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Self magazine isn’t known for embracing body diversity, so I was semi-surprised to see the oh, so cleverly titled Self piece “Sip ‘n Starve: Dangerous diets in disguise” republished on MSNBC today. Authored by Janelle Brown, who used to run the feminist ‘zine Maxi in the 1990s, the focus is on LA trendsetters who “starve themselves skinny” via “socially acceptable quasi-anorexia.” A marketing survey last summer found that the percentage of American adults on a diet has decreased by 10 percent since 1990, but those numbers might be disingenuous. As Brown explains, it’s no longer trendy to be dieting, at least for women in LA, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve abandoned their zeal to fit into negative number sizes, either.  She writes:

Even in this city, if you go on too many diets, your friends will start to think that you’re vain, have an eating disorder or are just plain annoying. As a result, women here are — superficially, anyway — forswearing dieting and embracing a new euphemism for it: cleansing. Sure, you’re still expected to fit into those size 00 jeans, but instead of just being super skinny, now you’re supposed to be skinny and healthy.

To reach this contradictory healthy-skinny ideal, L.A. ladies have developed some disordered techniques that cross old-school self-starvation with New Age mind-body rhetoric. And these techniques will probably land in your town soon — if they haven’t already.

I’m kind of baffled by Brown’s treatment of fasting for weight-loss as something new.  Newly-trendy, maybe, but it’s certainly nothing new.  Women have fasted for centuries in the pursuit of the Gospel of Thinness.  The Master Cleanse — perhaps the most popular crash cleansing scam in which a person drinks nothing but a tasty, I’m sure, concoction of fresh lemon or lime juice, maple syrup, water and Cayenne pepper — has been around since 1941.  Stanley Burroughs, it’s creator, originally called it the “Lemonade Diet,” but he didn’t intend for it to be used as a “diet” in the modern sense of the word in that weight-loss is the primary goal.  Burroughs was a naturopath and first devised the concoction as a way to heal stomach ulcers.  Indeed, much of his 1941 book, The Master Cleanser, is devoted not to the “diet” itself, but rather to a discussion of the ways in which toxins affect the body.  The state of California saw things a bit differently, however.  In 1984, Burroughs was convicted of second-degree felony murder, felony practicing medicine without a license, and unlawful sale of cancer treatments after a men he was treating for cancer died as the result of his “cure” treatment, which consisted of drinking his Master Cleanse lemonade for 30 days and massage therapy.  The murder conviction was later overturned and Burroughs was released after spending several years in prison.  He died in 1991.

The Master Cleanse became a popular weight-loss tool after Peter Glickman, then an overstressed software company executive, stumbled across Burrough’s plan and adopted it for himself along with a raw food diet.  Despite the fact that he readily admits that he is not a licensed health professional of any kind, Glickman nonetheless began instructing others in the weight-loss “benefits” of the plan and savvily marketed the Master Cleanse into Master Profits with the 2004 publication of a weight-loss book.  Most doctors, even well-known celebrity “diet doctors,” don’t recommend the Master Cleanse and say that it is unhealthy, but that hasn’t stopped hordes of celebrities and other aspiring weight-losers from trying it anyway.

Brown devotes much of the article’s attention to the dangerous outcomes to crash cleansing — potential enema dependence, a weakened immune system and organ failure are just a few of the side effects.  Cleanse dieters often try to make up for the supplements they lack in food with herbal teas, supplements, and other so-called natural products which only exacerbate the dangers of cleansing.  According to Arthur Frank, M.D., medical director of the George Washington University Weight Management Program in Washington, D.C: “These supplements probably have no value — the best you can hope for is that they won’t harm you.”  The FDA recently issued warnings for more than 70  weight-loss supplements after they were found to contain hidden and potentially harmful drugs.

There are those who might say that any risk, even death, is preferable to being fat but it isn’t even as if cleanse dieting works.  The shift from a liquid diet to a diet of real food causes the body to cling even more stubbornly to calories than before in anticipation of the next famine, thus setting the stage for weight regain.  Nonetheless, weight-loss fasting has become popular in part, because as Brown notes, it eliminates the “media minefield of ever-changing ‘good’ and ‘bad foods because, natch, you’re not eating anything at all.”  This might sound absurd to otherwise sane people, but it resonated with me — it’s one of the very reasons why I stopped eating altogether during my eating disorder.  It was far easier to simply not eat at all than to do mental calisthenics involving the complex caloric calculations and categorizations of food into “safe” and “unsafe” food groups.  And as Weight Watchers so cleverly discovered, the word “diet” is so last year. Touting one’s diet as a “health plan” not only detracts from any suspicion of disordered eating, it’s also more socially acceptable and culturally admired than admitting your real motivation is just to fit into those skinny pants in the back of your closet.  The skillful repackaging, Brown notes:

…goes down particularly well in Hollywood, a town where celebrities profess their love for french fries while secretly purging to stay wafer-thin, where everyone pretends to be inherently slim — and where half the women interviewed for this article begged to remain anonymous because they didn’t want anyone to think they had weight issues. Admitting you’re on a diet these days somehow means you’re weak.

Surprisingly for Self, the article ends on a body-positive note with the anecdote of Milne, a former Master Cleanser who had a serious health wake-up call after endless cycles of weight loss and regain.  The now U.S. size 8-10 public relations rep finally realized:

“I’m not perfect. Sometimes nothing quite beats the blues like a Big Mac,” Milne laughs. “But I’ve been that skinny size 4, and I hated myself more than when I was more than 200 pounds. I was so wrapped up in self-image, but now I recognize a huge part of being happy is accepting my body the way it is.”

I’m not entirely opposed to fasting even thought it was fasting that accelerated my descent into anorexia.  Don’t get me wrong — I no longer fast because I find it dangerously seductive and triggering.  The last time I fasted was for three days a couple months before I met my husband four years ago and it was more so to see if I could still do it.  But I soon realized that it’s not that I can’t do it; it’s that I can’t stop it.  It was early in my disorder when I stumbled across one of those alternative health sites that promotes fasting for health and decided to give it a try.  I didn’t ease into fasting with any kind of hippie wheat germ and carrot juicing; I drank water and only water.  In time, the fasts grew longer, four days here, eight there, and then the longest, 12 days.  I even chewed the same piece of sugar-free gum those last two weeks because I was afraid of consuming even the >5 calories in each stick.  People who’ve never experienced such insanity sometimes look at me with a mixture of awe and amazement when I tell them this, but physically, fasting isn’t that difficult.  The hunger pains disappear after a few days and you feel strangely more alert and energetic than before — the feeling, of course, is short-lived as the body begins to break down.  Fasting is more of a mental challenge than it is a physical one.  Food becomes an object of obsession; it consumes your focus and devours your waking thoughts.  You even dream of food, of buffet tables heaped high with a cornucopia of delights.  That is, until muscle spasms from potassium deficiency shatter the revelry and leave you screaming in pain.

Many people, especially Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims, incorporate fasting into their spiritual beliefs and believe that it gives them a heightened sense of self-awareness and a more intimate connection with god or nature.   It was fasting, in fact, that led to the Buddha’s spiritual awakening, but not in the way you might expect.  As legend has it, in his search for mahabodhi, or a great awakening, the Buddha left his affluent life and made his way through the Himalayas, seeking out teachers and practices that would help him achieve the end of suffering.  Believing desire to be the root of all despair, the Buddha thought that if he stopped eating, he could achieve this fabled liberation and so he ate only a grain of rice and a sesame seed per day.  In time, he got so thin that it was said you could touch his spine by pressing on his stomach.  Not so surprisingly, he found that he no longer had the strength to meditate and realized that only by eating and regaining his strength could he ever realize Buddhahood.

Part of the ways in which I judge my recovery is in my ability to read an article such as Brown’s and not go out immediately and stock up on lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper with feverish abandon.  The road to recovery is different for everyone, but for me, I know I’ve arrived when instead I think of the incredibly sad and desperate forces that lead women to believe that hope can be sipped through a straw.

It looks like Dutch animal rights group Animals Awake is taking a few cues from Peta, an organization I’ve criticized heartily for treating women like a piece of meat to get men to stop eating meat.

Warning: the video is quite graphic in its depiction of violence against women, so if you’re especially sensitive to this, please don’t watch.  Here’s a sanitized description of it instead: Playboy Playmate and all-around sexy vegetarian Ancilla Tilia is shown performing a Burlesque kind of strip tease for a roomful of ogling men.  It’s all in good taste until a fisherman approaches her and hits her across the face with some kind of fishing instrument that looks like a two-by-four with a hook at the end and proceeds to disembowel her.  The text “Stripping alive is not okay” then flashes on the screen, along with some supplemental text about how thousands of fish are flayed live every day.  The slightly-less-graphic, behind-the-scenes photo shoot is here.

I get the general point of the ad, which is to anthropomorphize animals so that people will see them more as sentient beings and not merely fodder for their dinner plates.  But many vegetarians, including myself, are so because we believe that a culture of violence towards any living creatures breeds a culture of violence towards all living creatures, including and especially women.  Note that these kinds of ads never replace the bodies of tortured, brutalized and murdered animals with images of men – they’re always, always of women.  The deliberate juxtaposition is intended to play on the imagery of women as helpless creatures in need of defending while also using sex to hook potential vegetarian converts, but it’s also more socially acceptable to objectify women as objects of meat than it is men.  That the women themselves volunteer to be presented in this manner doesn’t change the fact that they are complicit in their own sexist exploitation.

There are many ways to get messages of vegetarianism across without doing so on the backs of women.  For shame, Animals Awake, for shame.

Quick — name a famous fat celebrity who isn’t famous just for being fat.  Who comes to mind?  Oprah?  Queen Latifah? Rosie O’Donnell? Beth Ditto?  Now, name a famous thin celebrity.  Too many to list?  Exactly.

Try telling that to Michael McMahon, a so-called “obesity expert” who’s accusing the meager numbers of fat celebrities of proving that it’s possible to be, get this… fat AND successful.  Oh, the horrors!  Reports the British Daily Mail:

Chubby celebrities are stoking the obesity crisis by proving it is possible to be fat and famous, doctors have warned.

Professor McMahon, of the Nuffield Health private healthcare chain, said: ‘The increasing profile of larger celebrities means that being overweight is now perceived as being ‘normal’ in the eyes of the public.

‘We talk about the dangers of skinny media images but the problem actually swings both ways.’*

Oh, really? Maybe British culture is some kind of industrial anomaly and the media there is just busting at the seams with accomplished fat celebs, but here in the U.S., there are few fat folk in television and film with virtually none of them in leading roles and many pigeonholed into stereotypical portrayals of gluttony and sloth.  The accomplishments of even the most successful fat celebs are also often overshadowed by media scrutiny of their weights and bodies.  Beth Ditto, for example, has become quite the successful tour de force, but the focus of any media piece on her is usually on her weight, not on her music or talents itself.

So, is there really a fat hijacking of the media?  Will the entire advertising industry buckle under the weight (no pun intended) of allowing fat people representation and a modicum of self-esteem?  Not likely.  Let’s review the numbers.  According to one recent study of fat stigmatization in television and film:

More recently, Greenberg and colleagues examined 56 different television series from 1999 to 2000 (29). They found that thin women were over-represented (5% of women in American culture are underweight, although a third of television characters are underweight), while 24% of male characters and 13% of female characters were overweight or obese. Heavier characters were more likely to be in minor roles, were less likely to be involved in romantic relationships, had fewer positive interactions than thin characters, and were often the objects of humor

…Herbozo and colleagues (30) found that obesity was equated with negative traits (evil, unattractive, unfriendly, cruel) in 64% of the most popular children’s videos. In 72% of the videos, characters with thin bodies had desirable traits, such as kindness or happiness.

Associating fatness with negative traits certainly exacts its own social toll, but the deliberate exclusion of any group of people can be just as harmful.  It’s long been argued that the color-barrier to television and film perpetuates racial bias and promotes physo-social feelings of exclusion amongst minorities.  Excluding fat people from media representations or portraying them in demeaning representations only serves to breed similar kinds of cultural prejudice and personal dissatisfaction.  Fat people exist and they have much more to offer the world than the butt of sizeist jokes.  Just where would the world be today without the contributions of Alfred Hitchcock, Rosemary Clooney, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, Luciano Pavarotti, Marlon Brando, Lou Costello, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Divine, and perhaps the most famous fattie of them all, Santa Claus?

I don’t know what people object to most — the fact that fat people can be fat and successful, or that they exist at all.

* I’m sure that the fact that Nuffield Health and McMahon both have thriving bariatric surgery practices has absolutely nothing to do with McMahon’s comments.  Nope, no self-serving interests there.

Before I went vegetarian nearly seven years ago, vegetables for me basically came in a handful of varieties: green beans, potatoes, corn, carrots and the lettuce and tomato atop a burger.  Newly-veg enthusiasm and sheer culinary boredom compelled me to expand my agricultural repertoire and I soon began to discover new-to-me fruits and vegetables I love like pink lady apples, plantains, sweet potatoes, dandelion greens and kale, parsnips and okra.  There were a few I still don’t like (eggplant, yuck) but now whenever I see a new fruit or vegetable at the grocery story or farmer’s market, I make it a point to try it.

My latest food find is quince, a small mottled-yellow, lumpy fruit about the size of a large apple.  Quince trees, which produce beautiful large pink flowers, thrive in almost every soil, even on chalk.  It’s thought that the forbidden fruit eaten by Adam and Eve was not an apple, but in fact, a quince.  The fruit was cultivated long before apples in Mesopotamia and was carried by the Greeks into the Eastern Mediterranean.    Charlemagne helped bring it to France about 812 AD and it soon began being traded on the Silk Road.  Quince was quite popular in colonial New England and by 1720 was thriving in Virginia.  The fruit fell from popularity in the states and today is most popular in the Middle East, the Mediterranean and in some Latin American countries, where it’s also used for medicinal purposes and believed to be an aphrodisiac.    The fact that I found quince, which cost only slightly more than a large apple, at my grocer’s in the middle of summer is odd, considering that it is a seasonable cold-weather fruit usually cultivated between early fall and January.  But thanks to recently passed origin-of-food labeling laws, I could see that my quince was grown in Chile.

I had no idea how to prepare quince and with my customary disregard for directions, sliced it and ate it raw.  BIG mistake.  The texture of quince is kind of a mix between an apple and a firm, unripe pear, but the taste is tart and sour and leaves your mouth very dry.  It was only after I googled quince that I discovered that it is most usually eaten cooked, usually in fruit sauces and jams and jellies or it can be peeled, then roasted, baked or stewed.  The tannins that cause the acidic taste in quince supposedly mellow when cooked to produce a fragrant, delicate taste and also turns the fruit a pinkish red color.

I haven’t written quince off yet.  I plan to get a few more and try out some of the simpler recipes I’ve linked to below after the jump.  Has anyone tried a quince recipe or have one to share?   What are some other food finds you’ve discovered?

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I thought Brandon was kidding when he messaged me earlier this morning with the cryptic note, “I think Cary died.”  One hurried Facebook message to Cary’s girlfriend and a phone call a split second later confirmed it.  Cary, one of my husband’s best friends from high school and his former band member, died in a motorcycle crash last night.  He swerved to avoid hitting a piece of rubber in the roadway and lost control of his bike.  He was transported by medical helicopter to one of the best hospitals in the country, but was pronounced dead on arrival.

I only met Cary and his girlfriend several times but Cary was such a gregarious person that it was hard not to become fast friends with him.  They both work(ed) for the circus — he as a musician and she in their H.R. department — and travel(ed) about 350 days a year.   We’d meet up for dinner each time they visited his folks here in town or performed in a nearby city.  The circus was the perfect venue for Cary, a larger-than-life music freak with a passion for performance and thrill-seeking.  I was always a bit awed by his stories of the traipsing through the ancient Redwoods in California, of the light mist shrouding Mount Rainier; envious of his ability to travel around the country with no strings, no encumbrances weighing him down.  He packed a lot of living into his short 33 years.

Brandon is really shaken up.  He came home from work early and as I stood there hugging him, I couldn’t help but wonder what if…  Brandon and Cary are the same age… what if something like this had happened to him.  The very thought of it was simply unbearable.  I guess the message of this post is just to pull your loved ones close and let them know how much they mean to you for you never know when you might lose them.  RIP Cary.  Wherever you are, I hope there’s music.  Lots and lots of good music.

I came across the fifth annual gender conference of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (April, 2007) while writing my dissertation earlier this year.  It’s no surprise that food and gender were chosen as topics of study for the conference; the institute’s Schlesinger Library boasts one of the largest cookbook and culinary collections in the world.  That it’s Harvard explains why the conference featured a veritable who’s who of luminaries in the food and social history fields –  Warren Belasco, Amy Bentley, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Carole Counihan, Kathy Peiss, Laura Shapiro, and Peter Stearns to name a few.  The institute offers video footage of the conference online here.

I came across the Radcliffe link again while organizing my massive lists of bookmarks and thought I’d share it and other helpful links I’ve come acrosss in the way of feminist food studies and ecofeminism. I’m still working on a way to streamline all of these resources in some coherent fashion with the new site design.  If you know of any other pertinent and helpful online links, please post ‘em in the comments below.

Bibliographies and Collections

Feminist Food Studies Bookshelf: My somewhat rudimentary list of some of the most prominent works in the field of feminist food studies.

U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Poverty Tables: Includes the years 1959 - 2006 and distinguishes by family relationship and race; useful in examinations of poverty, food and gender studies.

The University of Pennsylvania offers an online bibliography of works by women on women and food.

Virginia Tech offers a historical list and brief bios of published women cookbook authors.

Feeding America: The Michigan State University project features an “online collection of some of the most important and influential American cookbooks from the late 18th to early 20th century. The digital archive includes page images of 76 cookbooks from the MSU Library’s collection as well as searchable full-text transcriptions. This site also features a glossary of cookery terms and multidimensional images of antique cooking implements from the collections of the MSU Museum.”

About.com’s collection of historical cookbooks: Includes historical recipes, bio on Fannie Farmer and very brief list of other historical cookbooks.

Middle Tennesee State University offers a more comprehensive women’s culinary history bibliography here.

The Ecofeminism Bibliography: Last updated in June, 2008; the site also offers links to other ecofeminist writers and an online archive of its now out-of-print ecofeminist journal.

Media & Images

Duke University’s Emergence of Advertising Collection: The database features more than 9,000 advertising publications from 1850 - 1920, including ads for food and kitchen products.

Ad*Access: Includes more than 7,000 images and advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955 in five main subject areas: Radio, Television, Transportation, Beauty and Hygiene, and World War II.

Sociological Images: Founded by two women with PhDs in sociology, the site examines and critiques images in the media and in advertising for their social implications.

AdClassix: Includes a good selection of midcentury vintage grocery ads.

Livejournal Vintage Ads: Open community where registered members post vintage ad images.

Food & Weight

PBS American Experience Miss America: Includes a list of winners of the Miss America pageant from the pageant’s start in 1921 through 2002, and lists their ages, heights, weights and measurements, allowing researchers to better gauge prevailing beauty standards of a given time in twentieth century American history.

The Body Project: Bibliography offered by Bradley University on women and beauty and weight standards.

Feminism and Weight Bibliography: Offered by the Council on Size and Weight Discrimination.

Since getting the bunnies last fall, it’s occurred to me more and more how much “rabbit food” gets a bad rap.  Rabbit food is commonly associated with dieting and deprivation or it’s thought to be the dietary mainstay of granola-munching, tree-hugging vegetarians — both of which make it sound as appealing as munching on cardboard.  The relationship with salad is even more complicated for fat folk, for whom eating anything beyond a dry salad in public becomes Exhibit A as to why they’re (presumed to be) fat.

The breakfast bowls I serve the bunnies are far from bland, however (a typical bunny breakfast can include any of the following: kale, mustard greens, watercress, escarole, raw green beans, carrots, parsley, cilantro, lettuce, grapes, raisins, dried cranberries, apples, plums, nectarines, etc…).  Often times their salad bowls rival that of any overpriced salad served in snooty restaurants and at a fraction of the cost.  So, in honor of the under-recognized salad, here’s my own favorite and, of course, simple recipe, which I happen to think is the Best. Salad. Ever.

• Lettuce (I prefer a mix of Romaine and red lettuce, but any lettuce will do)
• Kalamata olives
• Pepperocinis (I add these sparingly, since they’re spicy)
• Sprinkling of feta cheese
• Ken’s Steakhouse Lite Olive Oil Vinaigrette (Kraft has a similar variety, but I prefer Ken’s)
• Ground pepper to taste

Combine and enjoy.

What’s your favorite salad combo?

I was born a few years late to have ever sported a red leather jacket and rhinestone-studded glove, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t almost sprain an ankle trying to “Moon Walk” or wasn’t spooked silly by Thriller.  Michael Jackson was too big for any one decade to contain; his music transcended the pop culture zeitgeist and influenced generations in every reach of the globe.

In recent years, the King of Pop has come to be known more as Wacko Jacko for his strange dalliances with young boys and increasingly freakish figure.  Like the lead character of his appropriately-named Neverland ranch, Jackson, with his breathy girlish voice, frail figure and appeals of innocent love, appeared a perpetual man-child, a modern-day Peter Pan.  But Jackson may have had more in common with J.M. Barrie, the deeply conflicted and sexually-suspect author of Peter Pan, than he did with the boy who woudn’t grow up.  Despite an adoring public and legions of devotees, Jackson’s childhood appeared sad and lonely, which, perhaps, explains some of his later eccentricities.  In a 1993 interview with Oprah, he recalled his childhood, saying that in puberty — “very sad, sad years for me” — his father Joseph routinely called him ugly, “and I would cry every day.”  When Oprah asked if his father ever beat him, Jackson forced a smile even as he said yes, adding that sometimes when he saw his father coming, he’d become so upset that he threw up.  Then, in an aside to his father, added, “I’m sorry.  Please don’t be mad at me.”

After showing images of Jackson as a child, Oprah asked him, “when you look in the mirror now and see the image that looks back at you are there days when you say I kinda like this, or I like the way my hair…?”    Jackson replied, “no, I’m never pleased with myself. No, I try not to look in the mirror.”  He also told Oprah about his identification with another outsider, John Merrick, the unfortunately-disfigured, good-hearted creature known as the Elephant Man.  “I love the story,” he said.  “It reminds me of me a lot… It made me cry because I saw myself in the story.”  Jackson’s own disfigurement began shortly after his career went extraterrestial.  His skin went from a beautiful cocoa bronze to a pallid fishbelly white, his nose became narrower until his nostrils collapsed, he had permanent eyeliner tattooed around his eyes, his cheekbones lifted and his jawline squared.  A German plastic surgeon who agreed try and fix his rotting nose in the late 1990s said that Jackson was addicted to plastic surgery, which is, of course, a classic sign of body dysmorphia disorder.

Perhaps my most favorite song of Jackson’s is Man in the Mirror (lyrics after the jump).  I only wish that Jackson himself had ever been able to look in a mirror and like and accept the reflection staring back at him.

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Sara Ziff was “discovered” by a modeling scout while walking home from school one day at the age of 14. By age 20, she was out-earning her father, a university neurobiologist.  Now 27, the former Calvin Klein and Dolce & Gabbana model and her filmmaker boyfriend spent five years recording parties, castings, inside hotel rooms and backstage.  That footage can now be seen in their new documentary Picture Me, which won the audience award for best picture at the Milan Film Festival last month.  The film shows the all-too-often sexual objectification, harassment and exploitation that comes with the job of being a model.  Newsweek features an interview with Zeff here.   Some highlights:

[On the sexual abuse of young models...]

For the most part, people on these shoots are completely professional, so no girl who has one or two bad experiences—which she’s bound to have—is going to call home and say, “Mom, Dad, I just got molested.” Because she knows she’s going to be on the next bus back to Kansas.

And does the industry just turn a blind eye?
The agents are supposed to act as surrogate parents for these girls, but oftentimes, what’s in the agency’s best interest is not in the best interest of the girl. The average age of a model is something like 14. So you’ve got really young girls being put in these potentially compromising situations in a totally unregulated industry. A lot of the time they’re underage and working with predatory men. But the problem is the models are disposable, so they’re not in a position to complain.

What do you think about the media focus on the extreme thinness of models? Are there bigger issues in the industry?
You can’t talk about body image without talking about the extreme youth of models. Fourteen- and 15-year-old girls can be thin in a way that’s impossible for a 30-year-old; they are young and gangly, and that’s natural. What’s not natural is for a full-grown woman to aspire to that.

The Guardian did a more in-depth article on Ziff, her background and the film here.  The trailer, as linked to on the film’s website, is below.

My sister used to be an avid fan of Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica.  Don’t judge — she was a celebrity-obsessed teenager, plus Nick is an inspiration to all those desperate to leave the conservative confines of Cincinnati. I hated my job at the time and on my lunchbreaks would take refuge at her place, where I’d be treated to such cable treats as Newlyweds and Pimp My Ride.  After a few lunchbreak snippets of Newlyweds, I could totally see how Nick could claim irreconcilable differences as grounds for divorce — let’s just say that Jessica Simpson does nothing for the blonde stereotype.  Now the pop-singer-turned-reality-TV-star-turned-country-singer is returning to her roots — no, not those roots — in a new VH1 show called The Price of Beauty.

The show, inspired by her recent weight battles, will follow Jessica and a pal as they travel the globe exploring what different cultures find beautiful and why.  In the press release, Jeff Olde, EVP of VHI programming and production, said that Jessica is the perfect host for such a show because:

Perhaps more than any other pop culture figure on the radar today, Jessica Simpson has been the target of our obsession with beauty on both sides of the equation. She is a woman who can set trends and create firestorms with a single photo.  We could not be more thrilled that Jessica now gets to take control of that conversation and take a look at the idea of beauty through her own unique, unfiltered lens.

And according to an insider, Jessica plans to  even try some of the “shocking things that women do to make themselves beautiful. Picture Fear Factor.”  Hmm… something tells me that Mauritania’s “wife-fattening farms” won’t be included on the itinerary.   The show begins filming next month and will premier next year. What do you think?  Could this be Jessica’s calling or will she just offend local customs and give Americans a bad rap?   Will you be tuning in?