Editor’s Note: Happy Thanksgiving from the Media Consortium! This week, we aren’t stopping The Audit, The Pulse, The Diaspora, or The Mulch, but we are taking a bit of a break. Expect shorter blog posts, and The Diaspora and The Mulch will be posted on Wednesday afternoon, instead of their usual Thursday and Friday postings. We’ll return to our normal schedule next week.

by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger

Wednesday is the heaviest travel day of the year in the United States, as millions of Americans head home to celebrate Thanksgiving. Some of you are probably reading this dispatch on PDAs as you wait in an interminable line at airport security. Here’s some food for thought.

At Grist, food writer Michael Pollan officially declares himself a Rules Guy. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean he won’t accept a Friday dinner invitation offered after noon on Wednesday. Pollan thinks that our healthy eating skills are passed down to us as part of food culture. In this era of drive-through windows and meal replacement bars, a lot of the old wisdom is falling by the wayside and Americans are finding themselves adrift in a sea of calories. On the eve of Thanksgiving, Pollan provides some helpful guidelines for avoiding the food coma:

[M]any ethnic traditions have their own memorable expressions for what amounts to the same recommendation. Many cultures, for examples, have grappled with the problem of food abundance and come up with different ways of proposing we stop eating before we’re completely full: the Japanese say “hara hachi bu” (“Eat until you are 4/5 full”); Germans advise eaters to “tie off the sack before it’s full.” And the prophet Mohammed recommended that a full belly should contain one-third food, one-third drink, and one-third air. My own Russian-Jewish grandfather used to say at the end of every meal, “I always like to leave the table a little bit hungry.”

But wait, there’s more!

• Unions representing airline pilots and flight attendants are advising their members to avoid the the TSA’s new backscatter x-ray scans because of concerns about the long-term health effects of x-ray radiation. Crew members who refused scans have been subjected to new “enhanced” pat-down searches. This week, the TSA granted an exception to pilots, but not to flight attendants. As I reported for Working In These Times, all crew members go through the same FBI background check and fingerprinting process. “Don’t touch my junk!” has become a rallying cry for passengers, particularly white men, who are not accustomed to being asked to give up any part of their body’s autonomy for the greater good. Is it a coincidence that 95% of pilots are men and three-quarters of flight attendants are women? [Update: The TSA has relented. The agency announced Tuesday that flight attendants will now get the same exemption as pilots.]

• Adam Serwer argues in The American Prospect that it’s easy to demand tough security measures when the presumed targets are faceless Muslims in a distant country. When air travelers are asked to compromise their own privacy in the name of security, the tradeoff suddenly seems very different.

• Employee health insurance deductibles are skyrocketing at Whole Foods and CEO John Mackey is trying to blame the increase on health care reform. “This is very important for everyone to understand: 100% of the increases in deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums in 2011 compared to 2010 are due to new federal mandates and regulations,” Mackey wrote in a corporate memo. In fact, as Josh Harkinson reports in Mother Jones, Mackey’s memo is pure, organic BS. The provisions in the Affordable Care Act that might increase costs won’t go into effect until 2014, so it’s hard to figure out how federal policies could be responsible. Health insurance costs were rising by about 5% per year, year after year, before the Affordable Care Act passed. The truth is that health insurance is getting more expensive because health care is getting more expensive. As Harkinson points out, one of the reasons that health care is getting more expensive is because corporations like Whole Foods are pushing more of their employees into part-time work to avoid covering them. Of course, when those workers get sick, someone has to pick up the cost of their care. So those who have insurance, including some of Whole Foods’ own employees, have to pay more to make up the difference.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

No doubt Whole Foods CEO is a smart man. He took a small supermarket from Austin and not only turned it into a national chain, but totally took the idea of food shopping and turned it on its head. From an onerous task of schlepping a rickety cart up and down aisle after aisle of packaged goods highlighted by cheaper prices and artificial lighting, John Mackey turned shopping into an event. Fresh, organic foods, natural light, new and exciting products from local farms and fields in far-away places.

Whole Foods prices are more expensive than other places, but it doesn't matter, because people love to shop there, they love to interact with the knowledgeable staff and they love the idea of shopping at a place that seemed to have a heart.

Then CEO John Mackey wrote a piece on health care reform for the Wall Street Journal. The op/ed as it ran had the headline, "Whole Foods Alternative to Obamacare."

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Healthcare remains a hot issue this week. And this is really the critical moment. Now is the time for you to contact your Congressional Reps, your Senators, and your local media to give your opinion on healthcare reform. Remember the real facts, the numbers that show America spends top dollar for mediocre medical outcomes. We are on par with Slovakia, Albania and Cuba even though we spend more than almost any other nation on earth. Sweden, Canada, The Netherlands and the UK have the best overall cost to outcome ratio.

This could be our last chance for decades to reform our healthcare system, and it really needs your input both to Congress and the media.

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(Originally posted on The Bilerico Project by Mattilda aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore)

Gay consumerism reaches a whole new level with the opening of a Whole Foods Market in the glittering new $20 million Chicago LGBT Center.  A recent article in the Chicago Tribune (echoed by articles in the Advocate/Gay.com/Planet Out and Queerty) gushed about the excitement of "the first retailer of its size to anchor a gay community center in the US."

Whole Foods is a notorious union-busting chain, whose CEO, John Mackey, a free-market capitalist in green-face, is fond of comparing unions to herpes or parasites.  Whole Foods is also known for opening stores near smaller, community-based or cooperative health food stores, often forcing the smaller stores out of business (the Starbucks model).

Read the rest

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