A few Facts on Stravation

One way of measuring malnutrition in children:
•Mid Upper Arm Circumference (MUAC) :
•MUAC <125mm >110mm
•MUAC < 110 mm OR the presence of bipedal oedema

Taken from World Health Organisation web site

Is everybody actually getting fatter?

I've been trying to research vital statistics for a starving woman. The reason for this may seem a little shocking. I want to create a T shirt as a reminder of the extremes of weight which exists between me and somebody who has been deprived of food to the point of starving. I am struggling because as with most subjects things are not as simple as they first appear.
I keep finding a lot of research on the growing obesity epidemic in Developing countries. Its shown in this chart and the quote below from;
here

"The number of obese people in many countries is fast overtaking the number who are underweight — even in the poorest rural regions (see Figure 2). In Mexico, for example, nearly 60 per cent of people are overweight, compared with less than ten per cent underweight."

I have also ended up going down the route of looking at size 0 and what this means. Its easier to find the vital statistics for this, its 31.5" Bust 23" Waist and 34" Hips. There are lots of articles about starving models and the two sisters models who died of cardiovascular arrest and stomach leaks due to starving themselves. I think this is misleading though as its a very different issue to deprive yourself in a land of plenty than to be the victim of famine. If anybody out there can think of a place to go and look for the info I need it would be a great help. Its the vital statistics of a starving 37 year oldish woman in say Chad, India or Ethiopia.

Economic Rationalism

The true evil of economic rationalism
	Vast amounts of value, of jobs and long term sustainability of communities have been destroyed across the world in the name of economic rationalism.
	It is economic rational to build "super stores" in small and medium towns to destroy local commerce, drive down prices and create greater levels of consumer debt.
	It is economic rational to sell international brands in high spending consumer markets at outrageous mark-ups, while paying children in third world countries a few cents and item to make them under slave conditions;
	It is economic rational to make naturally grown pain killer crops illegal in major regions such as Africa, the forcing governments to purchase vast quantities of out of date synthetic pain killers from US and European pharmaceutical companies that remain ineffective and too expensive for 90% of the population.
	In all cases, economists argue that these are just extreme cases and that the "free market" has produced phenomenal amounts of wealth and raised the standard of living of countless hundreds of millions.
	But is this even true? Does living in a non-de script cul de sac two hours from work with neighbours you don't even know quality of life?
	Is a large screen TV, the latest gadgets and internet porn really improving the minds of your children or the closeness of your family?
	Are we really happy with everything we buy and still find ways to purchase more? or dow e convince ourselves we are happy, to make sense of a system that seems to lose a little more morality every day?
	In the absence of morality in decisions concerning the lives of human beings and its acceptance, it is only "rational" then to conceive of a time in great disasters that governments claim it to be "economically rational" to give up on great numbers of people and let them rot.
	When these times approach, the true nature and evil of economic rationalism will reveal itself to be one of the great evil acts of history. From here:http://one-evil.org/acts/acts_economic_rationalism.htm

Weight Loss Shoes

This site by Dominix Wilcox never fails to amuse and impress me. Could his scale shoes be the way to constantly monitor my weight loss? (p.s. not really contemplating this, just tongue in cheek)

http://variationsonnormal.com/2010/04/27/weight-watcher-footwear/

Question Time

What one thing;

directly kills 1.2 million people worldwide a year

causes injury to 50 million people a year

kills or injures many more poor people than rich people

kills or injures more children than any other age group?

Walk the world

Bread Art Rules OK

Fantastic site. Good fun with a good message. Have a go at creating your own bread art.

http://breadartproject.com

Could the strength of a society rest with its women?

Have sex with your husband or starve to death

Law in Afghanistan which says that a man can starve his wife is she refuses to have sex with him.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8204207.stm

A hunger Artist By Franz Kafka

Am going to try and get hold of a copy of this short story by Kafka called "A Hunger Artist". If there are any Kafka fans out there with a copy please let me know and I can see about buying it from you. At least in this one nobody should turn into a dung beetle of get lost in a very long corridor.

www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hunger_Artist

www.amazon.co.uk/Four-Stories-Franz-Kafka-Academy/dp/066019550X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272272126&sr=8-1

Taken from "Small is Beautiful" by EF Schumacher

"I sit on a mans back, choking him,and making him carry me, and yet assure myself that I am sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back." Leo Tolstoy

Gone all High Brow

It had to happen at some point. Here comes the theory.

Am reading "Small is Beautiful-Economics as if people mattered" by Eric Shumacher. He was talking about Divergent and Convergent problems. Convergent being easy to come to solutions about, write down and sell to others and divergent "Which have to be lived and are solved by death" and allow contradicting thoughts to exist in the same place. Divergent thoughts keep life going forcing us to strain ourselves to a level above ourselves whilst convergant thinking leads us away from life. I was thinking about the Starvation Diet Project in relation to this and it seems to smack of the Divergent. The two clauses I hold in my head are the "Want to Loose weight, want to look better, want to care for myself." the second is the "Want to redress the balance between having too much and having too little in the world, want to make the place a bit fairer, better, stronger" . They are not mutually exclusive but often they have seemed that way. When I focus on how I have or have not lost weight I become introspective and this leads me to take actions to swing back the other way, looking for pictures of starvation reality, seeking out the right charity etc. the challenge is to hold both thoughts in my head at the same time. That is the core of the project, two ideas which constantly bounce off each other, move apart, cross paths. The other element which I thought was true to divergent thinking is the way that the project has to be lived through and may only be resolved in death, (when I would no doubt loose a lot of weight pretty rapidly). I guess I could falsify information or just plane make it up but what would be the point of that?

Slow art and Starvation diet

I showed two projects at the Slow art event on Wednesday. One was this project, the other Knit a Year. The other project involves knitting my mood each day for a year and more info on it can be found here
http://www.bethbarlow.com/completed_pages/knit_a_year.html
Kerry felt that The Starvation Diet project was slow art because it has no predetermined end, less knowledge of the final product or outcome and could go on even beyond my death. Also maybe it rings true to Kerry's ideas of slow art more because it doesn't sit within the establishment. I've been thinking about that one. Does slow art have to have these attributes to be slow art? I can see Kerry's point that if we are affixing the word slow to art we are setting it apart as something different from art and it is then important to define what that difference is. I had thought that it was partly to do with emphasis on the process and over dinner we discussed how all art has processes, some more explicitly stated in the final work. I found myself that evening trying to justify my thought that it was a difference to do with process but then my mind kept throwing up artists like Pollock and Yves Klein, both of whom have a clear statement of process within their work but are frenetic within that process. I don't know that slow art is a different beast than that which has gone before. I think that maybe it might be a returning to a place where the integrity, speed and completion of a work is based on an artistic and maybe ethical considerations rather than art establishment systems. A place were artists can spend a lifetime on a work if needs be, exposing it at key points perhaps. This leads to the question, do we also want to return to the point were creative people live and die in destitution or is there a way to construct systems which value this creative process and support it. For example, at present you will often get funding in a big chunk and have to spend it in a year or be employed on a project for a year, a week or sometimes just one day or hour. If funding and projects dripped down over a longer time what might happen then?
I don't know that it is a case of looking at projects and ticking them off as slow art or not. Maybe it is more about a change of attitude and this change will provoke changes in the work.
But I digress from The Starvation Diet project here so I'll force myself to turn around and look at it again. I was filling in the log sheets this morning and I realised that the end may come sooner than anticipated. The project could extinguish itself or perhaps metamorphosise when I get so good at not thinking about and exposing myself to bad food that I am no longer resisting and therefore no longer put money into the pot.