helped clarify commonalities and difference in human and chimpanzee communication, as well as the qualities of chimpanzee cognition.
An article about Washoe can be found here.
Washoe learned around 250 American Sign Language word signs. Though there is debate about the extent to which Washoe could be regarded as using language, the research involving her helped clarify commonalities and difference in human and chimpanzee communication, as well as the qualities of chimpanzee cognition.
An article about Washoe can be found here.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Beringia and Human Migration to the Americas
Anyone interested in the ongoing debates about human migration into the Americas may want to take a look at a recent news article at Science Daily, New Ideas About Human Migration From Asia To Americas. The article reports on a recent study by Ripan Malhi and colleagues at the University of Illinois published in the Public Library of Science.
The following is from the Science Daily article:
“What puzzled them originally was the disconnect between recent archaeological datings. New evidence places Homo sapiens at the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site in Siberia – as likely a departure point for the migrants as any in the region – as early as 30,000 years before the present, but the earliest archaeological site at the southern end of South America is dated to only 15,000 years ago.
“These archaeological dates suggested two likely scenarios,” the authors wrote: Either the ancestors of Native Americans peopled Beringia before the Last Glacial Maximum, but remained locally isolated – likely because of ecological barriers – until entering the Americas 15,000 years before the present (the Beringian incubation model, BIM); or the ancestors of Native Americans did not reach Beringia until just before 15,000 years before the present, and then moved continuously on into the Americas, being recently derived from a larger parent Asian population (direct colonization model, DCM).
“Thus, for this study the team set out to test the two hypotheses: one, that Native Americans’ ancestors moved directly from Northeast Asia to the Americas; the other, that Native American ancestors were isolated from other Northeast Asian populations for a significant period of time before moving rapidly into the Americas all the way down to Tierra del Fuego.
“Our data supports the second hypothesis: The ancestors of Native Americans peopled Beringia before the Last Glacial Maximum, but remained locally isolated until entering the Americas at 15,000 years before the present.”
“The team’s findings appear in a recent issue of the Public Library of Science in an article titled, “Beringian Standstill and Spread of Native American Founders.”
The following is from the Science Daily article:
“What puzzled them originally was the disconnect between recent archaeological datings. New evidence places Homo sapiens at the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site in Siberia – as likely a departure point for the migrants as any in the region – as early as 30,000 years before the present, but the earliest archaeological site at the southern end of South America is dated to only 15,000 years ago.
“These archaeological dates suggested two likely scenarios,” the authors wrote: Either the ancestors of Native Americans peopled Beringia before the Last Glacial Maximum, but remained locally isolated – likely because of ecological barriers – until entering the Americas 15,000 years before the present (the Beringian incubation model, BIM); or the ancestors of Native Americans did not reach Beringia until just before 15,000 years before the present, and then moved continuously on into the Americas, being recently derived from a larger parent Asian population (direct colonization model, DCM).
“Thus, for this study the team set out to test the two hypotheses: one, that Native Americans’ ancestors moved directly from Northeast Asia to the Americas; the other, that Native American ancestors were isolated from other Northeast Asian populations for a significant period of time before moving rapidly into the Americas all the way down to Tierra del Fuego.
“Our data supports the second hypothesis: The ancestors of Native Americans peopled Beringia before the Last Glacial Maximum, but remained locally isolated until entering the Americas at 15,000 years before the present.”
“The team’s findings appear in a recent issue of the Public Library of Science in an article titled, “Beringian Standstill and Spread of Native American Founders.”
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Reginald Shepherd on Samuel R. Delany
On his blog, Reginald Shepherd has written an engaging overview of the work of science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, On Samuel R. Delany.
Here’s a quotation from Shepherd’s essay:
“Samuel R. Delany is a prolific science fiction writer, memoirist, self-described pornographer, literary critic, and social commentator. Since the publication in 1962 (when he was twenty) of his first book, The Jewels of Aptor, he has published numerous novels, short stories, essays, interviews, cultural commentary, and memoirs. What's most remarkable about this prodigious output is its consistent quality, wide range, and continual development. Delany has never been one to repeat himself or rest on his laurels. Unlike some writers who, beginning in the genre and subsequently seeking literary respectability, and despite his numerous works in other genres, Delany has always strongly identified himself as a science fiction writer. But his work has always pushed at and expanded the boundaries and conventions of the field, constantly seeking out new forms, ideas, and themes. Indeed, his work has become more challenging and complex over the course of his career.”
I’ve discussed Delany on this blog before (“Uses of Myth” and “Myth, Mythic Literacy, and Contemporary Culture”). Science fiction in general is a genre ethnographers should take seriously, given the parallel ways in which both involve the presentation in textual form of plausible worlds (though with the key difference that ethnography is ideally based on empirical fieldwork). Delany in particular is a science fiction writer worth taking seriously by anthropologists both for the consistently stimulating quality of his work and for the ways in which he takes seriously anthropological ideas and ideas from across the humanities and social sciences and incorporates them into his construction of plausible worlds.
Here is Shepherd again on a Delany novel that may be of particular interest to anthropologists:
“Babel-17 (1966), inspired by the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determnism (that our language controls our thought), centers on the efforts of the poet Rydra Wong to crack what is believed to be a military code used by an alien race with whom Earth is at war. What she finally discovers is that this code is a highly exact and analytical language which has no word for “I,” and thus no concept of individual identity. The novel examines the capacity of culture and language not only to control the way people see and act in the world but to determine who they are as persons. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein so famously wrote. Two different words imply two different worlds.”
Here’s a quotation from Shepherd’s essay:
“Samuel R. Delany is a prolific science fiction writer, memoirist, self-described pornographer, literary critic, and social commentator. Since the publication in 1962 (when he was twenty) of his first book, The Jewels of Aptor, he has published numerous novels, short stories, essays, interviews, cultural commentary, and memoirs. What's most remarkable about this prodigious output is its consistent quality, wide range, and continual development. Delany has never been one to repeat himself or rest on his laurels. Unlike some writers who, beginning in the genre and subsequently seeking literary respectability, and despite his numerous works in other genres, Delany has always strongly identified himself as a science fiction writer. But his work has always pushed at and expanded the boundaries and conventions of the field, constantly seeking out new forms, ideas, and themes. Indeed, his work has become more challenging and complex over the course of his career.”
I’ve discussed Delany on this blog before (“Uses of Myth” and “Myth, Mythic Literacy, and Contemporary Culture”). Science fiction in general is a genre ethnographers should take seriously, given the parallel ways in which both involve the presentation in textual form of plausible worlds (though with the key difference that ethnography is ideally based on empirical fieldwork). Delany in particular is a science fiction writer worth taking seriously by anthropologists both for the consistently stimulating quality of his work and for the ways in which he takes seriously anthropological ideas and ideas from across the humanities and social sciences and incorporates them into his construction of plausible worlds.
Here is Shepherd again on a Delany novel that may be of particular interest to anthropologists:
“Babel-17 (1966), inspired by the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determnism (that our language controls our thought), centers on the efforts of the poet Rydra Wong to crack what is believed to be a military code used by an alien race with whom Earth is at war. What she finally discovers is that this code is a highly exact and analytical language which has no word for “I,” and thus no concept of individual identity. The novel examines the capacity of culture and language not only to control the way people see and act in the world but to determine who they are as persons. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein so famously wrote. Two different words imply two different worlds.”
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Drinking and Cheating
As I noted a few posts ago (“On Why I’ve Not Posted Much Recently”), I recently attended the U.S. Department of Education’s annual meeting on Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse and Violence Prevention in Higher Education. One event I attended at this meeting was a “Town Meeting” (actually a fairly standard panel discussion, with short presentations by several panelists, followed by questions and open discussion) on the topic “Complementary or Contradictory Prevention Strategies: Finding a Balance Between Nonuse and Harm Reduction Messages.”
One speaker I found especially interesting was James Bryant, senior youth program specialist for Mother’s Against Drunk Driving’s UMADD program (basically MADD on university campuses). While most of the other panelists argued for a complementary strategy of emphasizing nonuse of alcohol for underage students, or those not wishing to drink on college campuses, alongside harm reduction messages for students who do choose to drink, Bryant, speaking specifically about underage students, argued forcefully and consistently for nonuse prevention strategies.
Bryant made a number of interesting arguments to this end. He pointed out that 18 – 21 year olds who go on to college have higher drinking rates than those who do not, an interesting correlation whether or not you accept his conclusion from this that there must be something about the atmosphere of college campuses that contributes to this (personally, I think he’s probably right on this), and that harm reduction strategies tend to reaffirm the naturalness of drinking on campuses (I find this claim plausible, but I’m not sure I’d consider it probable, much less proven – see my recent post, “Possible, Plausible, Probable, Proven.”)
His other arguments were basically that since underage drinking was illegal, and since students who don’t drink can’t drink and drive, then there should be consistent use of alcohol nonuse messages.
He then employed an interesting analogy. The rationale of harm reduction messages is that some students will drink anyway, so we should emphasize “responsible drinking” or “drinking in moderation.” He argued that that’s a bit like arguing that since some students will cheat on tests no matter what we do, that we should emphasize “responsible cheating” or “cheating in moderation” – something that, of course, no college campus would do.
While his talk was engaging and provocative, and while I do have the utmost respect for his organization, I ultimately found the analogy to be limited when applied to the university setting. There are two complications to the analogy. First, while underage students who drink might be “cheating,” students who are 21 or over are engaging in legal behavior when they drink – they’re not cheating. (They might do so illegally or illicitly if they drink in prohibited places, but their drinking per se is perfectly legal.) Second, while it’s true that people who don’t drink can’t drink and drive, it’s not the case that people who drink do necessarily drink and drive. That is, “drinking” doesn’t seem to me “cheating” (especially for of-age students) in the same way that “drinking and driving” might be, and harm reduction strategies are better suited to making such distinctions (perhaps in combination with nonuse messages for underage students).
In continuing to think about Bryant’s analogy, in particular the “cheating” side of thing, I actually began to realize that I tend to take a “harm reduction” approach to cheating. Bryant’s right that I wouldn’t ever tell students to cheat responsibly or in moderation, but in practice I tend to structure course assignments in such a way as to mitigate the harmful effects of cheating rather than emphasizing the policing of cheating. For example, I’m aware of how easy it is for students nowadays to copy and paste a document of the web to submit as a paper. When I assign papers, part of the assignment is to produce a number of shorter texts in stages (such as selection of the topic, an abstract, an outline with a detailing of the logical argument and sources of evidence for the paper, a rough draft, and a revised draft). In part, this helps students write better papers, and that’s my main reason for structuring the assignments this way, but it also means that it’s barely worth it for a student to plagiarize a text from the web, because they’ll have to recapitulate the process of having written it in the first place in order to get a decent grade (and they’ll end up learning something despite their best efforts not to).
One speaker I found especially interesting was James Bryant, senior youth program specialist for Mother’s Against Drunk Driving’s UMADD program (basically MADD on university campuses). While most of the other panelists argued for a complementary strategy of emphasizing nonuse of alcohol for underage students, or those not wishing to drink on college campuses, alongside harm reduction messages for students who do choose to drink, Bryant, speaking specifically about underage students, argued forcefully and consistently for nonuse prevention strategies.
Bryant made a number of interesting arguments to this end. He pointed out that 18 – 21 year olds who go on to college have higher drinking rates than those who do not, an interesting correlation whether or not you accept his conclusion from this that there must be something about the atmosphere of college campuses that contributes to this (personally, I think he’s probably right on this), and that harm reduction strategies tend to reaffirm the naturalness of drinking on campuses (I find this claim plausible, but I’m not sure I’d consider it probable, much less proven – see my recent post, “Possible, Plausible, Probable, Proven.”)
His other arguments were basically that since underage drinking was illegal, and since students who don’t drink can’t drink and drive, then there should be consistent use of alcohol nonuse messages.
He then employed an interesting analogy. The rationale of harm reduction messages is that some students will drink anyway, so we should emphasize “responsible drinking” or “drinking in moderation.” He argued that that’s a bit like arguing that since some students will cheat on tests no matter what we do, that we should emphasize “responsible cheating” or “cheating in moderation” – something that, of course, no college campus would do.
While his talk was engaging and provocative, and while I do have the utmost respect for his organization, I ultimately found the analogy to be limited when applied to the university setting. There are two complications to the analogy. First, while underage students who drink might be “cheating,” students who are 21 or over are engaging in legal behavior when they drink – they’re not cheating. (They might do so illegally or illicitly if they drink in prohibited places, but their drinking per se is perfectly legal.) Second, while it’s true that people who don’t drink can’t drink and drive, it’s not the case that people who drink do necessarily drink and drive. That is, “drinking” doesn’t seem to me “cheating” (especially for of-age students) in the same way that “drinking and driving” might be, and harm reduction strategies are better suited to making such distinctions (perhaps in combination with nonuse messages for underage students).
In continuing to think about Bryant’s analogy, in particular the “cheating” side of thing, I actually began to realize that I tend to take a “harm reduction” approach to cheating. Bryant’s right that I wouldn’t ever tell students to cheat responsibly or in moderation, but in practice I tend to structure course assignments in such a way as to mitigate the harmful effects of cheating rather than emphasizing the policing of cheating. For example, I’m aware of how easy it is for students nowadays to copy and paste a document of the web to submit as a paper. When I assign papers, part of the assignment is to produce a number of shorter texts in stages (such as selection of the topic, an abstract, an outline with a detailing of the logical argument and sources of evidence for the paper, a rough draft, and a revised draft). In part, this helps students write better papers, and that’s my main reason for structuring the assignments this way, but it also means that it’s barely worth it for a student to plagiarize a text from the web, because they’ll have to recapitulate the process of having written it in the first place in order to get a decent grade (and they’ll end up learning something despite their best efforts not to).
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Economics, Human Evolution, Genetics, and the Obesity Epidemic
At a recent research symposium on Addictive and Health Behaviors Research, I heard an informative talk by Kelly Brownell, co-founder and director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University.
Brownell’s talk was titled “A New and Important Frontier: Food and Addiction.” A key topic of his talk was whether “food addiction” is a real phenomenon for some individuals or a bad analogy drawn with addiction to a variety of mind-altering substances. He concluded that, at least for some, food addiction probably is a real clinical phenomenon, drawing on several bodies of evidence: foods high in sugar or fat have been shown to cause dopamine production in a way similar to that of many drugs (i.e. the experience of pleasure from such foods is not just in the taste buds); there’s evidence of addictive behavior around such foods in some lab animals; the narratives and descriptions of favorite foods by “food addicts” mirrors that of drug addicts.
In the process of laying out his arguments about food addiction, Brownell gave an overview of the obesity epidemic in the U.S. over the past few decades. Much of what he covered was generally available knowledge, though his comprehensive synthesis of a vast amount of material was impressive.
These were by no means the only factors he addressed (see the Rudd Center’s website that I linked above for a fairly comprehensive overview of obesity research), but I was particularly struck by his comments on economics and human evolution.
Economics and Obesity
Brownell addressed economics and obesity in several ways.
Agricultural Economics and Obesity
As many are aware, industrial agriculture is heavily subsidized in the U.S. and many other developed countries. In the U.S., corn (maize) agricultural interests are particularly well set up with regard to subsidization of the industry. In its current form, such heavy subsidization dates back to the Nixon era, intended as a way to combat food price inflation.
An effect of this was the tremendous growth of corn and other agribusiness, and the development of a number of at the time unanticipated corn products (greater availability of corn oil and development of high fructose corn syrup), all kept artificially cheap by agricultural subsidies. A result of this is that processed foods high in fats and sugars are often quite cheap, especially when compared to prices of healthier foods, in particular the relatively high cost of fresh produce. So, for example, even while some fast food chains commendably offer healthy salad options, the healthy options tend to be quite expensive compared to the price of a meal of corn-fed-beef patties, potatoes fried in corn oil, and high-fructose-corn-syrup-laden beverages in giant portions.
Junk Food as a Caloric Bargain
High fat and/or high sugar foods tend to nowadays be available cheaply, at least in the U.S. and other developed countries – and increasingly this seems to be true elsewhere as well. Brownell made another interesting point here, though. If we look at food economics not just in terms of monetary cost but calories, junk food is a tremendous bargain. By weight, junk food is typically already cheaper than healthier food, but calorie for calorie, junk food is tremendously cheaper.
Poverty and Obesity
On top of the basic economics of food in the U.S. today, in impoverished communities, high fat and/or high sugar foods tend to be easily available relatively cheaply (even if not as cheaply as the same foods in other areas because of the lower incidence of full service grocery stores), while things like fresh produce are often hardly available at all and at higher prices, contributing to the problem of obesity in poor communities.
Human Evolution and Obesity
I was happy to see Brownell address a topic often left out of debates about obesity: human evolution. There’s strong evidence that humans generally take great pleasure in fatty or sweet foods (those dopamines mentioned above). This is something we share in common with other mammals, and is almost certainly something selected for in our evolutionary history.
This makes perfect sense – foods high in fats and sugars are caloric bargains, but are not particularly common in many natural environments. Animals who take pleasure in eating these foods would tend to seek them out more often and would tend to have an evolutionary advantage over those who didn’t.
But take this evolutionary heritage and add it to an economic environment unlike any our hominid or earlier primate ancestors ever adapted to, with an over-abundance of sugars and fats, and you get the obesity epidemic.
Genetics and Obesity
Both during his talk and during the question session, Brownell spoke of genetics as a factor in order to dismiss it as significant. I had been similarly dismissive of genetics as a significant factor in producing patterns of obesity before hearing this talk, and generally agree with his perspective here, particularly at the level of populations and gene pools: gene pools haven’t changed in the past 20-30 years in any significant way; the food environment has changed in multiple significant and obvious ways; therefore, genetics is not a serious consideration.
Interestingly, as I listened to Brownell present a position similar to that I have tended to take, I began to see the possibility for a change in genetic predispositions as a factor in obesity at the individual level. With increases in rates of obesity, we’re talking about a change to phenotype. Phenotype is always the product of genotype in interaction with environment. In this case, genotypes haven’t changed; it’s a variety of environmental factors that have changed; but that doesn’t mean that changing phenotype is solely the product of the changing environment necessarily, for phenotype is, again, always the product of that relationship between genotype and environment. A genotype that didn’t contribute to increased predisposition to obesity in one context might in another.
Still, I agree with a point that Brownell made during the Q and A session. Regardless of any potential genetic predisposition to obesity that some individuals may have, from a prevention or intervention stand point, it’s essentially irrelevant. At the population level, environmental factors are clearly the directly relevant ones and genetic predispositions aren’t something that can be particularly addressed at that level anyway. But even for individuals, for a person attempting to lose weight, the trick is to expend more calories than are taken in, irrespective of genotype.
Brownell’s talk was titled “A New and Important Frontier: Food and Addiction.” A key topic of his talk was whether “food addiction” is a real phenomenon for some individuals or a bad analogy drawn with addiction to a variety of mind-altering substances. He concluded that, at least for some, food addiction probably is a real clinical phenomenon, drawing on several bodies of evidence: foods high in sugar or fat have been shown to cause dopamine production in a way similar to that of many drugs (i.e. the experience of pleasure from such foods is not just in the taste buds); there’s evidence of addictive behavior around such foods in some lab animals; the narratives and descriptions of favorite foods by “food addicts” mirrors that of drug addicts.
In the process of laying out his arguments about food addiction, Brownell gave an overview of the obesity epidemic in the U.S. over the past few decades. Much of what he covered was generally available knowledge, though his comprehensive synthesis of a vast amount of material was impressive.
These were by no means the only factors he addressed (see the Rudd Center’s website that I linked above for a fairly comprehensive overview of obesity research), but I was particularly struck by his comments on economics and human evolution.
Economics and Obesity
Brownell addressed economics and obesity in several ways.
Agricultural Economics and Obesity
As many are aware, industrial agriculture is heavily subsidized in the U.S. and many other developed countries. In the U.S., corn (maize) agricultural interests are particularly well set up with regard to subsidization of the industry. In its current form, such heavy subsidization dates back to the Nixon era, intended as a way to combat food price inflation.
An effect of this was the tremendous growth of corn and other agribusiness, and the development of a number of at the time unanticipated corn products (greater availability of corn oil and development of high fructose corn syrup), all kept artificially cheap by agricultural subsidies. A result of this is that processed foods high in fats and sugars are often quite cheap, especially when compared to prices of healthier foods, in particular the relatively high cost of fresh produce. So, for example, even while some fast food chains commendably offer healthy salad options, the healthy options tend to be quite expensive compared to the price of a meal of corn-fed-beef patties, potatoes fried in corn oil, and high-fructose-corn-syrup-laden beverages in giant portions.
Junk Food as a Caloric Bargain
High fat and/or high sugar foods tend to nowadays be available cheaply, at least in the U.S. and other developed countries – and increasingly this seems to be true elsewhere as well. Brownell made another interesting point here, though. If we look at food economics not just in terms of monetary cost but calories, junk food is a tremendous bargain. By weight, junk food is typically already cheaper than healthier food, but calorie for calorie, junk food is tremendously cheaper.
Poverty and Obesity
On top of the basic economics of food in the U.S. today, in impoverished communities, high fat and/or high sugar foods tend to be easily available relatively cheaply (even if not as cheaply as the same foods in other areas because of the lower incidence of full service grocery stores), while things like fresh produce are often hardly available at all and at higher prices, contributing to the problem of obesity in poor communities.
Human Evolution and Obesity
I was happy to see Brownell address a topic often left out of debates about obesity: human evolution. There’s strong evidence that humans generally take great pleasure in fatty or sweet foods (those dopamines mentioned above). This is something we share in common with other mammals, and is almost certainly something selected for in our evolutionary history.
This makes perfect sense – foods high in fats and sugars are caloric bargains, but are not particularly common in many natural environments. Animals who take pleasure in eating these foods would tend to seek them out more often and would tend to have an evolutionary advantage over those who didn’t.
But take this evolutionary heritage and add it to an economic environment unlike any our hominid or earlier primate ancestors ever adapted to, with an over-abundance of sugars and fats, and you get the obesity epidemic.
Genetics and Obesity
Both during his talk and during the question session, Brownell spoke of genetics as a factor in order to dismiss it as significant. I had been similarly dismissive of genetics as a significant factor in producing patterns of obesity before hearing this talk, and generally agree with his perspective here, particularly at the level of populations and gene pools: gene pools haven’t changed in the past 20-30 years in any significant way; the food environment has changed in multiple significant and obvious ways; therefore, genetics is not a serious consideration.
Interestingly, as I listened to Brownell present a position similar to that I have tended to take, I began to see the possibility for a change in genetic predispositions as a factor in obesity at the individual level. With increases in rates of obesity, we’re talking about a change to phenotype. Phenotype is always the product of genotype in interaction with environment. In this case, genotypes haven’t changed; it’s a variety of environmental factors that have changed; but that doesn’t mean that changing phenotype is solely the product of the changing environment necessarily, for phenotype is, again, always the product of that relationship between genotype and environment. A genotype that didn’t contribute to increased predisposition to obesity in one context might in another.
Still, I agree with a point that Brownell made during the Q and A session. Regardless of any potential genetic predisposition to obesity that some individuals may have, from a prevention or intervention stand point, it’s essentially irrelevant. At the population level, environmental factors are clearly the directly relevant ones and genetic predispositions aren’t something that can be particularly addressed at that level anyway. But even for individuals, for a person attempting to lose weight, the trick is to expend more calories than are taken in, irrespective of genotype.
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