Where to draw the line on child poverty

By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 10:12 AM - 46 Comments

Introducing his famous motion in Parliament committing the government of Canada to abolish child poverty by the year 2000, NDP leader Ed Broadbent conjured a Dickensian vision of Canada. “Being a poor kid means box lunches from food banks and soup from soup kitchens. Mr. Speaker, to be a poor kid means trying to read or write or think on an empty stomach . . . One quarter of our children are wasting away.” The motion passed, unanimously.

That was on Nov. 24, 1989. Twenty years later, writing in the Globe and Mail, Broadbent found little improvement. “Canada’s level of poverty is virtually unchanged . . . After two decades, the child-poverty rate has dropped a mere two percentage points, to 9.5 per cent. Why do more than 600,000 Canadian kids wake up hungry and go to school trying to read, write and think on an empty stomach?”

The answer is: they don’t. More than 600,000 Canadian kids are not waking up hungry today, any more than one quarter of Canadian children were “wasting away” 20 years ago. What Broadbent means by poverty is clear from his rhetoric: a state of absolute privation—hunger, an empty stomach, wasting away. But the numbers he cites are all based on relative measures: that is, how many children were less well-off than other children. Continue…

No more Mr. Nice Guy for Seth Rogen

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, April 9, 2009 at 12:14 PM - 0 Comments

Anna Faris and Seth Rogen in 'Observe and Report'

This weekend, whether you’re up for comedy or drama, prepare to be shocked. The drama is Hunger, a visceral real-life story that follows the final six weeks in the life of Bobby Sands, who led the 1981 IRA hunger strike in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison. It was written and directed by Steve McQueen—no relation to the late actor who rode the motorbike in The Great Escape, but the OBE and Turner Prize-winning British artist. There’s nothing escapist about Hunger, which has been stunning audiences and winning awards ever since its premiere last May in Cannes, where McQueen won the Camera d’Or for best feature directing debut. The other noteworthy, though less auspicious, opening this weekend is Observe and Report, which bears the ebulliant pedigree of Canadian actor Seth Rogen. It’s a dark comedy written directed by an American iconoclast named Jody Hill, his second feature after the martial arts comedy The Foot Fist Way.

Observe and Report

Don’t let the jolly posters of Rogen and the harmless gags in the trailer fool you. Warner Bros. is doing it’s best to spin this as another boffo Seth Rogen comedy. But audiences who go expecting a night of light entertainment—or a sentimental farce reminiscent of Paul Blart: Mall Cop—are in for a rude shock. This is one of the most twisted movies released by a Hollywood studio in some time. The last one I can think of that’s went this far out of its way to be offensive is Very Bad Things. But it at least was consistently cynical and distasteful. What makes Observe and Report so disturbing is that it pays creepy lip service to rom-com convention and underdog heroism, then cracks open its booby-trapped narrative with the cold-blooded sentiment of a suicide bomber. I suppose you would call it a satire, but the target seems less important than the sheer relish of the assault. And the morality of it is so garbled, so punch-drunk, that you stagger out of it not quite sure if its one of the most subversive films you’ve ever seen, or one of the most retrograde. Continue…

Between the Pundits: Hungry for the truth

By selley - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at 3:18 PM - 0 Comments

I waded into the whole poverty statistics rigmarole a few months back, after a Toronto Star editorial posited that “more than 905,000 across the Greater Toronto Area depended on food banks.” The claim was so outrageous that I hear Joe Atkinson clawed himself out of his own grave, dusted himself off and hopped the first trolley to One Yonge Street to inform his editorialists of the error. And in subsequent efforts, they did treat the figure—which represents the total number of visits to food banks across the GTA, not visitors—with slightly more respect. A “total of 905,000 people visited food banks across the Greater Toronto Area in the past year,” they wrote at Thanksgiving, which is… well, slightly closer to the truth, anyway.

But today, reacting to the Daily Bread Food Bank‘s latest annual report, the Star finally got it right. “Food bank use has risen by 5 per cent in the GTA in the past year to 952,883 visits,” they wrote. Perfect. Alas, the whole thing goes pear-shaped again in the very next sentence, which claims “more than 79,000 people now resort to a food bank every month.” The precise number is 79,407, for the record. I know because I went ahead and divided 952,883 by 12. They’ve more or less repeated the original error, in other words, but they’ve converted it from yearly to monthly form.

(Incidentally, for for future Star editorial use, the DBFB says “this year’s increase is attributed primarily to the opening of two new food banks and reflects Daily Bread’s increased capacity to meet the existing need as opposed to an increase in need.”)

Starving yourself: a way to prevent jet lag?

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 12:40 PM - 0 Comments

Airplane food is pretty bad anyway, but next time it’s offered on a long flight, you’ll have another reason to say no—researchers are suggesting that hunger could help long-distance travelers stave off jet lag, Reuters reports.

Body functions are controlled by circadian rhythm, a natural clock that tells us when to fall asleep and when to wake up. When animals are hungry, though, it seems they’re able to override it in order to find food. Starving yourself on a flight might have the same effect, according to U.S. researchers, whose work appears in the journal Science.

“A period of fasting with no food at all for about 16 hours is enough to engage this new clock,” Dr. Clifford Saper of Harvard Medical School told the news service. He notes that when an American traveller visits Japan, it takes about a week to adjust to the 11-hour difference. “By then,” he says, “it’s often time to come home.”

Dr. Saper and his fellow researchers looked at mice in this study—and while it’s not yet been tried on humans, he says he’s “certainly” going to avoid food on his next long flight to Japan.

Going hungry with Che

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 8:10 PM - 0 Comments

Slept in for a change. The Cannes programmers gave us a break today, clearing out the schedule to leave our palates fresh for this evening’s premiere of Che, Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour-plus epic about Che Guevara. For once it was sunny. I was tempted to hit the beach, and almost did. But dark rooms exert an addictive pull in this place, along with the fear of missing something unmissable. So this afternoon I caught the final market screening of Hunger, which opened the Un Certain Regard sidebar last week. It’s a much-buzzed feature debut from British visual artist Steve McQueen (you think he’d at least call himself Steven to avoid confusion with the dead actor on IMDB.)

Hunger is a tough film, highly graphic drama about the 1981 IRA hunger strike in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison. It begins with a no-wash strike—a harrowing, maggot-ridden ordeal of prisoners wearing nothing but overgrown beards who are beaten and tortured in cells while they smear the walls with their own waste. (Yet another example of the bizarre sanitation theme that flows like an open sewer through this year’s Cannes program). The filth and torture sequences, which are almost wordless, are followed by a long, uncut stretch of staccato dialogue between IRA militant Bobby Sands and a priest trying to talk him out of the hunger strike. That scene is a theatrical tour de force. Then we come to the hunger strike itself. It transpires as an ethereal trip into a palliative afterlife, featuring actors with gaping sores who are so alarmingly skinny they could teach the cast of Schindler’s List a thing or two about dieting.

But I had to leave Hunger before the end. I was famished, and desperate to pick up a slice of quiche to-go before heading into Che marathon.

Starring Benicio Del Toro, Che was presented in two parts, two separate movies really, with a 15-minute intermission. The dialogue is almost all in Spanish, with English subtitles. The first part plays like a war movie, and traces Che’s guerrilla campaign through the jungles of Cuba, intercut with black-and-white re-enactments of his visit to the United Nations in N.Y. The second part plays like a thriller, and follows his disintegrating campaign in Bolivia up to his death, another saga of starvation and sickness. It’s hard to imagine either part working without the other. They’re a matched set of victory and defeat, an ascent to revolutionary heaven followed by the descent into hell. The story of defeat is more compelling.

At half time, the lobby was littered with little shopping bags marked CHE, each containing a bottle of water and half a sandwich consisting off a flattened leaf of lettuce and virtually nothing else between slices of squished white bread. An attempt to simulate jungle rations?

A few observations on Che:

• Soderbergh goes so far out of his way not to make a conventional Hollywood biopic that he offers not a shred of personal back story, or front story. Just meticulous history and warfare.

• No one has sex of any sort, or even talks about it, during the entire four hours—except a deserter who rapes a peasant girl off screen. But the men smoke a lot of cigars.

• About an hour a three quarters into the movie, it’s casually mentioned that Che has a wife and daughter in Mexico; moments before his death in the second movie he mentions that he has five children. That’s all we ever hear of them.

• There are virtually no close-ups in either movie. It’s hard to find Benicio Del Toro’s eyes. Everyone has overgrown beards, and things can get confusing.

• For no apparent reason, except to provoke a titter of recognition, Matt Damon pops up in a cameo, speaking Spanish.

• Che is a severe asthmatic. At one point, as he lies gasping from breath in the Bolivian jungle, he says, “All of us have made mistakes but I made the worst mistake when I didn’t bring my medicine along.” So if he’d taken a puffer into the jungle, instead of cigars, could that have turned the tide of history? Clearly he would have been better off making revolution in a desert climate.

• Che’s screenwriter is Peter Buchman, whose previous major credit is a jungle tale of a different colour— Jurassic Park III

I don’t have any video from my own camera today, but here’s some official footage of what was happening at Che‘s red carpet premiere:

Obesity: a "brain disease"?

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 4:10 PM - 2 Comments

Have you ever been grocery shopping when you’re hungry, and bought way more stuff than you intended? Understanding the reasons for this may give us some clues to the obesity epidemic, new research suggests.

People generally eat for two reasons: because they’re hungry (hormones in the brain tell us to eat to maintain a constant body weight), or because we’re tempted by delicious food (so-called “hedonistic consumption”). But it could be these two urges are more interconnected than we previously thought: researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University say they’ve discovered that ghrelin (one of the hormones that prompts us to eat when we need more calories) might also make us want to consume food for pleasure.

“Our study demonstrates that ghrelin actually activates certain regions of the brain to be more responsive to visual food cues, thereby enhancing the hedonic and incentive responses to food-related cues,” neurologist Dr. Alain Dagher, principal investigator in the study, says in a press release. “Ghrelin is a hormone that triggers hunger, and is secreted by the stomach [when it is empty].”

This supports the view, the press release notes, that “obesity must be understood as a brain disease and that hunger should also be looked at as a kind of food addiction,” as obese people might be overeating largely due to an uncontrollable hunger.

Researchers found ghrelin actually acts on the same reward and motivation areas of the brain implicated in drug addiction, which could potentially have profound implications: “If food is thought of as potentially ‘addictive,’” the press release says, “this would support action to limit or ban fast food from schools and junk food advertisements geared towards children, in the same way that results proving nicotine to be addictive spurred the current public policy towards nicotine.”