Punterization in the Spin@ge: The USDA is Bull-Spreading on Spinach, Iron and Vitamin C
Jan. 3, 2011 4:50 pm
Punterization describes well any treatment whereby customers of a service suffer rather than benefit as a result of sub-standard advice, attitudes and policies.
In an article on Besthinking (http:
The USDA’s information that cooked spinach is a good source of iron is irrational because it punterizes any recipient of it by denying them the ability to make rational choices about what they should eat as a good source of iron.
Frankfurt (2007: 63) explains: “To be rational is fundamentally a matter of being appropriately responsive to reasons.”
Since reasons are constituted of facts, the fact that humans cannot absorb any more than 15 percent of the iron that is in spinach means that it is irrational to consider it to be a good source of nutritional iron.
Frankfurt’s (2007:84) proposition that: “The heart of rationality is to be consistent; and being consistent in action or thought, entails at least proceeding so as not to defeat oneself”, seems to me to be an abstract ideal that does not fit complex realities where individual ambition interacts with organizational aims and sub-culture; where for example a person may lie in order to achieve goals and be rewarded accordingly. For example, the USDA is an organization with core aims to provide both nutritional advice, and support for the agricultural and food industry. Therefore, its employees may find that being absolutely objective and honest about the fact that spinach is not a good source of iron will cause them more grief and less advancement than being disingenuous in their nutrition advice to the general public.
Arguably, some experts working within the USDA are attempting to get away from the fact that hardly any of the iron in spinach can be absorbed by those who eat it by disseminating harmful counterknowledge about the power of vitamin C to aid absorption.
This official quackmongery is perhaps rational as far as their responsibilities to agriculture and the food industry go but is irrational regarding their responsibilities to the general public.
When official government sources disseminate questionable information they create potentially harmful spuriofacts.
Arguably, the USDA is an organisation that is influenced on the iron in spinach issue, indirectly and structurally - rather than consciously and deliberately - by its obligations to the US spinach industry. If this is indeed the case, then the official USDA spinach is a good source of iron advice is of itself inherently irrational but the reasons for providing it are rational.
That said, blogging here to rationalize the dissemination of spuriofacts is one thing, allowing it to continue once discovered is another.
The dissemination of harmful nutrition counterknowledge by an official US Government department is not acceptable and should cease. That is the point of my latest article Spinage
Reference
Frankfurt, H.G. (2007) On Truth. London. Pimlico.
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