Chris's Articles

Why the government wants us to eat more.

2009-03-21T05:28:00.000-07:00

The government would like us to eat more food. This may sound like an oxymoron, unless you consider sugar, salt, fat and a host of other dubious additives as actual food. Author Michael Pollan says anything that rots is a real food and safe to eat, whereas any industrial product that requires a multi-million dollar ad campaign coupled with some crafty PR spin tarted up as nutritional information should be treated with suspicion. We know eating an orange is good for us; lolly water sprinkled with some vitamin C and packaged as an essential health tonic is of dubious benefit to our health.

The Government’s Preventative Health Task Force has launched the debate: should we tax junk food? In some quarters this is being seen as nothing less than dietary Leninism, a nosy government keen on taking away every last bit of fun a free citizen has a right to enjoy. But once again, it depends on what you call food. Does anyone seriously call a can of fizzy drink, a bag of crisps or a bar of chocolate real food? The popular vernacular sums it up perfectly as ‘having a sugar fix’, or being ‘addicted to carbs’ or the catch all phrase ‘junk food’. These snacks, treats and goodies, produced by powerful business behemoths with an eye on profit, not public health, should more properly be called drugs.

Take one junk food staple: sugar. Australians consume approximately 440 calories of it per day. It has no nutritional value. Some have even called it an anti-nutrient, as it uses vitamins B and C to turn the sugar into energy. Do the sums. Every 16 days we eat 7000 thousand calories of the stuff, equal to approximately one kilo of body weight. Sugar is being eaten like it is a real food, when it is not.

We expect government to look out for our health in all manner of ways. From road safety rules, to health warnings about cigarettes to campaigns to try and stop us from inadvertently doing harm to ourselves. We also expect governments to run first class hospitals and health facilities to keep us in tip-top shape. Should public health policy now be extended to tougher new rules on what we stick in our mouths? Should a ‘food’ that is not really a food, but more like an addictive substance, carry an extra tax?

The Government’s Preventative Health Task Force has a mix of policy prescriptions. Increased taxation on unhealthy foods, regulation of the amount of fat and sugar in foods, and media campaigns to promote healthy eating. Could we even see shock tactic advertising, as we do for drink driving and cigarette smoking? If you saw the Jamie Oliver special Eat To Save Your Life, where an autopsy was performed on a 160 kilo man who ‘ate himself to death’, you will know what some of the possibilities are.

While there has been much concern about extra taxes, no one has discussed the carrot involved in these recommended measures: providing subsidies to transport fresh food to remote and rural areas. One thinks immediately of indigenous communities that are starved for fresh fruit and vegetables, and that suffer high levels of diabetes and other diet related health problems. Could anyone argue with money being collected in the form of taxes on imposter foods and being re-diverted to fresh food and health programs?

Would these measures work? The report looks to the success of the anti smoking campaigns. During the 1950s, three-quarters of men smoked. Today that figure is one-fifth. Government campaigns have worked.

We’re now eating ourselves to death. Obesity and poor diet have put enormous stresses on our health, including reduced life expectancy, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and some cancers. The annual price tag on our health system has been estimated by ACCESS economics at $2 billion dollars. In New South Wales alone it was recently announced that five ‘mega lift’ ambulances are being bought to deal with heavier patients, at a cost of $280,000 each.

But forget all those statistics. People are unhappy being fat and unhealthy. Look at all the tears shed on The Biggest Loser.

Big food businesses may not like such measures. They may argue that any of their foods taken in moderation will not make you fat. This is true enough. Yet no big food business wants their product to be taken in moderation. Try selling that message to shareholders! Imagine a CEO announcing this year we are hoping for moderate consumption of our goods. Food companies spend such immoderate amounts of money on advertising campaigns for a reason. Growth in waistlines means strong business growth. Strong business growth means happy shareholders. This is the paradox of mixing the market with public health. They do not always go hand in hand.

Why we should support the recommendations of the Federal Government's Preventative Health Taskforce

2008-12-30T20:55:00.000-08:00

Here is a piece I dashed off in response to Chris Berg's article in The Age with regards to the Government's Preventative Health Taskforce recommendations. Mr Berg's piece can be read here. The Age elected not to publish it, but not to worry, you can read it here.

Why we should support the recommendations of the Federal Government's Preventative Health Taskforce.

I'm a fat man trapped in a thin man's body. If offered a piece of cake, I always take the biggest piece. Walking past a Haigh’s chocolate shop gives me heart palpitations. A brief spell in front of a cake shop window can bring on a dizzy spell. Nothing succeeds like excess, wrote Oscar Wilde. I know why people get fat. It’s fun to eat like a king.

I’ve erred on the chunky side before, and have often had to impose a regime that rivals the asceticism of a monk. This is not as bad as it seems. As Socrates said, hunger makes the best sauce. A delicious meal after a decent fast can make the taste buds that more appreciative.
Should government, though, be organising such austerity programs around what we eat? Could it be true, as Chris Berg suggested on this page (The Age, 21/12), that the government is looking at imposing a kind of dietary Leninism on the country?

The discussion paper commissioned by the Minister for Health and Ageing, Nicola Roxon titled Australia: The Healthiest Country by 2020, looks at preventative measures for dealing with tobacco, alcohol and obesity. Amongst the strategies it recommends, one is bound to raise eyebrows. It suggests that junk foods be taxed and fresh fruit and vegetables be subsidised in poorer areas. A media campaign to promote healthy eating could also be part of the deal.

Is it fair to put extra taxes on food, of all things? Depends on what you call food. Most of the energy dense foods we eat are made up of sugar, salt and anonymous additives. Today’s supermarket shelves groan with silly products that can hardly be called foods. There are vitamin enriched lolly waters, low GI ice creams and sweet yogurt drinks that come in toy bottles. Imitation flavours and chemical sweeteners are seen as normal these days. In days of yore, food fraudsters were pilloried. Now it seems to be all the rage.

Perhaps the question should not be whether we should put an extra tax on these foods, but whether they should even be legal in the first place. Governments should step in to protect consumers from such outright con-merchants.

In the West we live on an industrialised rather than a traditional diet. We’re fed by mega-corporations. Ridiculously, thousands of new products are invented every year. Many, if not most, carry the most spurious health claims.

We elect governments and give them the task of looking after our health. Our tax dollars fund hospitals and the professionals that staff them. Individuals should have free choice to do whatever they like. If that means eating yourself to death, then so be it. Governments should also step in when the public is being suckered into buying shonky foods that are no more than sugar and additives. As it stands, Australians consume on average 440 calories of sugar a day, that’s 3080 empty calories a week – almost half a kilo worth of fat!. These are all calories of zero nutritional worth. Our sugar habit should more properly be called a drug habit.

A tax on junk food is not making an individual’s indulgence everyone’s problem, as Chris Berg says. Such a tax will not hinder the gourmand from going about his or her business. There’s more to food than the Big Mac or the Mars bar.

It will just make it more expensive to eat toxic foods of dubious nutritional value. If fresh fruit and vegetables were made cheaper for poorer areas, as the report states, then who could argue with this? You’ll still be able to eat abundantly, like a king. Fake foods will just be more of a luxury item, unlike in the past, when it was the poor who were the first victims of food fraudsters.

Critics may argue, would any of this work? The discussion paper points to the success of the anti-smoking campaigns. During the 1950s, three-quarters of men smoked. Today less than one-fifth of men smoke. Shock tactics and sustained public awareness campaigns have scared us into quitting. Maybe we need to see the gruesome reality of what we’re doing to our bodies, as Jamie Oliver showed recently on his show, Eat To Save Your Life, where an autopsy was performed on a 25-stone man who ‘ate himself to death’.

Today we live in a fraught food environment, with a food industry and its platoon of advertising professionals wanting us to eat as much of their product as possible. Confusion is further added when spurious health claims are added to the many new products put on the market every year. Meanwhile, as we try to kick the habit of an industrialised diet heavy on sugar and salt and try to re-learn skills like cooking and shopping for fresh produce, taxation, pricing and education may nudge us in the right direction.

Tax junk food and give fresh fruit and veg to the poor

2008-11-26T02:34:00.000-08:00

Below is a piece I submitted to the Sydney Morning Herald, tentatively titled Confusion On The Menu. They weren't interested in the piece, and I lost interest in trying to place it elsewhere, so I thought I'd park it here. See what you think, dearest Friend-Reader.

Confusion on the menu, by Chris Saliba

I’ve never yet met a salty snack or sugary treat that I could ever say no to. After a lifetime of savouring the taste of chemical additives and preservatives, my tastebuds like imitation more than real.

As everyone knows, food doesn’t sprout out of filthy, bacteria infested soil anymore. It is conjured by chemists in pristine labs. Food technicians now create a mind-boggling array of food products every year. It’s all like something out of Charlie and the Chocolate factory. Magic vitamin enhanced lolly waters, low GI ice cream, sugared yogurt that comes in little toy bottles, each a new health and taste breakthrough, leaving sad old nature in the dust. Every year we consume about six to seven kilos of additives.

At the end of this factory line are the advertising gurus and industry psychologists who create strategies, media blitzes and advertising jingles to keep us buying all these goodies. For every buck you spend on such a product, 20 to 25 cents is for advertising alone according to analysts JPMorgan.

Can anyone doubt that foods are more like addictive drugs now, with food companies acting as pushers? It’s a no brainer to state that as a society we’re massively addicted to sugar, fat, salt and an array of anonymous additives to give flavour and texture.

Government may soon take a similar attitude. The discussion paper commissioned by the Minister for Health and Ageing, Nicola Roxon, Australia: The Healthiest Country by 2020, looks at preventative measures for dealing with tobacco, alcohol and obesity. It recommends obesity be treated with strategies similar to those used for combating tobacco and alcohol abuse, mainly taxation, regulation and education campaigns.

Critics will no doubt cry that government intervention into what we eat is nothing less than dietary Leninism. Individuals should take responsibility for their weight and not be tempted by the blandishments strategically placed at the supermarket checkout.

I agree. I’m a libertarian in all things. If individuals want to eat, drink and be merry, so they should be able to, without some obnoxious nanny state wagging its finger. If someone loves chocolate for breakfast, lunch and tea, and is happy with their jolly, stout frame, then good luck to them.

And if business can make a killing inventing the Mars bar, or the Big Mac, or whatever, then I’m frankly jealous. I’d like to be mega rich too.

Problem is, with the myriad of health problems we now know are caused by obesity, business is indeed making a killing - and it’s us who are dieing. The libertarian philosophy of unfettered individual freedom is a very fine thing, until it starts to impinge on the state and the community.

With obesity, it’s a tab the community picks up. In dollar terms, we’re looking at $8 billion for 2008. $2 billion of this directly affects the health system that you and I rely on. Business feels the pinch too, with billions lost in productivity according to ACCESS economics. Most importantly of all, there’s the human cost. Reduced life expectancy, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and some cancers.

So what to do? The discussion paper suggests what it concedes many may feel to be extreme or radical measures, primarily increased taxation on unhealthy foods, regulation of the amount of fat and sugar in foods, and media campaigns to promote healthy eating. That’s the stick. The carrot would be subsidies for rural and remote areas for fresh food. One thinks immediately of indigenous communities that are starved for fresh fruit and vegetables.

Would any of this work? We can look towards the success of the anti-smoking campaigns. During the 1950s, three-quarters of men smoked. Today less than one-fifth of men smoke. Shock tactic advertising has scared us into quitting. Maybe we need to see the gruesome reality of what we’re doing to our bodies, as Jamie Oliver showed recently on his show, Eat To Save Your Life, where an autopsy was performed on a 25-stone man who ‘ate himself to death’.

Our sophisticated society, fattened up on industrial foods, has scant knowledge of a traditional diet. What and how to eat is not passed on from generation to generation. Instead we have a mad mix of ever-updated scientific research advising us on what common sense should already tell us: foods closest to nature are best, artificial interlopers should be avoided.

Things are further confused by a food industry that keeps producing new items ad infinitum with health claims that verge on the ridiculous. Total confusion is constantly on the menu. Meanwhile, as we try to kick the habit of an energy dense, industrialised diet and re-learn old values like cooking from scratch and eating moderately, taxation, pricing and education may nudge us in the right direction.

Who Decides Who's An Artist? The Bill Henson controversy

2008-06-10T17:10:00.000-07:00

I was first exposed to Bill Henson's work as a teenager. I was studying photography in the late eighties and he was the artist everyone raved about. At the time, a huge hardcover book of a recent exhibition had just been published. It was hellishly expensive and only the most committed (or rich) students were buying it.

As I remember it, this huge coffee table book came in a box, with pages that folded out extravagantly. A friend at the time had a copy and I recall laying on the floor and having the pages turned for me while I gawked in awe. I dared not touch. It seemed no insurance policy would have covered any potential damage I may have incurred.

As a pauper, I had to settle for a cheapie retrospective book of his work. I think I may have shelled out about $25 bucks.

What struck me when I first saw those images was their dark, nihilistic view of sexuality. Young teens were photographed as though they'd just emerged from some post apocalyptic world. These were not the perky, chirpy pictures we usually see of healthy young bodies in our television commercials and on the beach in Neighbours and Far and Away.

Bill Henson's models looked sick, both in body and mind. They were images of human disease and sexual malaise. A kind of despair informed his work.

At that age, as a teenager myself, I thought I 'got' what Henson was trying to do: show that sexuality is not some uninhibited nirvana of the senses, but a dark realm of trauma and psychological fissure. Sex in Henson didn't lead to happiness. Desire led to a dead end. In fact, he seemed to suggest sex was no very good thing.

This sort of pessimism appealed to my youth. His work reminded me of Egon Schiele, the Austrian expressionist that I was also studying at the time. As the years pressed on I became less interested in images and more interested in words.

Hence it came as a bit of a shock to see the recent controversy surrounding Bill Henson. The first thing that came to mind was, why now, after thirty years of images like this?

Henson has been lauded to the skies for three decades. His work is ensconced in the country's artistic culture. Prestigious overseas galleries have collected his images and feted the man as a visionary artist. Even Aussie politicians are part of the scene: Liberal party leader-in-waiting, the mercurial Malcolm Turnball, has two Hensons in his collection.

Everyone has now been forced to debate the ethics of photographing teenagers, those under the legal age of adulthood, for public display.

Twenty years after seeing my first Bill Henson pictures I'm no big fan today. I don't think he really pulls off his ambition to create transformative images of the dark twilight between childhood and adulthood. His pictures look bland and obvious to me. The portrait that was used on the invitation that got him into so much hot water lacks any kind of psychic turmoil or drama, what Germaine Greer called Henson's 'melodramatic chiaroscuro'. No wonder he blows them up to such huge sizes, to boost their impact.

To me Henson's work does not qualify as pornography or sexually explicit material. It is not made in order to arouse. An artist's subject matter may be sexuality, but that doesn't mean it's sexually arousing. The only arousal Henson's art claims to prompt is aesthetic and intellectual.

Or as Oscar Wilde said in his introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray: 'The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.'

Catharine Lumby raised this point on Meet The Press. Must all naked images of children now be seen in a sexual context? Is this the end of the nude? Should our laws be changed to read: nudity equals pornography?

For me the most interesting commentary on the affair has been from Hugh Macken, the president of the Law Society of New South Wales, interviewed on Radio National's Artworks program by Amanda Smith.

In explaining the sections of the NSW law that related to the Henson affair, 91G and 91H of the NSW crimes act, Hugh Macken elaborated upon the law with regards to charging someone with child pornography.

Section 91G of the act states that it is illegal to use a child for pornographic purposes, this is defined as where the child is engaged in sexual activity, or where the child is placed in a sexual context. Macken comments that it can be a vexed and grey area trying to prove this, and that simply photographing a child unclad does not of itself fulfill this definition.

Furthermore, according to Macken:

'If simple nudity is placing a child in a sexual context, there are also specific defences available to the artist under 91h of the crimes act, which says that where material has been produced, and the defendant, that is the artist, was acting for a genuine child protection, scientific, medical, legal, artistic, or other public benefit purpose, the defendant’s conduct is reasonable to the purpose. That is, if you can establish that the material has been produced for an artistic purpose, then that is a defence to the charge of production of child pornography. That’s a defence open to Henson, it is interesting that it is probably not a defence open to anyone that then forwards on the material.’

The show's host Amanda Smith then asked, what about people creating child pornography then trying to hide behind the defence that they're making art. Macken sees this pretty much as a nonsense. If works have been hung in galleries and given prizes and recognised by the community as art, then it's not going to be difficult to prove something has an artistic purpose.

Hugh Macken again:

‘Clearly, child protection takes precedence over artistic aspiration. And the law is very simple. Depict children in a sexual context and you break the law.’

What about consent? The law says anyone under 16 must have their parent's consent to appear nude, unless it's in a sexual context. Then it would be illegal.

In summing up, Hugh Macken says, '‘if the world has moved to the point where simple nudity can only ever mean that there is a sexual context to it, well, then that’s where the world is. But I would like to think that we’re not there.’

Should we move there though?

Hetty Johnston of Bravehearts, who iniated the investigation, seems to think so. She was interviewed on ABC Radio News by Steve Chase on Friday 6th June. The DDP looked set to drop the whole case. Johnston was livid.

‘This is a huge victory for the pedophile movement across this country and across the world. It’s an absolute disgrace,' she fulminated.

Under UK law Johnston claimed that Henson would have been prosecuted as a pornographer.
'We’ll do whatever it takes to change the law if the law needs changing,' she continued. 'But there had better be a prosecution, or otherwise this is a huge victory for the pedophile movement and you’d be living under a rock if you didn’t think pedophiles are looking at these images with much titillation and much joy.'

Johnston finished by asking the question, ‘Who decides who’s an artist? We have to have definitive laws. We can’t have any sector of society operate outside of the law.’

Bill Henson has been found to have operated within the law. People may not be happy about it, but he's obeyed the law.

Why has nudity become so sexualised? Why the responses so polarised? Many commentators are speaking of a heightened awareness of child abuse and the easy accessibility of images via the net. We all have to be extra vigilant these days, as you never know where the sex offenders are. The media presents story after story of school teachers, bank managers, people we interact with every day and trust, turning out to be child abusers.

Maybe there has been a long absence of communication between the arts world and the common day world that your average Mr and Mrs Chadstone inhabit. Look at the now frosty relationship between the arts community and the Rudd government, the champion of so-called 'working families'. Cate Blanchett was only a short time ago the darling of the Rudd 2020 summit. Now she's a signatory to a letter pleading that Rudd reconsider his 'revolting' comment.

Rudd's forthright claim that Henson's work is 'revolting' is more fear than revulsion – fear of not being in step with the electorate. I sense that he 'gets' Henson's images too, but has to appear to be in line with community sentiment. In essence, he's made sure he's at the front of the mob calling for the hapless artist accused of filth and profanity to be burnt at the stake.

Henson has probably been too cosseted and protected from rigorous criticism. By that I don't mean the debate, or more properly, parlour talk of the arts world. That's a hermetically sealed world that talks of the need to 'shock' us plebs out of our self-congratulatory complacency.

Ironically, now that people have been well and truly shocked, the art world is shocked itself.
If the aim of the art world is to 'shock' and 'confront us' with 'edgy' work, then the tax payers who fund it (Henson is collected by umpteen public galleries) have a right to know why they need to be shocked and confronted.

What is the art world trying to say to the Australian public? What is Bill Henson trying to say? All the arts world gives us is platitudes about artistic expression. We need more substance.

And if our laws are to be framed to explicitly equate nudity with sex, if Hetty Johnston gets what she wants, then the full implications of such new laws need to be thought out and explained.

Writing this piece I've swung all over the place on this argument, and can't seem to settle down anywhere in particular. If the laws become more rigorous with regards to depiction of nudity, more and more genuinely innocent people will be caught in its net. Could the humble family snap of kiddies in the bath - I have a rather fetching one of myself somewhere around the house - become pornography by the promulgation of new laws?

Will Morris Iemma and Kevin Rudd start pushing for new laws to stop people like Henson, or will this particular fire quickly subside, another periodical 'moral panic'? Time will tell.

The National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) is holding a public forum on June 12 at the Foundation Hall, Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Panel speakers will include Hetty Johnston, Clive Hamilton and Julian Burnside QC. Margaret Pomeranz will introduce the forum and David Marr will chair.