I had a couple of encounters recently with uglies, not just the jug above, but the human incarnation.
One person forwarded a link to an article describing terribly unsafe living conditions for renters. The article concluded with a couple of paragraphs of racist commentary on the people who owned and managed the buildings. The post drew some very appropriate criticism. I reached out to the person who posted it saying that there were serious issues. That the expressed racism was offensive and undermined the credibility of everything in the article. The person who posted it, strongly disagreed and made excuses for why the reader should overlook the racist comments and just pay attention to the terrible living condition. I can't help but think maybe the entire article was tainted by the authors racism. I am in a position to cut the poster off from the formun, something I rarely do, but I did.
The other ugly last week was a conversation with someone involved in "public health and nutrition programing." The person described an effort to improve the diet of older adults by convincing them that they can no longer eat traditional comfort foods. I asked why? The response was "so they can live longer and healthier in their old age!" Forcing a change in the diet of a 70 or 80 year old is not going to have that big of a difference. So what if it adds a few days, weeks, or months to the life of the person, if everyone of those days, weeks or months is spent missing the happy foods of their life? This is money and time wasted, it is paternalism.
There is malnutrition among older adults, mostly due to either a loss of appetite, an inability to eat, or a lack of access to a food or a variety of foods. We need to spend the senior nutrition dollars on enticing appetites, medical and dental care, and assuring access to foods that people want to eat, the comfort foods of their lifetime, and not on trying to convince them to eat more Kale - unless it is simmered for hours with lots of fatty sausage and ham and that is what they associate with the best of mom's cooking.
There is joke that circulates from time to time, that research shows that people who carry an extra 15 or 20 pounds, live much longer than the spouses that point it out to them.
End of rant, I feel less ugly now.
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