For the poor parents I met, children’s food rejections cost too much. To avoid risking waste, these parents fall back on their children’s preferences. As the mother of the 3 year old said: “Trying to get him to eat vegetables or anything like that is really hard. I just get stuff that he likes, which isn’t always the best stuff.” Like many children, her son prefers foods that are bland and sweet. Unable to afford the luxury of meals he won’t consume, she opts for mac and cheese.
I met plenty of poor parents who wished that their children liked healthier food. But developing their children’s palates has hidden costs. When I asked her about offering cauliflower 10 times to shape her son’s tastes, a poor mother from a town outside Boston said: “No. No. That’s a lot of wasted food.” This mother faces an uncomfortable choice: She can experiment and risk an empty cupboard, or she can make her food last by serving what her son likes, even if it’s not the healthiest and even if she feels guilty about it.
Wealthier parents didn’t face this trade-off. These parents met plenty of mealtime challenges — time scarcity, resistant children, the emotional toll of serving an unappreciative audience. The cost of waste posed fewer concerns. One middle-class mother has hated fruit all her life. But she offered her daughter a host of fruits early on. When I asked her about the cost of possible food rejections, she said, “Honestly, it never crossed my mind.”
this is so important to think about if you grew up eating junk because it was relatively affordable and your parents could reasonably assume you would eat all of it and not go hungry. it can take a huge effort to catch up and acquire a taste for food that isn’t processed shit. and on top of that, no one wants to admit they’re an adult who doesn’t eat vegetables because it’s embarrassing, but there’s a reason for it sometimes.
That’s not to say it was well-hidden before. It wasn’t; if you wanted
to look, it was blindingly obvious. But if you’d rather not see what
was right in front of you, there was at least a thin veneer of
deniability. They’re not even bothering with that anymore.
Post-impeachment, and with a craven party behind him, an emboldened
and unchecked Donald Trump has made clear that he’ll weaponize the
powers of his administration — especially the obsequious Department of
Justice — to punish enemies, reward allies, and gin up scandals and
pseudo-scandals to aid his re-election. He won’t try to hide it. He
doesn’t care if you know. He’ll push the limits of presidential
authority, and he knows Congress won’t stop him.
Consider the last week: First, following a Trump tweet, Attorney General Bill Barr’s office announced that it had overruled career prosecutors’
sentencing recommendation for Trump henchman Roger Stone — who’d been
convicted of obstructing Congress and witness tampering, and who refused
to tell Robert Mueller what he knew about the Trump campaign’s links to
WikiLeaks — prompting them to quit in protest. Trump publicly
congratulated Barr for “taking charge” of the case and went on a Twitter
rant attacking the judge and the departing prosecutors.
We then learned that not only had Barr had similarly intervened on behalf of disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who’d pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during the Mueller probe, but that he’d also assigned another prosecutor to review Flynn’s case, yet another extraordinary example of political interference.
In addition, he also removed Jessica Liu, the U.S. attorney for
Washington, D.C., who was overseeing the Stone case and — more important
to Trump — an investigation into former FBI acting director Andrew McCabe,
who’d authorized agents to investigate Trump for obstruction of justice
in 2017. The DOJ’s inspector general had referred McCabe to
prosecutors, alleging that he’d lied to investigators about a media
leak. But Liu never brought charges, and on Friday, The Washington Post reported that federal prosecutors decided to close their inquiry. (Not coincidentally, Trump also rescinded her appointment to a top post in the Treasury Department.)
On Twitter — and reportedly in private, too — Trump has raged against
McCabe and demanded his incarceration. And he’s not the only one.
According to the Post,
when federal prosecutors decided not to charge former FBI director
James Comey over his handling of memos of his conversation with Trump,
the president “complained so loudly and swore so frequently in the Oval
Office that some of his aides discussed it for days.”
In January, he similarly lost it when he learned that U.S. Attorney John Huber in Utah had shut down his fruitless years-long investigation — initiated
by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions at Trump’s behest — into
Fox-News-conspiracy allegations against Hillary Clinton and the Clinton
Foundation and Uranium One. So now he’s insisting that John Durham,
another U.S. attorney that Barr appointed to investigate whether FBI or
CIA agents broke the law during the Russia investigation, put some heads
on pikes soon, in time for the campaign.
That’s on top of his suggestion that the army punish Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman — whom
Trump removed from the National Security Council — for the “crime” of
testifying against him and his threat that Representative Adam Schiff, a
“corrupt politician” and “very sick man,” will pay a “price” for impeaching him.
And it’s also on top of his demand
that New York “stop all of its unnecessary lawsuits & harrassment
[sic]” in order for the Department of Homeland Security to allow the
state’s residents to use the Trusted Travelers program. (The DHS forbid
New Yorkers from using it in retaliation for a law that allowed
undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses.) New York, of
course, has filed numerous lawsuits against the administration
anti-immigration policies. More to the point, perhaps, the state’s
attorney general is also investigating the Trump Organization and
actively pursuing Trump’s bank records.
The Post summed it up
in a bone-chilling lede last week: “President Trump is testing the rule
of law one week after his acquittal in his Senate impeachment trial,
seeking to bend the executive branch into an instrument for his personal
and political vendetta against perceived enemies. And Trump — simmering
with rage, fixated on exacting revenge against those he feels betrayed
him, and insulated by a compliant Republican Party — is increasingly
comfortable doing so to the point of feeling untouchable, according to
the president’s advisers and allies.”
This is banana republic territory — a wannabe despot eager to use the might of government to crush anyone who gets in his way.
Facing a backlash to his intervention in the Stone case, Barr tried to mount a defense. In an interview with ABC News,
he insisted he wasn’t Trump’s stooge, that Trump hadn’t told him what
to do, that he planned to change the sentence recommendation before
Trump tweeted, that Trump needed to stop tweeting about DOJ matters
because it was making his job “impossible,” that he was “not going to be
bullied or influenced by anybody.”
The national media bought the charade, saying Barr was “pushing back”
and asserting his independence. But Trump’s reaction was the tell: “The
President wasn’t bothered by the comments at all and [Barr] has the
right, just like any American citizen, to publicly offer his opinions,”
his press secretary responded.
This was, in other words, the only time the president had been
publicly “rebuked” by a subordinate — by anyone, really — and not flown off
the handle. He was, instead, magnanimous. The next day, he simply asserted
that he’d tweet whenever and whatever the hell he wanted, and Bill
Barr, who’d just said those tweets make his job “impossible,” didn’t
quit.
Weird how that worked out.
Contact editor in chief Jeffrey C. Billman at jbillman@indyweek.com.
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