Running on Empty

admin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:09:00 +0000

Directed by Emily Marlow, Charles Stewart

When I was perhaps ten years old or younger, I used to sit in front of the television on weekend mornings, and flip around until I found a Save the Children show. I’d then proceed to watch the entire episode, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and cry. For years afterwards I was always furious when my mother would flip past the standard image of a young child of color, starving and attracting flies, with a sound of disgust.

Running on Empty is part of the sixth season of _Life, an educational series put out by Television Trust for the Environment, which delves into globalization’s myriad of affects on poverty. This particular episode shows the effects, mostly ineffective, of the Millennium Development Goals, a plan signed by 192 United Nations members to halve poverty and hunger by the year 2015.

The film contrasts the lives of Dawn, a mother of three living in one of the poorest areas in Europe, and Asemu, a mother of two living in northern Ethiopia. Dawn and Asemu, both only twenty-two years old, depend on cash payments to buy food, clothing, and other basic necessities. The film deals with the question of whether it is more effective to give cash or food aid to families in need. The fear is that adults will spend the money on more frivolous items instead of necessities.

While Running on Empty logically decides that cash is the best form of aid, it also shows the women spending a large part of their meager resources on events described as “social obligations.” Dawn ends up borrowing six hundred and fifty pounds (over nine hundred dollars to us) for her children’s Christmas presents, and struggles to pay back the loans. Asemu doesn’t receive regular cash payments until five months after the harvest; and she must spend a large part of their harvest on a women’s gathering, at which the women take turns supplying the food.

The film ends agreeing that the Millennium Development Goals are not working. Dawn receives just enough money to survive on after she splits her cash between food, diapers, laundry, gas, and electric bills. While her children are not underfed, and she knows what kind of diet is best for them, she lacks the money to buy healthy food. Therefore, Dawn falls back on fries and other high-fat, high-calorie solutions.

Asemu, who receives one pound for every one hundred and thirty of Dawn’s, explains that the cash aid she receives hasn’t increased to keep up with inflation rates. Her youngest child is developing well, but her older son, born before the family began receiving aid, only started to walk at age four due to malnutrition. The damage done by lack of nutrition in his first two years will never be undone, and the family’s diet is still extremely poor in protein, with no money for fish or meat.

The show is well filmed, with segments in Ethiopia and South Wales, and does a striking job at drawing parallels between the different types of poverty the two families live in. In the end, neither can afford to give their children the nutrition they desperately need for proper development, despite all of the rich promises of our “world leaders.”

Written by: Ilinca Popescu, June 1st 2009

Fed Up

admin — Fri, 29 May 2009 09:46:00 +0000

By Jessica Conant-Park, Susan Conant

Berkeley Prime Crime

Given the strained and perilous relationship I have with my own mother, I have a lot of admiration for any mother-daughter pair that get along well enough to successfully negotiate the writing of a novel. That said, Fed Up could have been a lot better than it was.

I give the authors points for creating a strong and opinionated female character, Chloe, who solves the mystery of a poisoned woman on her own through a rough mixture of luck and logic. Apart from the protagonist, I found a lot to underline and scribble about in anger. Every female character that was introduced, apart from Chloe’s blonde, pregnant, about-to-be-married best friend, was negatively described in terms of clothing, the amount of makeup worn (less is ugly, more is good), and body type (“slightly plump,” or “almost scrawny” or “blah and shapeless”). I would have thought that writers, especially women, would have moved on from the sexist device of making their likeable characters beautiful, and all other women ugly, as decreed by Vogue. I have no intention of warming up more to the sexy and curvaceous characters than to the ones whose haircuts do not flatter their face shapes.

The characters are all heterosexual, almost all white, and consistently upper-middle class. Chloe is in graduate school because her uncle’s will states that she has to obtain a master’s degree before she can collect her inheritance. She’s quite a snob about the correct type of cracker to spread cheese on, and the differences between how white and red wines ought to be served.

At the beginning of the novel there is some lip service played towards how lovely it would be if the cooking show/contest at the center of the plot was targeting unsuspecting middle- and lower-income families to cook surprise gourmet meals for, instead of searching for affluent audiences, but this thought is never expanded on. At another point in the story, Chloe has a three-line-each exchange with her mother’s new assistant over the need to supply cheaper, environmentally friendly gardening and landscaping solutions to the less wealthy. But class issues are never serious for the girl whose parents are paying for her best friend’s entire wedding. At most, Chloe seems to believe that providing rain barrels to rich people, hidden in designs that match their homes or garden styles, is a “political” concern.

All in all, Fed Up was entertaining, which is perhaps what it was meant to be. I still found it hard to believe that after watching a woman die on a bathroom floor, vapid Chloe was traumatized only up until the next day when she went over to see her best friend, who did her hair because, “the best route to feeling good is looking good.”

Written by: Ilinca Popescu, May 29th 2009