An Interview with Susanne Freidberg, author of Fresh: A Perishable History

Whether a devout vegan or hardcore carnivore, almost all of us want to know how fresh our food is (or was).  But what does it mean for food to be fresh?  How does food stay- or in some cases, become- fresh?  And what, exactly, does freshness do for us?

Susanne Freidberg’s Fresh: A Perishable History takes on those questions.  The reader will discover quickly that there are few definitive answers.  So how did freshness become so important?  

Ms. Friedberg kindly agreed to speak with me about some of the early history of modern fresh food, the local food movement and how much our quest for freshness has altered our food system and even our food.

Would it be fair to say that your book documents part of the story of the creation of our modern food system?

In a word, yes. But many books have told that story. My point in Fresh was to show that freshness—a food quality that we tend to consider natural and naturally appealing—is in fact a product of this modern food system. I also wanted to show how freshness came to be valued as an antidote to the ills and downsides of modern industrial life. I don’t just mean antidote in the nutritional sense, though I think it’s significant that in the 1920s fresh fruits, vegetables and dairy products were called “protective” foods. Freshness also became associated with other qualities that early 20th century consumers felt nostalgia for, such as purity and vitality.

What were some of the concerns about the healthiness of refrigerated and frozen food?  Once refrigeration and freezing became acceptable technologies, what were some of the supposed health benefits of shipped foods?

In the early days of refrigeration—meaning the 1870s and ‘80s—consumers often had good reason to distrust the foods it touched. For starters, the technology itself was not very reliable, due to erratic temperature control and poor insulation in cold storage warehouses. But the bigger problem was how merchants used the technology to store goods that were already bad, such as rotten eggs, or fish unsold at the end of a market day. It was easy enough to blame cold storage itself for the poor quality of whatever came out of it. The problem with this kind of scapegoating was that consumers came to believe that refrigeration really was the source of harm. They thought that even if the food looked, smelled and possibly even tasted fine, it might actually be somehow spoiled. This notion faded after the first decade of the 20th century, but even then consumers were suspicious of merchants that used refrigeration to manipulate the availability (and price) of seasonal foods.

Eventually shipped fresh foods came to be valued for the variety and vitamins they added to the middle class daily diet. The popularization of vitamin science in the 1920s provided support for the idea that consumers needed fresh fruits, vegetables and dairy products everyday and ideally all year round. So did consumers’ growing preoccupation with calorie-counting and staying slender.

You write the story of a number of different foods: beef, milk, eggs, fish, lettuce and fruits- even, in a way, the story of ice.  I'm guessing a lot of people reading this will be as surprised as I was to learn that eggs used to be a seasonal food.  Which food yielded the most surprises for you?

The history of eggs contained the most surprises, because I also didn’t know they used to be seasonal. Nor, it turns out, did most people I told about this, including those of older generations. But if you think about it, other birds lay eggs seasonally, so why wouldn’t chickens?  It certainly makes evolutionary sense, in that chicks hatched in spring would be more likely to survive than those hatched in fall or winter. Similarly, many of the ways that people used to procure fresh foods—walking beef cattle hundreds of miles to market, keeping dairy cows in the middle of cities, transporting live fish by barge (still practiced, by the way, in East Asia)—might now seem surprising to us, or at least extreme. But they were in fact practical adaptations to the highly perishable nature of highly desirable foods. Given the constraints, in other words, they made sense. Refrigeration and rapid transportation have changed what we consider commonsensical about freshness.

There are things that make locally grown food attractive (particularly supporting local businesses in a weakened economy), but is that a realistic option for everyone?  Can everyone afford that? If they could, is that going to provide sufficient food for everyone?

As a geographer, one of my first questions is always: what scale? If local means 50 or 100 miles from market, then no, an entirely local food supply is not a realistic option for New England, among other places. Alongside the climatic limitations (even many ardent locavores would prefer not to give up coffee and olive oil!) are spatial ones, especially if the average American diet continues to include a lot of livestock products. That said, increasing the proportion of fresh foods sourced locally would be viable, given adequate infrastructure and support for farmers. Such support might include government loans or subsidies to make farmland more affordable in densely populated regions, because this is currently a big obstacle (and one of the reasons local food sometimes costs more).

So some re-localizing and re-regionalizing of food supply is certainly possible and— if fuel prices continue to rise—likely. But I don’t think it should be a top priority for food system transformation (and I say that as a longtime farmers’ market shopper). For one, there’s now abundant evidence that local food does not always have a smaller environmental impact. For another, while it’s appealing to support local businesses—especially businesses run by people we come to know and care about—it’s not entirely clear why their proximity makes them automatically more deserving of our support than businesses elsewhere. The idea that nearby farmers treat their land and workers better than do farmers elsewhere—well, it may often be true, but it also reflects what we like to think about an imagined local community, and what we fear about the distant and unknown. We often hear these days how important it is to know where your food comes from. Well, I’d prefer to know that I could trust my food regardless of where it comes from. Or, to put it in less pie-in-the-sky terms: Getting to know food producers can be educational and socially satisfying. But the health and wellbeing of people, animals and the environment—wherever they are—should be protected by laws; they should not depend on our figuring out who seems like the most trustworthy farmer at the market.

Along the same lines, measures to promote local food will not by themselves do anything about the sharp geographic inequalities even within our own country, not to mention across the world.  Would a more just food system be one in which the immense disposable food income of New York City only flowed into the Hudson River Valley? That’s an extreme example, but the point is, I think it’s dangerous to assume without questioning that “local” means greener, fairer, healthier, or better, period.

What would you like to see readers do with what they learn from your work?

Question their assumptions about what they think is fresh, and why that matters.

For more on food, globalization and nostalgia, please see my interviews with Charles Mann and Pankaj Ghemawat.

An Interview with Charles Mann, author of 1491 and 1493.

Charles Mann, science journalist and author of the paradigm-shifting 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, graciously agreed to speak to me about globalization, immigration, race, disease and food.  As with all good works of history, his books provide as much insight into our present as they do into our past.

Charles C Mann

We used to believe that when the Europeans got to the Americas they found an Eden with abundant flora and fauna and not too many people.  The best part was that the people and the rest of nature lived in this magically harmonious state.  What you show in 1491 is that there were many more people and the plant and animal species weren’t as numerous because those people did a good job of controlling them. 

They were outstanding land managers by and large.  This was a technology that the original Americans were quite good at, and better in some ways than Europeans.  That’s an entirely different thing than saying that they lived in a timeless harmony with nature, like perfect Sierra Club tourists.  Nobody really knows how many people were here, but [for many years] the most widely accepted estimate for the population in North America, north of the Rio Grande, in 1492 was about 900,000.  I think it’s fair to say that almost nobody believes this anymore.  Typical estimates [now] are 10 to 15 million, and that’s a whole lot different than 900,000.  Although that makes North America less populous than Mesoamerica, that still leaves plenty of room for human imprint on the landscape. 

Do smaller numbers alleviate guilt about what happened?

The logic seems to be: if there are only 900,000 people, much of the landscape is empty, so it’s okay if we move in.  That’s a little bit like saying that it’s more okay to take over part of someone’s land out west if they have ten acres than it is someone in Massachusetts if they only have an acre.  Under our laws, it’s equally bad no matter what you do.  [Native] property right systems were different from ours, but they certainly had a clear idea that this was their land in ways that are similar to ways we think about our land.  The fact that they were thin on the ground wouldn’t be a defense. 

But the destruction of those civilizations wasn’t as much through war but more through diseases.

[Diseases were] a weapon we didn’t understand or control.  Neither side did.  Both of them understood the disease as manifesting somehow the will of the heavens or the spirits.  The English people saw that the natives fell to sickness and said to themselves in essence, “Wow, God must really like us!”  Native people made the exact same calculation but from the reverse and said, “Wow, we must have done something wrong.” 

1491 is about the Americas, but 1493 is about the post-Columbian world.  We think about post-1492 as a European story, but it wasn’t just the Europeans.

Obviously, the Europeans had a directive role.  But if you look at it with a different lens, you see different things.  If you look at it demographically, you’d see that before Columbus Europeans were largely in Europe, Africans were almost all in Africa, Asians were almost all in Asia, Indians were almost all in the Americas.  After Columbus, the human species gets tremendously jumbled up.  You end up with places like Argentina and Australia dominated by Europeans, Brazil dominated by Africans and Chinatowns all over the world.  The driver of all of this is the slave trade, and what you would see if you were a biologist or an ecologist is this huge die off in the Americas followed by this enormous wave of Africans coming from Africa with Europeans playing a peripheral role.  From that perspective what you’re seeing then is a meeting of Africa and the Americas rather than Europe [and the Americas]. 

We’re taught that there are large numbers of Africans in the New World, but we think of them as cattle or sheep.  We don’t think of them as actors.

And they were actors.  That’s something that we really have trouble with for a couple of reasons.  One is that most people in this country are of European descent, so naturally we tend to think that our ancestors were the most important.  The second thing is that a lot of what the Africans did they did out of sight of the Europeans.  The relations they had with the native populations were something that was deliberately done outside of the European purview. 

Not that those groups had an automatic affinity for each other, but as you describe in 1493 they saw that in some cases that they had good reason to work together.

In some cases, and in some cases they didn’t.  In some cases they cooperated at a distance, like the “Red Seminoles” and “Black Seminoles” in Florida where they set up parallel societies.  In some cases they completely mingled with each other, which is mostly the case in Brazil.  In some instances one society would be more dominant, and you find this in the case of the Cherokee.  Lots of Africans became Cherokee, and they essentially preserved Cherokee society.  In the coast of Ecaudor in the Esmeraldas, you had an African society which many native people joined and essentially became Africans.  In some cases they just fought.  In the Yucatan, the Maya, who were never really subjugated by the Spanish, lots of Africans said, “these look like good people,” and they declared that they were Maya, but the original Maya didn’t like that.  There was lots of tension between the “Red Maya” and the “Black Maya”.

As an Asian American I felt vindicated when I read about the amount of Asian activity in the Americas, specifically Chinese and Fujianese.

By Chinese we’re speaking very broadly.  The biggest complement [in the Americas] were the Fujianese who weren’t Han [the dominant ethnic group in China], although there’s tons of Han involved.  The other thing that makes this difficult is that a lot of the readily accessible records are Spanish.  They didn’t know who these people were; they called them all “chinos”.  [Asians] are busy, active partners in this world that we’re all creating willy-nilly together.

And you don’t usually have that many people migrate without some significant interbreeding or intermarriage.

That certainly happened in Latin America.  This is another area where American historians have been timid.  There is a tendency to think, “English people didn’t do this.”  This just isn’t true, and this is the reason we’re finding all sorts of surprises when people get their genes tested. 

Why is it that in Northern North America we are predominantly a European people with a smattering of Americans? 

Right after the Civil War there was a huge wave of immigration from Europe to the United States.  That is when Europeans really became dominant, in the latter part of the 19^th century.  It begins with a lot of Irish that come in the 1840s and 1850s, then continues for a couple of decades.  The Germans come in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, then the Russians.  That’s when the United States takes on a strongly European character.  As the country becomes more “multicultural”, it’s really tending back toward its origins. 

The second part is that the US is split apart by the malaria line [which corresponds to the Mason-Dixon Line].  There’s a dramatically different demographic history in the southern part of the east coast than the northern part.  In places like Brazil, if you were a plantation owner, you had to import all of these foreigners because Europeans wouldn’t go.  In New England, Europeans could go and probably wouldn’t die.  New England is a weird outlier among all of these colonial societies because they were a European majority in a way that most other parts of the Americas were not.  Because a lot of American historians come from New England, people have a natural tendency to look around them and imagine that what they’re seeing is true everywhere else. 

Have you noticed the nostalgia people have for a “pure”, back-to-our roots history?

There’s all kinds of nostalgia, but they hearken back to an imagined past.  I experience it when I grow vegetables in my garden, and some part of that is some imagined simplicity in the past. 

Like the myth that we had food security until modernization and globalization interfered? 

The average 17^th century European did about as well as somebody from Zimbabwe today [see A Farewell to Alms for more].  It’s really striking to see that Europe couldn’t feed itself for centuries upon centuries.  Then globalization happens and they get the potato and maize.  It’s hard to be glib about globalization when you think about this. 

For much more on these topics- plus slavery, agriculture and how the Columbian Exchange just might have caused the Little Ice Age- please pick up a copy of 1493 today.  The younger reader in your family will also enjoy Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491, co-authored with Rebecca Stefoff, which covers much of the material in 1491 in a way that younger readers will appreciate.

An interview with Mike Schatzki, author of "The Great Fat Fraud"

Mike Schatzki, author of The Great Fat Fraud, agreed to chat with me about the obesity "epidemic", fitness and public health.  (Please see my review of his book.)  

At a time when we are blaming childhood obesity on bad mothering, perhaps Mr. Schatzki can help inject a little common sense into the conversation.

What is the fraud you refer to you in your book? 

The fraud is that fat and obesity are diseases.  They are not.  However, it is very much in the interests of the $60 billion weight-loss industry to continue to perpetuate this fraud. 
 

Why are you an authority we should listen to about this? 

I am the tour guide to the experts.  Over the last 20 years scientists and researchers have conducted hundreds of experiments involving hundreds of thousands of people in order to develop a clear understanding of how the body responds to weight and fitness in terms of morbidity (illness) and mortality. 

The results of those experiments directly contradict all the prevailing myths surrounding the so-called “obesity epidemic.”  However, these researchers are far more skilled at understanding how the body functions than they are in publicizing their work.  As a result, their findings have been overwhelmed by the massive propaganda efforts of the weight-loss industry. 

The purpose of The Great Fat Fraud was to bring together in one place, in an easily accessible and readable format, all of the research that has been done that exposes the fraud of the “obesity epidemic.” 
 

You make it pretty clear in your book that, with very few exceptions, weight and even BMI is a vanity issue, not a health issue.  However, you still talk about dieting and weight loss.   

There are really two very valid reasons why people might want to lose weight.  The first is that some people are simply not happy with the way that they look when they are heavy.  I am not sure I would use the word “vanity” since that tends to have some negative connotations.  I would prefer to say that people have every right to make “aesthetic choices” about how they look. 

The second reason is that there’s some pretty convincing research showing that people who are heavy experience wage discrimination in the workplace.
 

For both of those reasons I felt that it was important to discuss weight loss and some of the myths and misconceptions that have surrounded it.  The research is fairly conclusive that: 

1.  Exercise and fitness alone will not result in weight loss for the great majority of people.  To lose weight, you still have to diet.

2.  Without a continuing fitness regimen, the overwhelming majority of people will, over time, regain whatever weight they have lost.
 

I've met a number of people who genuinely do have trouble losing weight, even with a fitness-focused plan like the one you suggest.  They will lose some weight, but not very much- easily less than ten pounds over the course of a year.  Are those the kinds of "results" people should expect? 

The research is pretty clear that for most people fitness alone will not result in weight loss.  The reason is that the body’s set point recognizes the calorie deficit created by fitness activities and increases one’s hunger level so that they compensate by eating more.  So even with a fitness program, most people who want to lose weight will have to consciously diet. 

It is also true that some people have enormous difficulty in losing weight.  People who find themselves in this situation should seriously consider the precepts of the Health at Every Size movement.  Health at Every Size emphasizes body acceptance and intuitive eating among other things.  However, even with Health at Every Size, fitness is a critical component of being healthy.
 

It's very hard to dissociate health from appearance.  When we see someone who is "heavy", many automatically assume that they are unhealthy and/or a drain on our public finances.   

It is critical here to make a distinction between individuals who are sedentary and individuals who are fit.  People who are fit do not have a health problem regardless of their weight.  However, high levels of weight when combined with a sedentary lifestyle is a lethal combination. 

A thin person who is sedentary has twice the mortality risk of a person who is BMI 30 but fit.  A person who is BMI 30 and sedentary has three times the mortality risk of a person who is BMI 30 and fit.  And since fitness can be achieved either through exercise or through a 10,000 steps per day walking program, it is a lot easier for most people than losing weight. 

And even if someone still holds firmly to the position that fitness is all well and good but you still have to lose weight to be healthy, they’re still going to have to embrace fitness because without fitness, whatever weight someone loses is surely going to be regained.
 

There's talk about instituting higher insurance premiums and taxes on those with high BMIs.  Not coincidentally, we're also talking about taxes on sodas and candy.  How do we "decriminalize" the un-thin? 

Someone who is heavy and sedentary is most definitely going to have higher health claims costs than someone who is thin and sedentary.  But someone who is heavy and fit is going to have substantially lower health claims costs than someone who is thin and sedentary. 

It would be massively unfair to penalize someone who is fit but heavy when that person is likely to have half the healthcare claims experience of someone who is thin but sedentary.  Corporations who impose or are planning to impose obesity penalties must have a fitness exception.  People who are heavy must be given an opportunity to prove that they are fit with a simple treadmill test, and those who are fit must not be penalized.
 

I live in Boston.  We have banned the sale of sugary drinks and we have a campaign called "Don't Get Smacked By Fat".  In addition to showing teenagers literally getting fat thrown in their faces, it states this: "health costs of obesity in the United States are $147 billion annually".  Is this true? 

The $147 billion annual cost figure comes from a study entitled "Annual Medical Spending Attributable to Obesity: Payer and Service-Specific Estimates."  The major flaw in this study, like in so many similar studies, is that the population data base being analyzed (in this case the Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys) is not separated into fit and sedentary groupings.  If it were, we would undoubtedly see that those who are heavy and fit impose no additional healthcare costs on the system.  We would also see that those who are sedentary impose substantial healthcare costs on the system with those costs escalating as weight increases. 

Lack of fitness, not obesity, is the primary public health issue for the 21^st century. 

For a first person perspective on being overweight or obese, please visit My Body Stories on My Body Gallery.

The Great Fat Fraud by Mike Schatzki

The Great Fat Fraud by Mike Schatzki helps untangle the issues around fitness, weight, diet, surgery and the weight loss industry.  By the end of the book, the reader should walk away with the understanding that fitness does not equal thinness and that achieving weight loss is much simpler than Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig and LA Weight Loss would have you believe.

Within the first six chapters, the author cites the work of three large, long-term studies (some going back to 1953) that show conclusively that the most reliable predictor of mortality isn’t size but fitness and activity level.  (Although many define “fitness” differently, for this purpose it’s a measure of how well the body can use oxygen.)  An active, fit person has a significantly lower risk of mortality than a sedentary person- regardless of body mass index (BMI).  If mortality is the primary concern, activity is the answer.  Numerous studies have shown that walking 10,000 steps per day is the target for the majority of people to achieve optimal fitness levels.

The next chapters discuss losing weight.  For most people, fitness activity will not result in very much weight loss, if any.  In order to achieve lasting weight loss, people have to 1) reduce their food intake (in other words, diet) until they hit a weight plateau and then 2) follow that up with activity- ie, 10,000 steps per day.  This combination will prevent the body from going into starvation mode and hoarding fat, which is what it does when deprived of calories (ie, dieting).  Weight loss is doable- and in fact, most people on diets have done it before they regain some or all of their weight- but the author takes pains to note that for most people weight loss is an aesthetic choice, not a health imperative.  In these chapters he also cites a study that showed that people who focused on body acceptance improved their health (lipid levels, blood pressure, activity, etc.) more than those who focused on dieting and, not coincidentally, felt better about themselves.

Schatzki spends a brief chapter each on stomach reduction surgery (because of the risks, it’s only appropriate for the most unhealthy 1 or 2 percent of the obese), weight loss drugs (which, unlike other drugs, trick a healthy body into malfunctioning) and weight loss programs (most of them can help you take the weight off, but you won’t keep it off... unless you’re active).  However, the most damning section of the book deals with what he calls the “researchaganda” that promotes the idea that obesity is a public health threat when in fact is not.  

By 1998 the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Obesity Task Force of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had been manipulated by the weight loss industry to the point that the BMIs for overweight and obese had been lowered (to 25 to 30 and over 30, respectively).  In 2004, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) published a report that obesity was responsible for 400,000 deaths every year.  

Although the CDC study was debunked shortly after it was published (by everyone from the Wall Street Journal and Science Magazine to the Government Accountability Office), the damage had been done.  The media now had a story: fat isn’t just something people didn’t find attractive, it's a dangerous public health issue, and there is nothing modern media loves like a story that scares people- even if it's not true.  

At the end, Schatzki asks readers to take up the challenge to spread the real story about weight, fitness and obesity and offers links to the information cited in his book.

Both well-researched and accessible, this is a short, easy read that debunks obesity hysteria.  Recommended for anyone with an interest in health issues.

What I've written lately

I thought I was promoting myself to the point of embarassment, but when my own mother was surprised when I casually mentioned something I'd written, I thought it was time to give a consolidated update.

So...

An interview with Pankaj Ghemawat, the author of World 3.0
An interview with Randal Christensen, the author of Ask Me Why I Hurt
A review of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
A review of Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl
Shakespeare and Scarlet Letters- My Heroes
Getting Noticed Online Is Harder If We DON'T Have An Online Presence
The Blackberry vs. The Library- A Writer's Toolkit

(Special thanks to Erin Cawood and Literary Boston for allowing me to pontificate on their sites.)

Some of my selected blog posts:

Ms. Nam-Krane Goes to Washington
Why Is Infrastructure a Bad Idea?
Thank God for the Public Library System

What I'm reading right now: Fresh, by Susanne Freidberg

What I'm doing tomorrow: interviewing the author of two books that have changed the paradigm of how we think about world history.

As always, please send me book recommendations.  I prefer my non-fiction to back up any analysis with data, and I like my fiction to feature believable characters.

Dystopian fiction, dystopian non-fiction

True confession: I'm mildly horrified by the popularity of bad guys.  The Sopranos, House, True Blood, Breaking Bad- all of these feature protagonists that could in some way be described as anti-social, and I don't mean Charles Darnay anti-social.  Mobsters, drug addicts, vampires, drug dealers.  (Some would lump my favorite show, Mad Men, in there too, and I must agree- Don Draper is so empty he's a walking echo.)

The popularity of the bad guy has even invaded my old favorite genre, the soap opera.  Sonny Corinthos and his henchman Jason Morgan are mobsters and killers on General Hospital; I think we're supposed to feel a little better that their primary criminal activity seems to be smuggling and not prostitution or drugs.  Victor Newman on The Young and The Restless is a cutthroat business man who punishes his loved ones if he doesn't have total loyalty.

I get it up to a point; Othello and even King Lear are fascinating to watch- for two hours.  But a decade later and I don't care what makes you tick if I have to keep watching you do horrible things.  I just don't want to watch anymore.  (For all of the horrible things Don Draper has done, murder is not one of them- technically.)

I'm relatively alone in this because, as I said, the shows above are really, really popular.  It's not confined to television: vampires and dystopia are hot, hot, hot in publishing.  You know what's really popular?  Young adult dystopia, with vampires or some other kind of monster.   

I'm horrified, but I'm not superior.  I don't pretend that my tastes are better than anyone else's, and I don't want to get into a fight with anyone about why romance and women's fiction are better.  You can't compare by genre, you have to go by title, if you can compare at all.  But I don't want to argue with anyone's taste, I just want to understand.

With a little reflection, I think I do.

Years ago, I was watching a PBS production about the rise up to the second world war in Germany.  Despite the promises of a better world and some prosperity, many of the artists of the time were painting works filled with destruction.  They heard the underlying messages of their leaders, and they collectively shuddered.  I humbly submit that many modern-day writers are shuddering too.

American infrastructure is literally crumbling, and we have overall unemployment over 9%.  In some communities, unemployment is above 15%.  In Mexico, people are engaging in unimaginable violence to pursue and protect huge profit margins available through the drug trade.  Human trafficking, particularly for sex, has not abated.  Children are literally being bullied to death online.  Four and a half decades after the Civil Rights Act, people in certain communities are still being threatened if they try to vote.  And, classically, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

It doesn't take much imagination to see the wasteland.

I don't read dystopian fiction, I read dystopian non-fiction.  The health problems of homeless teenagers in Arizona.  The continuing struggles of the 9/11 responders.  The constant compromise of our electronic privacy.  The loss of 60 million women around the world due to sex-selective abortion.  Neurosex discrimination.  The unconscionable inequities in our healthcare system.  Worldwide food distribution issues.  And, to put a historical spin on it, the end of civilization as the Americas knew it.  I tell myself that these aren't the same because most of these books present solutions to the problems we're facing, but that's only part of why I'm reading it.  In part, I like the affirmation that someone else recognizes a problem.  I think, in part, that the people who gravitate towards fictional dystopia see the same problems a little more starkly than I do.  I cannot argue that they are wrong.

The climate disturbs me, but it would be ridiculous for me to petition HBO, Fox, ABC or CBS to change their programming or ask publishers not to publish books urban paranormal.  It makes more sense for me to try to change, well, reality through the political process.  I can't do anything about anyone else's imagination, but I can at least try to effect changes that shape our collective imagination.

Who knows?  If other people join me, we might finally see the publication of the story of the happy elves Lemony Snicket teased us with.

An interview with Mara Hvistendahl, author of "Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, And the Consequences of a World Full of Men"

Sex selection is a big deal. By "big deal", I mean by as much as 163 million missing women in the world. To put that number into perspective, that's more than the population of women in the United States.

Are most of those women missing from Asia? Yes, but not all. As tempting as it is to say "sexism and traditional gender roles", the truth is more complicated. Mara Hvistendahl's Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, And the Consequences of a World Full of Men reaches back not only into the histories of China, India and other affected countries, but also the policies of Western nations to find out why so many women were never born. Just as importantly, she also paints a picture of what the world will look like if these trends go unchecked.

Mara was gracious enough to share some of her insights here about sex selection, history, technology and the ethical ramifications of our decisions.

Let’s start with the basics of your book: in certain relatively affluent countries that have access to ultrasound technology, women are choosing to abort female fetuses. We know this is happening because the sex ratio at birth is over 106 males to 100 females, and people have been talking about this for years now. But the real story of your book, as I read it, was, in part, the role that the First World played in this in the 50s, 60s and 70s- the same countries that are bemoaning the development now. What did those countries do and why?

There are several different threads to my book. The first simply tells the story of what's happening. Another describes the dire consequences of a shortage of women. But still another details the role played by Western countries in promoting research into sex determination technology in the 1950s through the 1970s. I included that history because it's a story that hasn't been told, and because sex selection is so often portrayed as a distant problem affecting only Asian nations and stemming from traditional values. I find that portrayal misleading.

Beginning in the 1950s population growth became an issue of major importance in the West, and over the decades that followed American and European governments and organizations funded efforts at reducing birth rates abroad. There were some very real reasons for concern, among them the fact that around the world people were living longer than ever before. But as that concern turned into hysteria a number of unfortunate strategies for controlling population growth were put on the table. In countries like India, for example, abortion was legalized under U.S. pressure as a population control method and not as a woman's right.

Another solution floated to the "population explosion" was sex selection. Groups like Planned Parenthood (which back then was a very different organization) and the Population Council had done research into the reasons women in Asia continued to have children, and one of the things they found was that women in many countries continued to have children, in part, because they wanted a son. In the late 1960s, the idea emerged to somehow figure out a way to ensure couples the boys they so desired. Prenatal sex determination was still in its early stages, but population activists advocated pushing that research along. Some even pushed for the creation of a "manchild pill" that would ensure a son upon conception, eliminating the need for abortion.

Wherever we see this, you paint a bleak picture for all of the inhabitants. Can you talk about how it’s affecting Taiwan, for example?

Taiwan was one of the first countries to really take to sex selection. Sex selective abortion became common in the early 1980s, and today the generation born in that decade has three quarters of a million more men than women. Many of those men are what demographers call "surplus" -- they can't find wives in their country. That combined with changing gender roles has yielded a situation in which many now travel abroad in search of women.

On the other side, Vietnam. They are selecting for sons, but not to the same degree as Taiwan, China or South Korea two decades ago. So it is still a “market” for prospective bride buyers. How are the Vietnamese being affected?

Vietnam's situation is doubly depressing. The country emerged as a destination for men from around Asia seeking wives in part because of the Vietnam War, which left it with a surplus of women. The trade in brides has become alarmingly formalized in the decades since, as professional agencies have been set up in countries like Taiwan and Singapore to handle the marriages. This industry is a little like the mail-order bride industry in the West, and it existed before Asia's "surplus" men started coming of age. But the gender imbalance has undoubtedly made the situation worse. Today so many surplus Taiwanese and Korean men go to Vietnam to buy brides that there are villages in the Mekong Delta where half of all new marriages are between local women and foreign men. I visited one island that has lost so many women that locals jokingly call it "Taiwan Island."

The marriage trade alone is bad enough, but to make matters worse Vietnam recently developed a sex selection problem of its own. Females now only outnumber males among the elderly, and parents in the northern part of the country have begun selecting for boys using ultrasound scans followed by abortions. When Vietnam's surplus boys come of age they'll be especially bad off.

When one thinks about this in strictly theoretical economic terms, there’s an impulse to conclude that because there is a smaller “supply” of women, 1) their bargaining power goes up and therefore 2) this can lead to an improvement in conditions for women. Unfortunately, that’s not what’s going on. What is this doing to the status of women?

Strictly speaking, the value of women has gone up. But while for some women -- mostly educated women living in developed cities -- that translates into more bargaining power, it also means the vast majority of women are now at greater risk. The shortage of wives in South Korea, Taiwan, India, and China is fueling demand for trafficked women and girls for both marriage and prostitution. Even when Asia's bought brides cross borders willingly, as many do, they typically do not speak the same language as their husbands, and they remain dependent on the men for income and immigration status. For those women, the gender imbalance is hardly a great thing.

To the extent that this was sold as a relief to the population problem, I can’t help but think of the economic, social and population pressures many African countries face. Is there a danger that this practice could be marketed there?

There is a danger sex selection could catch on in other countries if the same combination of factors that have played a role in Asia and Eastern Europe take hold there. A rapid drop in the birth rate and an influx of new technologies are two of the most important ones. That said, at the moment demographers are much more concerned about the Balkans and north Africa than they are about sub-Saharan Africa.

The other thing to watch out for is rapid advances in prenatal testing -- fetal DNA tests that make it possible to determine the sex of a fetus with a prick of the pregnant woman's finger, at seven weeks. Widely available blood tests could be a game-changer. [Interviewer's note: And it looks like they're getting closer.]

While there is some evidence that Asian American families are practicing sex selection for boys, for the most part, that’s not the issue in the United States. We are selecting for sex, but we’re selecting for girls, and we’re doing it before there’s even a pregnancy. This is also something that only the most affluent among us can do. In your book, you don’t characterize this as a positive development. Why?

To clarify: it's only the Americans who turn to preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) or sperm sorting for sex selection who favor girls, and that's only according to fertility clinic directors. There is, however, a separate trend in our culture at this moment in time toward favoring daughters -- whether because they do better in school, because they are believed to have fewer behavioral issues, or because today's generation of parents is determined to raise strong and successful daughters.

In any case, from an ethical standpoint I don't think it matters so much whether parents select for boys or girls. In both cases they are heightening the expectations put on their children from before birth. In that sense the Chinese boy who is chosen because he is expected to get married and carry on the family line has a lot in common with the American girl who is chosen because she is expected to dress in pink frills -- neither child may want that fate. Sex selection, along with many other forms of selection, isn't just harmful when it causes huge demographic imbalances. It's also harmful at the level of the individual -- the level of the child created not in wonderment but according to his or her parents' ideas of what a child should look like.

Your book was published shortly after the Republican-controlled Congress led a failed effort to defund Planned Parenthood. Conservative writers and activists have used you to support their opposition to Planned Parenthood and abortion itself (I’m thinking right now of Ross Douthat). It’s obvious to anyone who reads your book that this is a distortion of your position, but can you speak to how being critical of sex selection is not the same as opposing reproductive rights?

It's possible to support Planned Parenthood today and yet acknowledge that the organization has a very different past. And it's possible to support abortion rights while also being outraged when women are forced to abort, or when abortion is legalized not as a woman's right but as a population control method. That's a nuanced understanding of the situation. And I do hold out hope that there is still room for nuance in the American political landscape.

What needs to happen in order to end sex selection?

That's a complex question, and I'm afraid I don't have any easy answers. But for starters, the issue deserves a lot more international attention that it now gets. I'd like to see an international body along the lines of UNAIDS formed. Such a body might take up the question and give careful thought to just how we go about solving it. To truly be effective all possible solutions should be considered -- including crackdowns on sex selection and tighter regulations. That is one route tried in several countries in Asia that hasn't been given full consideration in the West, in part because of the contentious state of abortion politics in the United States.

We should also keep in mind that new technologies that make possible other, more sophisticated forms of prenatal selection are being introduced every year. Ethical issues surrounding selection are just beginning. And ultimately we cannot shy away from them.


Many thanks to Mara for a great book and a wonderful interview. Run, don't walk, to your bookstore and pick up a copy.