In fact, they’re complaining a lot about French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who came to office last May with a vow to be “the purchasing-power president.” Unfortunately for him, in France and much of the rest of the world the rapidly inflating price of food is creating a dark mood about the cost of living that even the famously energetic “omnipresident” Sarkozy can’t dispel. Food inflation used to be seen as a problem mainly for developing countries; in the past year, as food inflation spiraled, there’ve been riots from China to Mexico. Now the bite, as it were, is being felt in the heart of Europe.
The issue may be arising first in France because the country spends so much of its income on eating—about 14 percent of total household spending, versus 7 percent in the United States. “The perception of inflation seen from the consumer side took off in August and since then is really skyrocketing,” says Eric Chaney, who is Morgan Stanley’s chief economist for Europe, “and the only rational reason for that perception is the rise in food prices.”
The increases haven’t been astronomical: 5 percent for fresh vegetables, 7 percent for fruit, 4 percent for bread, compared with the year before. But “when the price of milk and bread goes up, everybody sees it,” says Chaney. “People talk about hyperinflation! That is extremely neurotic, but that’s the way it is perceived.”
The French aren’t in the worst shape. Germany is suffering from what one tabloid called “inflation angst” with an overall rate of 3.3 percent in November. In France, it’s projected at a more reasonable 1.5 percent. But the inflation is in precisely the products people cannot do without: fuel and food. The overall index looks so reasonable only because the cost of optional purchases like computers, televisions and other electronics dropped about 50 percent in three years.
It’s one of the paradoxes of globalization. As Western consumption of Asian goods rises, so do incomes in China and India. That creates a demand for better food, and thus higher food prices. Meanwhile, crops in many of the world’s “breadbaskets” have been affected by bad weather, so global yields are down. And then there’s ethanol, which used up some 20 percent of the U.S. corn crop this year. “It was a huge harvest, so big that it was piling up in parking lots; there wasn’t enough storage capacity,” says Ben Senauer, former codirector of the Food Industry Center at the University of Minnesota. Yet prices kept going up.
Senauer thinks food inflation could soon be a major issue in American politics. But in France it already is. A poll last week showed Sarkozy’s overall approval rating drop from 55 to 51 percent in a month, while half the respondents don’t think his policies will help their purchasing power, and a quarter think it will get worse. (Sarkozy’s ratings haven’t been helped by his acceptance of a 140 percent raise for himself voted by his party in Parliament.)
No wonder recent reform efforts have been halfhearted. Last month Sarkozy gave his recipe for increasing the income of French employees: let them work longer hours with lower taxes on extra time. But the deal has to be agreed to by more than 50 percent of each company’s employees—not an easy sell.
Last month’s insistence that striking transport unions give up their special pension arrangements was undermined economically, if not politically, by compromises on wage increases. Meanwhile, Sarkozy is reluctant to increase competition in the retail sector, since small shop owners are core supporters, and French law gives them what amounts to regulatory veto power over new businesses in their neighborhood.
All these problems would be easier to resolve if there were expectations of strong economic growth over the next year. But there aren’t. So every day is a show in which Sarkozy tries to create a spectacle of progress, whether flying to China or Algeria or receiving Libyan dictator Muammar Kaddafi in Paris last week to seal deals for atomic reactors, airplanes and other big-ticket projects. The economic payoff from those deals will take a long time to materialize. When it comes to buying power, as the French say, there’s no baguette magique, or magic wand, for Sarkozy to wave. And the price of the baguette is still going up.
title: “Let Them Eat Cake” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-06” author: “Diane Kelleher”
And now, with much the same messianic fervor they once devoted to the war against fat, some women have gone into battle against diets. In a Manhattan penthouse, several dozen women, ranging from their 20s to their late 50s, gathered on a recent evening for a weekly meeting of Overcoming Overeating (OO), a group run by New York psychotherapists Carol Munter and Jane Hirschmann. One young woman sat on the floor digging into a box of Entenmann’s chocolate-chip cookies; another nibbled on pasta and crackers as the group discussed how to make peace with food. “It took me a long time to get used to all the eating,” said one participant. “For so long, if I wanted a cookie, I couldn’t eat it in front of anybody.”
Buttressed by psychologists, sociologists and doctors, women across the country are banding together in support groups like OO, trashing their scales and freeing themselves from a lifelong obsession with what goes through their lips and onto their hips. Even some giant corporations are replacing weight-loss regimens with programs that emphasize self-acceptance. Carol Normandi, 32, of Woodacre, Calif., gained two dress sizes after giving up dieting but acknowledges that her old goal was absurd. “I was aspiring to the body of a male adolescent,” she says, “instead of a healthy, full-grown, developed female.”
A conference organized by the National Institutes of Health in April planted the official kiss of doubt on dieting’s face, particularly when it questioned the effectiveness of widely promoted weight-loss programs and products. The panel did conclude that losing weight may benefit people with diabetes and high blood pressure-but some researchers say yo-yo dieting may increase the risk of heart disease even more than remaining overweight.
Since few dieters can attain the lean lines of a fashion model, many have decided to stop shooting for the unattainable and try accepting their bodies as they are. “They are fed up with equating self-worth and their body size,” says Geneen Roth, who conducts Breaking Free workshops nationwide. Other dieters are ambivalent about surrendering the habit. “If it’s OK to be fat, why do I still want to lose weight?” asked a heavy middle-aged woman at the OO meeting.
In groups like Roth’s and OO, there are no weigh-ins. Members (overwhelmingly women) are not there to lose pounds, but to learn how to eat in a comfortable way that will help them reach their “natural” weight-*ne dictated by their genes and appetites, not by the pages of Vogue. To the uninitiated, it sounds pretty eccentric. Members distinguish between physiological or “stomach” hunger, and emotional or “mouth” hunger. They are encouraged to eat “on demand”-exactly what and when they want, in response to their bodies’ hunger signals. Eating this way, explains Munter, satisfies cravings with less food and prevents “foraging through the night” after a dutiful dinner.
Permission, self-gratification and self-acceptance substitute for the discipline, self-control and eyes-on-the-prize goal-setting required to follow, for example, the stringently low-fat Pritikin diet plan. There are no “good” foods or “bad” foods, and everything can be “legalized.” Members of many of the support groups are encouraged to tote bags of their favorite portable foods with them at all times, and to stock their kitchens and shelves with as many boxes of cookies and pints of Haagen-Dazs as they like. “Scarcity makes people anxious,” says Hirschmann. “Surplus calms them down.”
This extraordinary permissiveness is what alarms some people about the anti-dieting message. “They think they will eat 12 gallons of ice cream and six pizzas and dozens of doughnuts,” says Roth, whose own decision to stop dieting in 1979 was indeed frightening. For the first two weeks she consumed only chocolate cookies and chocolate-chip-cookie dough. Had she given up then, she reflects, it would have been just one more binge. Instead, she says, it was the start of a process of relearning how to eat what her body was asking for. Taking off weight was not her motivation, but after an initial gain she did lose and then was able to level off.
Laurelee Roark, 41, who with Carol Normandi leads four Beyond Hunger groups in San Rafael, Calif., also gained weight-perhaps 20 pounds, she says-when she decided to quit dieting four years ago. “I had come from many years of dieting, and it was like letting the tiger out of the cage. I ate everything that wasn’t nailed down.” But when she understood she would never deprive herself again, Roark was able to halt her frenzied feasting. “Now my body says ‘broccoli’ as loud as it once said ‘chocolate’,” she declares. Formerly a skinny size 6, Roark is now, at 5 feet 8 inches, a still-slender size 10.
Like Roth, many-but not all-of the women in the anti-diet groups do lose weight once they start eating on demand. But often they stabilize at weights society deems decidedly plump, and even some of those who accept this “natural” size would like to be smaller. A New York TV producer, 26, went on 50 diets from the age of 8 to the time she read Munter and Hirschmann’s book, “Overcoming Overeating.” She says the program “feels so good and so right” but admits that she would prefer to be somewhat thinner. “Deep inside there’s a lower weight I’d like to be at,” she says, “though I feel comfortable where I am now and can stay here if this is where I’m meant to stay.”
Why are American women still so obsessed with getting and staying thin? Certainly the cultural message leaping off every page and screen encourages it. Feminist author (“The Beauty Myth”) Naomi Wolf believes society is punishing women for their achievements by requiring them to engage in “semistarvation.” Women who decide to throw away their scales and live a little fatter but free of food obsessions do remain outside the mainstream. “The anti-diet movement is an alternative,” says Joseph McVoy, director of the eating disorders clinic at St. Alban’s Hospital in Radford, Va. “But we’re still David; we’re not Goliath.” David’s troops are increasing, however. In May, 900 people showed up for a Gala Benefit to Reclaim Women’s Bodies and Appetites, thrown by the Women’s Therapy Center Institute in Manhattan. The celebrants, mostly female, had a grand time. They watched an inspirational film, heard rousing speeches and-unlike most women at parties-ate as many cookies as they wanted.
On any given day, 30 million American women and 18 million men are on diets.
An estimated 90 percent of dieters will regain lost weight after the diet is over.
75 percent of 18- to 35-year-olds think they are fat; only 25 percent are in fact medically overweight.
45 percent of medically underweight women think they are fat.
SOURCES: AMERICAN DIETETIC ASSOCIATION, CALORIE CONTROL COUNCIL, GLAMOUR MAGAZINE
title: “Let Them Eat Cake” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-24” author: “Jules Moshier”
As always, the details are in the fine print. Take Time Warner, which is buying Turner for about $7 billion of newly issued stock, creating the country’s biggest media company. The deal combines the Time Warner empire (which includes Time magazine, NEWSWEEK’S archrival) with Turner, whose properties include CNN (which, you should know, pays me for a weekly appearance). Ted Turner will emerge as Time Warner’s biggest stockholder, with more than $2 billion worth of shares.
I have no problem with Turner knocking down that fortune–he’s earned it. What bothers me is that Turner, who will own about 11 percent of the combined companies, is getting 1.3 million Time Warner stock options as part of his employment package. Hello? Why did Time Warner give Turner any options at all? The rationale for giving options to employees is to align their interests with those of the company’s stockholders. Turner will own 60 million Time Warner shares. You think 1.3 million options will make him work harder than having $2 billion at stake and his ego on the line?
Ironically, this comes from a man quoted in The New York Times just last month about how wrong it is for moguls to obsess about piling up the biggest fortune possible. I couldn’t get Turner to tell me his side of the story. Or, for that matter, to explain why he protected only eight of his employees with new contracts, leaving hundreds of others to worry about being demoted or losing their jobs when the companies combine. The companies wouldn’t talk, either.
Let’s examine another strange aspect of this deal: Time Warner agreeing to pay $40 million of the grotesque $50 million fee former junk-bond king Michael Milken is getting. (Ted Turner is paying the other $10 million personally.) It’s not clear what, if anything, Milken did to earn this fee, which is more than double what the four other advisers in this deal are getting. Combined. A spokesman for Milken declined to comment, referring me to Time Warner and Turner Broadcasting. Neither company would talk.
In shareholder documents, the companies say that Milken last year signed a $100,000-a-month consulting contract with Turner Broadcasting that called for him to get a fee, to be mutually determined, if the company were sold. The fact that Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin initiated the deal doesn’t matter. The documents, which don’t explain what Milken actually did, try to justify the fee by pointing out that it’s a smaller proportion of the deal than fees in other deals. As if that mattered. In the current Fortune magazine, Milken is quoted as saying that he’ll give his fee to charity after subtracting expenses. Of course, we’ll never know whether Milken is increasing his charitable contributions to account for the fee, or whether he’s donating money he would have donated anyway.
I don’t want to be vulturistic here. But we have to remember that his considerable talents notwithstanding, Milken has served jail time after pleading to six felonies for violating the securities laws. What do Time Warner’s long-suffering shareholders–whose stock currently trades at only about what it fetched when Time grossly overpaid for Warner in 1990–get for handing over 40 million bucks to a felon? Beats me. Time Warner should have insisted that Ted Turner pay the whole $50 million to his buddy, rather than only $10 million.
The numbers in the Bell Atlantic-Nynex combo aren’t as outrageous as Turner’s options and Milken’s fee. But the numbers are still plenty big to those of us who think that a million dollars is real money. About half a dozen top managers in these companies are getting bonuses in the low seven figures or high six figures to hang around until the deal is completed. To be fair, Bell Atlantic spokesman Eric Rabe noted that several hundred employees at each company are getting such bonuses. ““And they’re not all executive vice presidents,’’ he said. Rabe declined to provide details, but I’ll bet that the overdogs get disproportionate payments. Meanwhile, many of the companies’ 130,000 employees are consumed with worry about their futures. Not to mention the 3,000 employees whose jobs will be eliminated.
Yes, we’re talking about small beer relative to the $7 billion of stock Time War- ner is paying for Turner or the $23 billion Bell Atlantic is paying for Nynex. But even small beer has symbolic value. When Turner knocks down stock options on top of $2 billion of stock, it tells everyone that he matters, other people don’t. Ditto for the overdogs getting big bucks at Bell Atlantic and Nynex. Who knows? If people get annoyed enough with the Turners, Milkens and phone executives, these guys, who have been forced to restrain their greed onstage, may learn to behave offstage, too.
