The Gaslit Age
Where the aggressor is the victim, the broligarchs champion meritocracy, and empathy is a menace
An important note on last week’s issue: the EU’s agricultural vision document has curiously disappeared from the web.
Thankfully the Wayback Machine has an archive version, so go there if you want to read it in its entirety.
Also, I’ve donated money to the Internet Archive, which manages the Wayback Machine, whose work I’ve always been thankful for, but more so these days given the delete-happy people in power.
See also: the Novo Nordisk story below.
Over the past years, I’ve often come across complaints that “gaslighting” has become an overused and outdated word that has lost its meaning, much like… fascism.
I’ve also noticed that often the people who make this charge will also say those refusing to accept abuse (mental, physical, or otherwise) are just too sensitive, too thin-skinned, too snowflake-y, etc. Text-book gaslighting behaviour, some would say.
I hope the past week alone has showed that unfortunately for the vast majority of us, gaslighting is alive and thriving, and why the word resonates with so many, especially those of us on the wrong side of the power imbalances.
We saw it unfold LIVE on our TV screens on Feb 28 when a group of sneering men in suits tried to browbeat a sitting president - a supposed ally - who is defending his country from an invasion.
We relived those moments when much of the mainstream media called what transpired a “shouting match” and sycophants after sycophants dutifully came online and on TV to tell us what we saw didn’t happen the way we saw it.
I felt it upon seeing two murderous dictators - Myanmar’s Min Aung Hlaing and Russia’s Putin - beaming and hugging each other in a show of “Gaslighters Unite”.
But these are the obvious examples. We live in a world where corporations and governments constantly gaslight us to distract, demoralise, and demonise us.
Choose the real red pill. Always.
Food, Food Everywhere But…
The argument that we need to increase food production to feed a growing population has always been around, but Russia’s invasion Ukraine turbocharged it.
The term “food security” and “food sovereignty” were misused and abused by politicians, the agricultural lobby and the food industry to push a narrative that we need to produce as much food as possible, at any cost.
But a new study (open access, yay!) has reinforced an argument made by many food systems experts I admire: that we cannot focus on quantity alone.
The world produces enough calories to feed everyone, but not the right kind that we need, “with large global shortfalls in fruits, vegetables, and legumes, nuts, and seeds”, said researchers at Tufts University and the International Food Policy Research Institute.
“Does the world produce enough food? In calories, yes. In all foods needed for a healthy diet, no,” it said.
“Investments in “food” or “agriculture” need to go beyond the set of crops that have typically received the vast majority of investment – staple grains, starchy roots and tubers, and oil crops – and focus on the foods that are the most in need: fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and seeds.”
The paper used the new global Healthy Diet Basket (HDB) to measure if there is adequate food globally and at more granular levels.
HDB specifies the recommended intakes of six food groups (starchy staples; fruits; vegetables; animal-source foods; legumes, nuts, and seeds; and oils and fats) for an adult woman to meet her energy needs. UN agencies and the World Bank use it to monitor the cost and affordability of healthy diets worldwide.
The findings showed that per capita availability of all six food groups global has increased between the 1960s to 2020s. However, some, like animal source foods, have risen - and continues to rise - dramatically but others, like fruits, legumes, nuts & seeds, are nowhere near where they should be.
There are also important variations at regional levels. If you look at the figure below, where the black dashed lines represent HDB targets, it is obvious that only starchy staples are available in adequate quantities in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Pretty much every region in the world has inadequate levels of fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts & seeds. The sharp trajectory for East Asia & Pacific when it comes to the availability of vegetables is due to the outsize role of China and nearby countries still face deep deficits, the researchers said.
In North America, animal source foods, oils and fats, and sugars have remained at levels two or even three times higher than the target intake.
The study admits a few limitations, including the possibility of errors in country-level data, the exclusion of foods from unofficial sources (like informal trade and foraging), not accounting for consumer-level food waste, and not addressing whether primary ingredients are transformed into unhealthy foods.
Still, there’s enough to show the productivity-obsessed that if we really want to tackle the rising problem of malnutrition in all forms, we need to be growing the right kinds of food, not just any food. One lives in hope.
Pharma-backed Project on UPF
Speaking of how primary ingredients get transformed into unhealthy foods, scientists are criticising what they say is an industry-backed attempt to revise Nova, a classification system for ultraprocessed foods (UPFs).
The system is used by UN agencies including the FAO and the WHO but naysayers say it’s imprecise. This includes Arne Astrup, vice-president of the Novo Nordisk Foundation, supposedly the world’s wealthiest philanthropic fund with a controlling interest in the maker of Ozempic. He has publicly criticised Nova.
Last October, the University of Copenhagen announced that the Foundation is funding a two-year initiative to “update” the system and develop “the next generation of the NOVA classification”.
Last week, Carlos Monteiro, a Brazilian nutritional epidemiologist, and his colleagues at the University of São Paulo who developed the system, wrote an open letter asking for the Nova name to be removed from the Novo Nordisk project since none of the original team are taking part.
A second letter signed by some 100 scientists, public health experts, and nutrition researchers followed. It said they’re “deeply concerned” about plans “to revise the established Nova food classification system without scientific legitimacy or the participation of its creators”.
“Novo Nordisk, as one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, derives substantial profit from the treatment of diet-related diseases, including obesity and diabetes,” they wrote.
“It is deeply problematic that a corporation with vested financial interests in these conditions is now funding a project that seeks to redefine the very classification system used to successfully study the role of diet in diet-related diseases.”
“The language used in the project announcements, particularly the framing of Nova as "flawed" or "requiring change," appears as an effort to delegitimise independent research and promote an alternative classification system more favourable to industry.”
In 2009, Carlos and his colleagues proposed the system, which sort food into four broad categories. Below is a good summary by The New York Times.
Brazilian media has documented the attacks on Carlos for his work, which includes coining the term UPF. It has famous supporters too, including Marion Nestle, the OG of food and nutrition politics.
As is Mark Lawrence, a professor at Deakin University’s Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition, who said the claims of controversy originates from researchers associated with UPF manufacturers because the concept “challenges many conventional nutrition research and policy activities as well as the political economy of the industrial food system”.
The second letter said the Novo Nordisk-funded initiative involves “researchers with long-standing financial and non-financial ties with the food industry, and food industry affiliated groups” but I haven’t been able to independently verify this. If anyone has more info, please share!
It’s possible I couldn’t find the information because it’s been wiped, like the original announcement of the project on the University of Copenhagen website which now has a “404 not found” message. Thank god for the Wayback Machine’s archives.
Omnishambles
Last week, I focused on the EU’s agricultural vision and didn’t have time to go through its Omnibus package. Thankfully, others have done the hard job for me, thank you Chloé Mikolajczak, Politico, EU Observer, and Brussels-based orgs.
Essentially, the package is a set of laws the European Commission is proposing with the expressed aim of simplifying the bureaucracy and cutting red tape.
I mentioned in the last issue a lot of civil society groups are concerned that “simplification” is a ruse to undo climate and social ambitions, and unfortunately, they seem to be right. Those who took the “simplification” reason at face value seem to have been gaslit.
The package covers four key rules under the European Green Deal: The corporate sustainability reporting directive (CSRD), the corporate sustainability due diligence directive (CSDDD), the EU taxonomy on sustainable investments and the carbon border tax.
Politico’s opening line says it all.
The proposed new rules include, among others, delaying the CSRD by two years and diluting the CSDDD by requiring companies to ensure that only direct suppliers aren’t committing human rights violations and damaging the environment.
EFFAT (the European Federation of Food, Agriculture and Tourism Trade Unions) said the proposed amendments “significantly weaken human rights directives aimed at ensuring corporate accountability and social and environmental justice”.
“These directives are crucial to defend workers’ rights and tackle environmental degradation particularly in EFFAT’s sectors, which rely on very long and complex supply and subcontracting chains as well as franchise networks.”
If the proposal goes through - it still needs the EU parliament and member states to approve them - these tools will “become little more than useless tools”, EFFAT warned.
Former president of Ireland Mary Robinson and CEO of The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre Phil Bloomer also wrote a sharply-worded op-ed for EU Observer, calling the package an “act of economic vandalism”.
“The commission is dismantling vital safeguards and in so doing will deepen inequality in Europe and beyond and apply convenient myopia to the accelerating climate crisis
In a post on LinkedIn summarising the text, Chloé wrote that the package has “nothing to do with simplification and everything to do with full brown deregulation”.
“What we're seeing here is basically one of the most successful corporate lobbying campaign EVER,” she added.
Aid Cuts Don’t Kill People, Aid Does…
If you’re too young to get this reference, please see here.
On Mar 2, Reuters reported that a senior official with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was placed on leave 20 minutes after he warned of unnecessary deaths as a result of Trump’s dismantling of the agency.
"This will no doubt result in preventable death, destabilisation, and threats to national security on a massive scale," Nicholas Enrich, USAID's acting assistant administrator for global health, apparently wrote in a seven-page memo that he shared with staff via email.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio had made mealy-mouthed assurances that lifesaving assistance would be waived from the disastrous freezing of all foreign aid but Enrich said Musk acolytes at DOGE and other political appointees have made it impossible to approve payments for those critical programs.
The waiver process was “a bureaucratic mess” and it didn’t help that “every day, the Trump administration sliced more staff away from USAID, dissolving those responsible for managing the waiver process”, wrote Devex, which has more details on Enrich’s memos. Yes, there’s more than one.
A second memo stated that in just over a month, USAID’s global health bureau lost more than 90% of its staff, severely affecting his department’s ability to function.
Even more chilling, Enrich was compiling one more document, this time “detailing the consequences of the foreign aid freeze to date” before he was put on leave, according to Devex, which got hold of the unsigned memo.
“Halting USAID’s malaria programs, he said, would lead to an additional 12.5 million to 17.9 million cases per year, along with an additional 71,000 to 166,000 deaths — an increase of nearly 40%… And stopping USAID’s nutrition programs, he said, would lead to one million children with severe acute malnutrition losing access to treatment.”
A source told Reuters the decision to put Enrich on administrative leave was made days before the email.
I guess that’s ok then, since it’s not a direct retaliation for daring to point out that the emperor has no clothes?
Even before all this went down, The New Humanitarian published a piece that showed how petty, pointless and draconian these cuts are. They quoted the country representative of an international organisation that received USAID funding.
“We received feedback on some of our suspended awards. One said we had to remove any mention of ‘girls’, ‘women’, ‘youth’, ‘equity’, or ‘inclusion’… Basically, any programme that helps women or girls or youth, we were asked to remove that language.”
“I don’t know what we’re gonna replace those words with.”
According to the White House though, USAID has apparently funnelled “massive sums of money to the ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats, with next-to-no oversight”.
The kindergarten-level writing skills in that release, dated Feb 3, was bad enough, but what really takes the cake was the list of media outlets the White House is now citing to support its burn-the-house-down agenda.
Of the 12 selected examples of “the WASTE and ABUSE” (their capitalisation, not mine!), five came from The Daily Mail, two from The Washington Examiner, and one each from The Daily Caller, Breitbert, and Washington Times.
Corporations Shed Their Sheep Clothing
BP is going to put more money in oil and gas and cut investments in renewables to “fundamentally reset” its strategy. Wells Fargo is “scrapping its goal of achieving net-zero emissions across its financed portfolio”.
Perhaps it’s not a bad thing for them to show their true colours, as my former climate editor, Megan Rowling, put it eloquently.
At the same time, around 880 staff, including weather forecasters, at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have been laid off as part of the Trump administration’s war on the federal workforce.
Sadly, it seems Tom Di Liberto, a climate scientist who also happens to be a great communicator and featured on Thin Ink two years ago, was part of the cut.
To those who don’t know, NOAA’s weather data is used not only by American companies and meteorologists but also by international partners, and there are concerns the firings will jeopardise the agency’s ability to forecast and respond to extreme weather events.
But the agency is a target of Project 2025 which called it “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. Prosperity”.
What do you call when a country that has lost nearly $3 trillion to weather and climate disasters since 1980 want to gut an agency that could predict them?
Thin’s Pickings
Myanmar’s war on nature - Mekong Eye
A selection of previously published stories by brave Burmese journalists on how the coup and its aftermath - the civil war - is destroying land and natural resources in my home country.
Insightful interview by Iker Seisdedos. Lots of great quotes but the below two might be my favourites.
“Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you’re operating within a fascist logic, because that means there might be a second one you’re willing to sacrifice, and a third, a fourth, and then what happens?”
“The more people who say that they can “live with” racism and misogyny in a candidate, even if they’re not enthusiastic racists, the more the enthusiastic racists and the fascists become stronger.”
“My Flight Arrives at 5 am, Can You Pick Me Up?”: The Gatekeeping Burden of the African Academic - Journal of African Cultural Studies
Really interesting piece by Elizabeth Tilley and Marc Kalina, two self-declared white researchers based in Africa, on the unequal and unidirectional burden shouldered by African scholars for researchers from the Global North.
There are vivid anecdotes as well as practical, concrete steps the visitors can take “to level the highly unequal playing field”.
“Many visitors still expect a personal pick-up, despite the availability of taxi services (and the inconvenience to the host), because they feel “unsafe” or unable to navigate their new surroundings, despite having based their careers on being “experts” on the continent.
Over the past few years, we have lost, collectively, hundreds of hours, travelling to and from the airport to fetch Northern colleagues, who have expected that sacrifice from us.
We do it because we often want to, are polite when we don’t want to, and we want to manage our relationships professionally and have projects of mutual interest succeed. Yet, how likely would it be for the Oxford professor to spend the day fetching our hypothetical Tanzanian at Heathrow?”
On Gentrification - From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy
Short but thought-provoking post.
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