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morsmordrehasbeensaved · 7 years ago

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CONGRATULATIONS HALEY, YOU HAVE BEEN ACCEPTED AS BENITO ORTIZ WITH THE FACECLAIM OF ETHAN CUTKOSKY!

Halsey!!! You know I absolutely adore all of the characters you already have, but I think Benito might be my new favorite! The amount of detail you put in and the dedication you show to this character was absolutely spectacular, and I can not wait to have him on our dashboards

Check out our acceptance checklist right here on what to do next!

♔ OUT OF CHARACTER INFO ♔

NAME/ALIAS:

Haley

AGE:

PREFERRED PRONOUNS:

She/Her

TIMEZONE & ACTIVITY:

PST (damn..) and Hella Active

TRIGGERS:

nah

ANYTHING ELSE:

nah

♔ IN CHARACTER INFO ♔

FULL NAME:

Benito Carlos Ortiz, with a few select people who call him Benny

FACECLAIM:

Ethan Cutkosky

BIRTHDAY AND AGE:

December 10th, 1961. He just turned 17.

HOUSE AND YEAR:

Sixth Year, Hufflepuff

AFFILIATION:

Neutral as hell

BLOODSTATUS:

Muggleborn

PRONOUNS:

He/Him

SEXUALITY/ROMANTIC ORIENTATION:

Just a regular ole’ straight guy. Heterosexual/romantic

EXTRACURRICULARS:

Art Club

DESCRIPTION:

You’ve never been give a fair shot at the shiny things in life, and this has left you bitter, distrustful, and angry. No matter how hard you’ve worked, you’ve never been able to have what other people have. So, you’ve decided that you’ll just start taking them for yourself. The muggle world let you down, and so has the wizarding world, and you’re starting to believe that there is no such thing as a good person, only those that are willing to take their lives into their own hands. With your work ethic, and your creativity at solving seemingly impossible problems, you know that everything is yours for the taking. So, go on and take it.

PERSONALITY TRAITS:

(-) Audacious: Living in the slums, as well as being the youngest of his siblings forced Benito to learn how to stand up for himself. Whether that meant fighting with his older brother and sister to get the most comfy spot on their shared bed, or if it meant a risky steal so that he could put some food in his belly later that night. To survive in the area he did, one had to learn to be brave, or else they would never make it. It also gave Benito a certain aggression against the “haves”, considering he was decidedly a “have not” so sometimes, he just like to steal the purse of some rich old lady when she wasn’t looking. Sometimes it was for survival, sometimes it was not.

(-) Fierce: It was hard to make it in Benito’s house, and in order to be heard, one had to be loud and proud in their emotions. He feels things intently, whether that be happiness or anger. If happy, he might dance like fool or shout giddily into the air. If angry, he’s prone to throwing objects and is more than willing to get violent. While sometimes this helps Benito, more often than not, it doesn’t make things better.

(-) Hedonistic: Being forced to live a life that withheld a lot of life’s pleasures (vacations, good food, a room of his own, etc) has led Benito to believe that he ought to snatch up fun whenever he sees it. Unfortunately, this can manifest in both good and bad ways. Sometimes, it could be good. He might skive off class to work on a sculpture, but he also would never tell anybody no for a drink, even if he might have a class later that day to show up for.

(-) Greedy: Growing up as neglected and poor as he was, he has a tendency to seek out the better things of other people. He wants to have the same luxuries as other people, and is angry about how hard it is. He’s come to believe that he deserves what they have, and will take any measure to get there. Money is important to him, perhaps too much, and it is his main thing that drives him.

(+/-) Bold/Brash: Benito wasn’t scared of anything, at least nothing so far. Sometimes, it was to his benefit, because more often than not, most people assumed he was bluffing when he said he wasn’t afraid to fight. Other times, it was to his detriment, like when he attempted to curse someone of a far superior dueling skill. There isn’t much that he isn’t willing to do if he truly wants to, and there isn’t a single person he would back down from, for better or, for worse.

(+) Hard-working: Laziness wasn’t an option for Benito, not if he wanted a new pair of shoes, or the really cool toy that everyone else in primary school had. Or, at the worst of times, if he wanted to eat. In the Ortiz house, everyone worked for their share, from the moment they were able. He had to throw himself into what he was doing, no matter what it was, and it created within him an excellent work ethic. However, he is only hardworking on the things he feels have value, not those imposed on him by other people. He has his own goals in mind that are often different to those around him, and that is what he is always working towards.

(+) Confident: Benito is a hard worker, and he’s creative too. He has all of the traits to put his ideas into motion, and this has given him confidence. He trusts in his ability to follow through with his plans, and he knows that if he works hard enough, he can accomplish any goal he sets his mind too. Whether the goal be to beat someone up in a fight, or to best them in a duel, or to get Imogen to forgive him for something stupid he did, or to find a way to steal that necklace from that new Gryffindor girl without her noticing. He can do it, he knows it.

(+) Vivacious: Benito’s life was rough, yes, but it was not all bad. All of his family were very loud and outspoken people who knew how to have a good time. If there wasn’t a fight occuring in the house, then there was a party. His father’s laugh was booming and loud, and his mother spoke too excitedly when she was having fun. His brother often like to dance around the kitchen, and his sister was never afraid to trap Benito in a friendly headlock. This has given him an appreciation for fun, and the good times in life. He enjoys them wholeheartedly, and without reservation.

(+) Loyal: Benito is not a very trusting boy. He’s been let down too many times in his life for him to find it easy to trust someone, or something. It takes a long time for him to let down his walls enough to truly dedicate himself to something, but once he does, he extremely dedicated. He will do anything, no matter the risks, if it something he believes in. He’s committed to Imogen, and would do anything for her. He’s committed to the pursuit of money, and damn it, he would be rich one day. He’s committed to his family, and helping them make it in the world. It would be a cold day in hell for Benito Ortiz to back away from something he has pledged himself to

BIOGRAPHY:

“Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.” That was a quote from Galileo, some scientist, or whoever, that he had heard a little about during his primitive years of schooling. Benito Carlos Ortiz put a lot of stock into names, as was tradition among his father’s side of the family. Benito’s father, Hernando Ortiz, was born in Mexico during the winter of 1930. His name meant adventurous, as would prove to be true when the young boy grew up. Mexico was experiencing a lot of change during Hernando’s youth. President Cárdenas rose into power when Hernando was a boy, and began attempting to enact a vast amount of social change. However, the Ortiz family was very poor, living in a small rural village, and many of these benefits never reached them. They stayed in a single room shack together: his mother, his father, and all four of his siblings. Life was hard, and Hernando felt as he got older that it only got even more difficult. When Hernando was ten years old, World War II was ravaging the world, and his father enlisted in the Mexican Army, which was planning to help America after the attack on Pearl Harbor. That was the last time that Hernando ever saw his padre. Six years later, Mexico had a new leader: President Alemán. Life had been tough, and scary ever since his father had died, and things were more divided than ever between the rich and the poor. So, with one bag tossed over his shoulder, Hernando walked away from his village at the tender age of sixteen, to see if he might fair better somewhere else in the world.

He snuck upon a supply ship to Portugal and lived off of the few items of food he had brought with him. When that ran out, he ate the rats that scurried to and fro across the lower deck. It was hard, but Hernando was used to such things. Eventually, however, he reached Portugal, and life truly began. He spent a year in Portugal, sometimes managing to scrounge enough money to stay in an inn, but lots of times he just had to sleep on the street. After Portugal, he headed to France, hoping he might have better luck in the Country of Love. However, he didn’t find it quite to his liking, and quickly moved on over to Spain. Hernando loved Spain a lot, for he knew the language they spoke. He’d had quite a rough time these past two years, struggling to learn different languages in order to converse with the people around him. Spain was a nice break from this. He was seventeen when he arrived in Spain, and he stayed there until nearly his twentieth birthday. He worked a variety of odd jobs and stayed in a small, rundown flat with three amigos he’d met at work. However, as his name demanded, Hernando had a thirst for adventure, and eventually, he moved on. From Spain, he headed to Great Britain. As with France, he didn’t stay long, and moved again before the year ended. From Britain, he headed to Northern Ireland, Belfast specifically, where he would find himself staying for quite a long time. It was on his twenty second birthday when he got the job at the local Ship Carpentry. It was fine work for a single man, and he was happy where he was.

Two years after his move to Ireland, in the year 1954, Hernando met Annabel Buckley.

Annabel was also born in the winter, but in the year 1938. Her name meant delight to be around, and the surname of Buckley meant servant. Both of these things would prove true, for awhile anyways. Annabel was born into a quaint, small, and loving Irish family. She had an older sister, whom she loved dearly, and she got on splendidly with her mother and father, as most toddlers did. When she was of the tender age of three, Annabel’s mother was killed in the 1941 bombings of Belfast. At the time, Annabel’s father was fighting on the war front against Germany, where he too succumbed to battle. This left Annabel and her older sister alone and orphaned. Annabel doesn’t remember this too much, considering her young age. Her older sister, however, worked hard to make sure that the pair was provided for. Eventually, after an entire year of living on the street with many other orphaned children, Annabel’s older sister was able to find work in a Belfast pub, ran by a kind, elderly couple. They allowed Annabel and her sister room and board in exchange for work, and this is where the girls stayed for most of their lives. As she grew up, Annabel took on more and more responsibility in the pub, eventually becoming one of their more favored servers. She was beautiful, with golden blonde hair and shining green eyes. Her cheeks always had a rosy sort of glow to them, and she was wonderfully charismatic to boot. It was no wonder that Hernando couldn’t tear his eyes away from her. And, to remind you, her name did mean ‘delight to be around.’

Annabel was sixteen when the devilishly handsome, and worldly travelled Mexican man came into the small village pub in which she resided. She sat him at his table, and immediately, the two couldn’t keep their eyes off of one another. The chemistry was almost touchable in the air between them, and it didn’t take long for the two to come together in an incredibly passionate, heavily romantic relationship. Annabel often remarked that Hernando made her feel like the woman in the romantic moving pictures at the theater, and Hernando often claimed that she was the first thing that truly made him feel alive. They were awfully in love with one another, and that love culminated in a pregnancy, two months from the day that they met. Hernando, who truly did love Annabel, wanted to do right by his amor, thus, the pair was married just a month after they discovered the pregnancy. And, for a bit, they seemed every bit the picture perfect family. Eight months after their marriage, in the (again) winter of the year 1955, Elena Ortiz was born. Hernando chose her name, which meant Light, for he considered his darling daughter to be the true light of his life. He fell into fatherhood with a delightful ease, and found that he could spend hours cooing and smiling at his hija pequeña. The small little family did not have much money, but they had more than enough love to fill their one bedroom house. For the first time in his life, Hernando Ortiz felt grounded and settled. For the first time in her life, Annabel Ortiz felt like she had a full and complete family again.

A year and a half later, when Elena was in that adorable early-toddler stage, Annabel fell pregnant again. Like with Elena, this had been an accident, but Hernando and Annabel were decidedly less excited about it, this time around. Another child would cost a lot of money, and they were only barely making ends meet at the current moment. Not to mention, they lived in a house with only a single bedroom. This brought Hernando back to his childhood, reminding him of the one bedroom shack he’d shared with his large family. He wanted to do better by his own children, so he relocated them to a different house, one with two bedrooms. However, it was a bit more expensive, and when their son was born, both Hernando and Annabel felt that they were at their wits end. Like he had with Elena, Hernando chose the name for his eldest son as well. Leonardo Ortiz, whose name meant Brave As A Lion, was born in the early summer, June of 1957. The family began to struggle in a way they never had before, just to put bread and cheese on the table. Hernando started working a lot of doubles, and began drinking a lot to cope with it. Annabel, who had always been a bit of a drinker, did the same. The resulting stress, drunkenness, and anger that came from this began to sour the previously loving and devoted relationship that Hernando and Annabel shared. They grew violent, the both of them, and it was began to be commonplace for the neighbors to hear loud screams and breaking glass over the sound of small children crying.

Still, Hernando and Annabel had made vows to one another, vows that they refused to break. They hoped that one day, things would be easier. They kept faith that one day they would find a way to love each other like they used to. Unfortunately, those days never came. The months continued to tick by for the Ortiz family, and they lived in a sort of limbo for many years, flipping rapidly between awful fights and wonderful family bonding. Around the time that Leonardo was two years old, Hernando fell back into contact with the family he had left behind in Mexico so many years ago. He began speaking to his mother again, and his brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts, and even his abuela, who was somehow still alive. He began to make annual visits to them, though he could never afford to bring his wife and children along with him.

Years later, in the early spring of 1961, Annabel fell pregnant once more. The family, at this point, had gotten used to their low income and had found means to survive around it. They weren’t happy, but they weren’t necessarily unhappy either. It was in this strange middle ground that Annabel and Hernando’s third child, and second son, was born. Like his father, mother, and sister, the child was born in the month of December. Hernando, as was tradition by now, chose the name. He gave the boy the first name of Benito, which meant Blessed. He hoped that the name would rain down good fortune on his son one day, and that the good fortune might trickle down to the rest of the family. Benito Carlos Ortiz always kept this in mind, believing it to be his duty to gift blessings to his family one day.

With Benito’s arrival, the Ortiz was complete, and the real story can now begin.

Benito was a happy baby, and an even happier toddler. He shared a room, as well as a bed, with his big sister and brother. During these young years of his, he was quite close with Leonardo, who was only four years older than him. From the moment that Benito was walking, the two brothers ran all around the house, causing mischief for their mother, father, and sister. Leonardo was Benito’s first role model. However, that’s not to discredit Elena. Elena, his bright and smart big sister, was the one who taught him how to survive in a world as poor as theirs. Not to mention that she also sacrificed a lot of her own toys and happiness so that her brothers might enjoy a happier childhood than she had. The family was close, despite the rather wild fights they often got into, and Benito has always looked back on this as his happiest time, the only time he could remember his family truly being a unit, albeit a dysfunctional one. Sure, their family could fight. In fact, they knew how to do this very well. Benito’s spent his childhood watching his mother throw a fist in his father’s face, and then watching as his father threw her to the ground in retaliation. He had never really been too bothered by such things, figuring that this was just the way life was. Besides, as much as they knew how to fight, they also knew how to have a good time. Alcohol permeated their family, and the community around them, and Benito honestly couldn’t remember one of their good times that wasn’t helped by the influence of alcohol. Some of his fondest memories were watching as his father and brother tapped their glasses of tequila together in a companionable gesture before tossing the liquid down their throats. He looks back fondly on their nights seated around the kitchen table, playing cards and singing old traditional family songs together: Irish and Mexican alike. Benito and Leonardo often wrestled, and while Benito never won, he always had fun. His sister loved to dance, and even more than that, she loved to wrangle her reluctant brothers into dancing with her. His childhood, while not perfect, was not entirely awful either. Sure, it was hard, and there were nights that he went without food. But there was love in his heart, and in his household, so he knew that he would be alright.

However, all of that changed when he was just seven years old.

For all of his life, Benito knew that his father had family back in his home country of Mexico. After all, he left home for a two weeks once a year to go and visit them. However, one day, just after Hernando had returned from his weekly visit to Mexico, Annabel found something while looking through his suitcases. There was a small envelope, hidden beneath a secret little flap, that was filled with pictures. Pictures of Hernando with some woman, a woman who was not Annabel. And, if that weren’t bad enough, there pictures of children. Two, to be specific. They were both girls, and they both looked to be similar to Benito’s age. There with pictures of the girls, of the woman, and of Hernando with all of them together. Annabel dug a little further, and dug up some love letters, written to Hernando by a woman named Amanda, who she presumed to be the woman in the pictures. She couldn’t understand them, for they were written in Spanish, so she brought them to Elena to translate. Elena read them, growing angrier and angrier with every word her eyes ran over, and when she finished, she looked up to face her mother with furious tears in her eyes. It seemed that Hernando had started another family, all the way across the world, and he’d kept it hidden from them for years. Now, it made complete sense why he had never brought his wife or children to meet his mother, or grandmother, or brothers and sister. Annabel wondered if he had brought this Amanda to visit them, or the two little girls. She wondered if his mother even knew about Elena, or Leonardo, or Benito? For the first time in her life, Annabel wanted to be rid of Hernando.

And so, she confronted her husband one day, after he had finished a fifteen hour shift. He stepped through the door, looking weary and tired and in dire need of a shower. Annabel didn’t care, and she flung the photos and the letters right into his face. The resulting fight was spectacular, the worst one that Benito had ever seen in his seven years of life. Leonardo jumped in at one point, trying to use his lanky eleven year old body to protect his mother. Hernando was enraged at the disrespect shown to him by his son, and things looked as if they would continue to get worse. But, then Elena stepped in. Faced with his beloved daughter’s disappointment, rage, and hurt, Hernando couldn’t face it. He fled up to his room, packed a bag, and walked right out the front door, never to be seen again by the four remaining Ortiz’s.

The absence of their father shattered the family, and from then on, they began to splinter off into different directions. Annabel turned even more so to drink, especially now that she had to work to support the children alone. She grew angry, and bitter. Benito didn’t think her name was true anymore, for she was most definitely not a delight to be around. She was mean, and she was always drunk. It became commonplace for her to pass out on their couch, surrounded in a pool of her own alcohol, or, if she was really drunk, a pool of her own vomit, or urine.

Elena grew angry too, and stopped looking out for her little brothers quite so much. The three children had to contribute to the household now, and since they were eleven and seven, Elena considered them old enough to do so. After all, she was thirteen. It was high time she started looking out for herself after spending so many years helping those around her. She grew closer with Annabel, however, and never blamed her for her drunken depression. She placed the blame firmly on the shoulders of her padre, who she know hated with a fiery passion.

Leonardo felt the same way, for he had never gotten along with father. To Hernando, Leonardo’s arrival had signalled the beginning of the bad times. To Leonardo, Hernando was angry, drunken man who couldn’t appreciate the loving family that he had around him. Leonardo was only eleven when his father left, but he was now the man of the house, and he took it upon himself to start bringing in money. For the past year, he had begun to spend more time with the other boys in the neighborhood, since the age and maturity gap between him and Benito had become a little much. The boys that Leonardo was spending his time with were other poor street kids like himself, and they’d developed a reputation for being a band of troublemakers. It wasn’t that hard for them to turn towards things a little more illegal, especially to make some money, so by the age of twelve, Leonardo had made a small name for himself by selling marijuana. The work wasn’t always safe, especially where they lived, but it brought in money.

Benito, only seven when his father left, wasn’t quite sure what to do, but he very quickly found his calling. It wasn’t all that hard, really. He discovered that if he went to the more wealthy side of town, many people didn’t lock their cars or back doors. It was all too easy for him to slip inside and fill his pockets with their expensive watches and jewelry. He was quite good at it, too, what with his small size. He could hide in spots that adult burglars could never, and he made a heavy profit from it. Soon enough, he grew more and more bold. He taught himself how to unlock a locked vehicle, using his neighbors beat-up lemon of a car for practice. From there, came stealing from stores. First, petty shoplifting. But, soon enough, Benito could walk out of a store with a bag filled and not a single employee wise to his crimes. Sure, every now and then he had close calls. He was eight years old the first time that someone caught him, but he was fast, and he easily made an escape by sliding down the flagpole next to the apartment building.

He was nine years old the first time that it wasn’t so easy to get away, but he’d surprised the man by giving him a swift kick to the bollocks. Grown adults were always surprised when children fought back. It was almost nothing for Benito to dash through the front door to escape from the foliage. There was a thrill in stealing, and a pride that Benito did not get from anything else. He often laid in bed at night, turning his wrist over so that he could examine whatever flashy and new watch he had stolen that day. It made him feel rich, which was ever so relieving since he was ever so poor.

It was actually during one of his little escapades when he noticed something very strange about himself. He was ten years old now, and he was in someone’s house. He had no shoes on, only his socks, because it made it easier for him to slip around unheard. He was being risky today, sneaking into a house while the owners were home, but he was confident that he could do it. He had just scampered onto their dining table, hands extending for the diamond coverings on their chandelier, when he accidentally knocked the vase on their table over with his foot. He swiveled around in alarm, lunging for it so that he could stop it from rolling off the edge, but he was too far. It rolled, rolled, and then began to tip over, and despite knowing he couldn’t stop it, he reached for it anyways. But then the most peculiar thing happened. Rather than falling off the table and loudly shattering all over the ground, it simply returned to its original, upright position. Benito thought he had imagined the whole thing, for he just couldn’t explain it. Not then, anyways.

He was eleven years old when a very strange man came to his house. He was tall, and he had a beard that seemed to go down forever. Not to mention, he looked very, very old. Perhaps the oldest man that Benito had ever seen. He would never forget the day when the man came to visit. He knocked on the door mid-morning. Benito was on the couch, in only his underwear and socks. He had a bowl of cereal in his lap and was trying to make out what was happening on their television, which was very cheap and only in black and white. Elena had answered the door, and when she came in with a strange expression on her face and told Benito that someone was at the door for him, his life changed forever.

It hadn’t been too hard for Benito to believe, not after the man demonstrated his strange powers. Turns out, the man had a strange name too. Albus Dumbledore. The surname sounded foreign and blocky on Benito’s lips. Albus Dumbledore, apparently, was the headmaster of a wizarding school. A wizarding school that they wanted him, Benito, to go to. He was shocked, and so was his family. After they got over their initial disbelief, they had a million questions to ask. Professor Dumbledore was patient, and he answered everything they had to ask. Benito felt embarrassed when his mother asked if the school cost any money, and then scared a second later. Would he be denied entry to this school simply because he was poor? Thankfully, Professor Dumbledore said they had a fund for helping underprivileged students. He said that Benito would have to get most of his things secondhand, but that was fine. Everything else he owned was, anyways.

And so, when summer rolled around, Benito and his family followed the directions left by Professor Dumbledore to travel to the wizarding village of Diagon Alley. It was hard to get there, since London was no easy drive from Belfast. Benito was half scared that the Professor Dumbledore wizard-man had been lying, and this was all just a scam! A clever, genius, well thought out scam, but a scam nonetheless. But, as it turns out, it was no scam. Diagon Alley was a real, live place and Benito and his family stared in awe at the sight of it. Annabel hurriedly made her way to the Leaky Cauldron to see if wizarding alcohol worked the same as muggle alcohol. (It worked better). Benito, however, set off on his own, wandering through each and every shop in search of his supplies.

Benito had just stepped into Ollivander’s Wand shop, when he saw her. She was about his size, though she looked a lot less out of place than he did. What on earth was everyone wearing? It was strange. Some people looked as wild as some of the strange figures that wandered the area of that one weird alleyway by his house! She got his wand first, and when he saw the sparks shoot from the end of it in a wonderful display of color, he couldn’t help but to exclaim in surprise. That had drawn her attention, and the two fell into conversation. He found out that her name was Imogen, and that she was also starting at Hogwarts in the fall. They didn’t talk long, but he felt good when he left the store, hardly taking the time to be surprised that he had warmed up so quickly. Once he had his wand, he was finished, and he headed to the bar to collect his extremely inebriated mother.

Now, all Benito had to do was wait.

September the First came quickly, and before he knew it, Benito found himself seated alone in a compartment on a train called The Hogwarts Express. He’d hoped to sit alone for the ride, but that seemed impossible. However, to his happy surprise, the face that popped into the compartment was one he recognized. It was the Imogen girl he’d met at Ollivanders! The two ended up sitting together, and when they arrived at Hogwarts, they were sorted into Hufflepuff as well.

Five years later, Benito is in the peak of his sixth year. His grades are alright, but he doesn’t really care about that. He had no intention of going into the Ministry of Magic, or really working at all in the Wizarding World. No, no, Benito Carlos Ortiz had bigger plans than that. After all, he was born to be blessed. No, Benito planned to use his magical powers and natural aptitude for sneaky things to live nice and breezy in the muggle world. And in the meantime, he would steal from his fellow wizards. After all, many of them didn’t respect him for who his parents were, so why should he show them the respect of allowing them to keep their belongings? The war is heating up around him, and Benito is more than ready to defend himself. But, he means to only defend himself. He had learned a long time ago that it was a dog-eat-dog world, and he knew better than to think the wizarding world was any different.

Benito Ortiz decided to not concern himself with the opinion of people that didn’t matter. He had Imogen, he had the Hufflepuffs, and he had his family. Nobody else mattered, and he wouldn’t lie and pretend that he thought they did. What he planned on doing was making as much money as he possibly could, in any means that he possibly could, and if he could, he’d try to find his dad along the way.

CONNECTIONS:

Imogen Connolly: His first friend and current girlfriend. Benito and Imogen have been together for what feels like forever, and there isn’t a single person on the planet that he feels more love for. He feels like they’re soulmates, and can’t imagine his life without her.

Katherine Bradbury: She’s new to the school, and she looks rich, so he’s got his eye on her. He doesn’t take her seriously, not really, and he finds it rather funny that she’s an American. But, he did hear a rumor about her ruining a debutante ball, so perhaps there is more to her than meets the eye.

Lucius Malfoy: Malfoy stands for everything that Benito detests, so he often tries to get on his nerves. But, more so than that, Benito has been stealing from him here and there for six years now. He has so much money that its almost easy.

ADDITIONAL INFO:

He’s a Sagittarius Sun, and an Aries Moon. Some quotes from this website that apply to Benito are, (1) “Even though you are smart and perceptive, your emotional growth lags behind your understanding.” (2) “A Sagittarius-Aries is fearless about speaking their mind and has been so since a young age. No other mixture personifies such blunt outspokenness. You have no inhibitions but have the courage to say precisely what you feel. You are active, capricious, and very independent. Everything is as you see it. It does not matter what others think, you are forthright and fearless.” (3) “You need be careful of that rather big ego of yours.”

Benito really likes the movie, “The Godfather”

Benito speaks Spanish, though not as well as he used to

Benito is really into sculpting, and astrology.

His class schedule is: Charms, Arithmancy, Divination, Potions, Transfiguration, and Defense Against the Dark Arts

#morsmordre accepted #benito ortiz #hp rp #marauders era rp

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whatfilmwasthat · 5 years ago

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Cidade de Deus (2002)

Cidade de Deus, located in the West Zone of Rio de Janeiro (Close to where I grew up), began to be built and occupied in the course of the 1960s. Decades later, amid the debates generated around the exhibition of the film of the same name, Mauro Magalhães, leader of the Carlos Lacerda government in the Legislative Assembly at the time of the then State of Guanabara, stated that the housing complex, left by Lacerda in the final stage of construction, it was not intended to house the favela population. This would have been contemplated with the Kennedy, Aliança, Esperança and other villages, being the City of God built to shelter the civil servants of the old city-state. According to Magalhães, in the beginning of 1966, during the Negrão de Lima government, a great flood occurred in the city, and the buildings, still unfinished, were invaded by the flagellates, who took up residence there.

In its original composition, Cidade de Deus was formed mainly by ex-residents from different parts of the city, who came from different favelas located in the South Zone. The consequence of this context for Cidade de Deus was the practically inevitable destination of the end of 1980 and 1990: the slum or the creation of what is now, according to some of its residents, a horizontal slum made of reinforced concrete. Over time, the situation of legality, that is, the public policies that led to its creation in the 1960s, gave way to a community that is increasingly entering into lawlessness, from the official point of view, as a way of survival. in the ingenuity of its residents, in the activities of the informal economy or the action of organized crime.

The toponymy in Cidade de Deus is a unique feature, referring to the address of the Divine, suggested by its name. It is not necessary to go far to recognize that this notion is reinforced in the biblical nomenclature existing in several of its places. Examples of such a sacred nominate are evidenced in the innumerable reverences to the prophets, as in the street Moses and the street Elias, in the references to the kings, in the streets David and Solomon, in the mentions to the Sacred Scriptures, in the Square of the Bible, in the street Genesis and the street of the Numbers. There is an allusion to the relevant points of religious convergence, such as the side street Jerusalem or to great biblical characters, such as on Avenida José de Arimateia. In the same direction, we observe reference to the elevation of the spirit, in Rua da Luz, and to the Promised Land, in the lane Canaã, in a mention to the so-called “land of milk and honey”.

Regarding its origin, the most current version states that the name of the neighborhood (as well as its streets) alludes to the book written by Saint Augustine, entitled "De Civitate Dei" (from Latin, The City of God). Over the years, however, there is a confrontation established between this deific notion contained in his name and the idea of a space for crime and fear acquired by the neighborhood, especially reinforced by the exhibition and the great success of the film " God's city". Anyway, the toponymy Cidade de Deus by itself is already endowed with a characteristic symbolic dimension, once loaded with positive and negative meanings, built over time and contrasting with the reality of the neighborhood that, even with a biblical name, can still be seen as a synonym of a needy and violent area, but, at the same time, creative and pulsating in Rio de Janeiro.

The film, directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund and nominated in the categories of direction, adapted script, edition and photography for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (informally known as Oscar), was inspired by the homonymous novel by Paulo Lins, whose script addressed the place from the perspective of organized crime. In this sense, the plot and the drama of the acclaimed production made many believe that it was a faithful picture about the neighborhood, disregarding that it was a fictional work. This perspective inspired a negative judgment about the locality, its residents and, by extension, the daily life of Rio. Thus, the film of international repercussion has become a symbol often repudiated by an expressive portion of the inhabitants of the neighborhood, considering that it has generalized banditry and assigned a name and address to organized crime: Cidade de Deus.

A curious fact is that the entire first part of the film, Cidade de Deus in the 1960s, was shot at the Nova Sepetiba housing estate, which, despite being partially occupied, had not been officially opened. The second phase, Cidade de Deus in the 1970s, was held in a complex built at the same time, Cidade Alta. However, the third phase, the neighborhood in the 1980s, was filmed in Cidade de Deus itself and also in the studio, with a view to safety and to facilitate its production.

The great exposure in the media made many looks to the neighborhood. In one of the attempts to stimulate the local economy, for example, a community bank was opened and the social currency CDD was introduced, whose banknotes are emblazoned with the faces of iconic community personalities. Also, Cidade de Deus, among many other locations, came to be chosen as one of the points of celebration for the anniversary of our city, with the presence of renowned Brazilian artists. It has also received the presence of the singer and presenter Xuxa, the Colombian singer Shakira, the actress and presenter Regina Casé, the four-time football champion Ronaldo Nazário, the heir princess of Denmark Mary Elizabeth, as well as the most powerful man on the planet, Barack Obama, president the United States, among others. However, in its recent history, the most illustrious resident of the neighborhood is the most illustrious resident, rapper MV Bill - a recurring presence in the editions of the Criança Esperança program and who even acted in the teen soap Malhação -, the funk singer Tati Quebra Barraco and Rafaela Silva, the first Brazilian woman to win a world judo champion.

Due to its uniqueness, the neighborhood tends to be in the national and global spotlight. And with that, a new reality emerges in this context, due to social projects and government actions aimed at local development. Thus, the question arises: was the City of God finally doing justice to its Christian name?

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notesonfilm1 · 6 years ago

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I grew up in Montreal, where Elvis was King en français. The local commercial French station, TVA Canal Dix, showed Elvis films regularly: the dialogue was in French but Elvis rocked in English. I must have seen all of them and had firm favourites: Viva Las Vegas (George Sidney, 1964) with Ann-Margaret, Blue Hawaii (Norman Taurog, 1961), and this one, King Creole. I now see that it’s perhaps significant that these were all directed by old-timers of the studio system who knew their craft.

Some fans prefer Jailhouse Rock (Richard Thorpe, 1957), and certainly its famous and eponymous number is a delight. But King Creole is arguably Elvis’ best film. And it’s part of the tragedy of his film career that even his best film is but a derivative and pulpy melodrama. Themes of teenage rebellion, the relationships of fathers and sons, and children looking on pityingly at what they see as the emasculation of their fathers by society and societal institutions, are all themes that are better dealt, in this very same period, by Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause.

As a teenager, I’d read and enjoyed the Harold Robbins novel the film is based on, A Stone for Danny Fisher. And Curtiz’ film follows the plot quite closely, if exchanging Brooklyn for New Orleans and the boxing world for that of the nightclub scene on Bourbon Street and the 1930 Depression setting for the present.

Presley’s Danny Fisher, a talented singer working two jobs to help keep the family afloat. His father had been a prominent pharmacist but lost it all when his wife’s death led to a spiral of depression and drink. They lost their house and now live in a slum tenement next to a brothel. Fisher keeps failing High School’s cause he’s just got too much to do. In the meantime the streets offer lots of opportunity for easy money. Danny’s father is willing to humiliate himself so that his son can get a diploma; Danny can’t bear to see his father humiliated and also can make easy money singing. King Creole is a mix of teen film, musical, and noir.

King Creole is one of the few Presley films, the only one I remember, where he’s presented as a real film star. He gets a great star entrance with the ‘Crawfish’ number, a duet with ryhtm and blues singer Kitty White, written by songwriters Ben Weisman and Fred Wise as a street vendor’s cry, that starts off in the pre-credit sequence, continue on Kitty White post-credit, then cranes up and dissolves to introduce us to Elvis, who is framed behind lace curtains, in turn framed by the window, in turn framed by the shutters, in turn framed by balcony railings.

Elvis opens up the curtains, and comes out, to us, like a fancy chocolate in a box within a box within a box and next to flowers. As the song continues, Elvis is intercut with Kitty passing by on her cart, finally we get a reverse shot that shows us the other side of the street, with the ‘hostesses’ on the balcony on the nightclub next door soliciting Elvis. In the shot when he responds, ‘No you don’t, ya gotta pay me, his sister appears on the right hand side to offer him breakfast. Cutiz masterfully presents what people have paid to see — Elvis — makes us wait for what he’s got to offer, frames him, teases us, and reveals his talent, desirability, family relations and a context in which the drama can unfold all in one scene. It’s a brilliant mise-en-scene of stardom. Something Curtiz is so expert at and that so few other directors offered to Elvis.

What Elvis was famous for in 1958 was conveying sex to teenagers. The Los Angeles Mirror-News entertainment editor wrote that ‘what Elvis offers is not basically music but a sex show’ (cited on p. 438 in Peter Guralnick’s Last Train to Memphis (438). Guralnick writes that Leber and Stoller’s ‘Trouble’, a Mudy Waters-styled blues was intended somewhat tongue in cheek but was delivered by Elvis with untempered ferocity. ‘It sounded sort of comical to us, but strangely enough to the mass market it wasn’t. It was somewhat generational and somewhat cultural, but they bought it’. (p.449).

In the film, Curtiz stages that sexy ferocity as a challenge to the gangster played by Walter Matthau, as something to entice the gangster’s moll played by Carolyn Jones, and as a source of conflict between the two nightclub owners. That talent, sex and ferocity are once more put in the scene in the context of different narrative threats where his very power and desirability originate the source of the tragedy to come. It’s a lesson in how to mobilise a star persona in narrative and how to narrativise stardom.

Julie Lobalzo-Wright in Crossover Stardom’ writes that there can be no doubt that Presley represented the rebellious image of the 1950s, both within America and worldwide, and his cultural impact cannot be overstated. (p.59)…Presley’s early live performances on The Milton Berle Sow, The Steve Allen Sow, and The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956) created a stir displaying Presley’s overt sexuality that consistently presented his sexualized body as an object of desire. Thomas. C. Carlos has described his early television performances as ‘so sexy, not white sexy, not coy sexy, but so humping swaggering black r&b sexy” that they led to a national uproar’.

I’d also like to comment on the quieter ‘Young Dreams’ number (see above). This is such a joyful performance, the dip in his shoulder, the shake of his head during ‘kiss you morning, noon and night’ then again dipping his shoulders and opening his mouth in the pause as if to say, “‘wow’ isn’t this naughty and marvellous’. Presley conveys the saucy and the tender filtered through a joyful amazement, sex combined with feeling in gleeful wonderment. No wonder his girlfriend in the audience is on the verge of tears with longing. Seeing him, we understand her, and understand why Elvis was so appealing to both men and women for so long. It’s a quiet number in the film, but powerful.

King Creole offers a mise-en-scene of Presley’s stardom, both as a musical performer, a sensation really, and as a movie star. I’ve commented on some of the numbers above. But let me just draw your eye to other aspects:

See for example how in the scene where he takes his girlfriend to see his old home, the focus is on him even when she’s doing all the talking; and note how he’s lit (see below):

See also how Curtiz present Presley to us in and through through light. Lighting is accentuating his features, his feelings, his very presence. He’s often shown coming in and out of the light. See some of the pictures below but further down you can also see how he’s lit as a kind of noir hero/film star in the scene were he watches his father get attacked.

Ultimately, the story is hackneyed but professionally told. Curtiz knows how to make his stars shine and how to use what they represent to create context, plot and convey feeling. Elvis’ stardom is part of the mise-en-scene of King Creole. It’s the same kind of care others took to present Judy Garland, Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire; it’s the same kind of care Curtiz used in his musicals with James Cagney and Doris Day; it’s the kind of care Elvis rarely got from any of his other directors.

José Arroyo

King Creole (Michael Curtiz,USA, 1958) I grew up in Montreal, where Elvis was King en français. The local commercial French station, TVA Canal Dix, showed Elvis films regularly: the dialogue was in French but Elvis rocked in English.

#Carolyn Jones #Doris Day #Fred Astaire #Gene Kelly #James Cagney #Judy Garland #Julie Lobalzo-Wright #King Creole #Michael Curtiz #Walter Matthau

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lovelyparanormalbooks · 7 years ago

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Book Blitz: There Be Demons by M.K. Theodoratus (Excerpt + Giveaway)

There Be Demons M.K. Theodoratus Publication date: September 26th 2017 Genres: Paranormal, Suspense, Young Adult

After her father remarries, Britt Kelly’s life becomes a cesspit. She lives in her sister’s two-bedroom tenement apartment with her mother, two brothers, and two young nephews. She starts a new high school where she knows no one. And, even when Britt thinks she’s making friends, the church where she studies in is torn down. Then, the field commanders of The Demon Wars draft her and her friends to aid the four Gargoyle Guardians who fight the demons invading the city of Trebridge. The fate of the city hangs on Britt’s ability to lead and learn enough self-control to manipulate the natural magic of Grace. Meanwhile, she also needs to decide what to do about Cahal, her chemistry lab partner who is as strong as her and may have interests more than just protecting Trebridge. “There Be Demons” is a continuation of M. K. Theodoratus’ urban fantasy, “Night for the Gargoyles”. It tells the tale of Gillen and his team of Gargoyle Guardians as they defend Trebridge while teaching Britt and her friends – the untrained “reinforcements. Along the way, Gillen and Britt learn things about each other to make them stronger both together and alone.

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EXCERPT:

Britt Kelly leaned against the jamb between the cramped kitchen and living room of her new home in the projects. I feel like a sardine stuffed in a can. Her anger churned. If her father hadn’t abandoned his family for his bimbo boss, she’d be back home in her own bedroom, chatting with friends about the new school year. Instead, she was stuck in her older half-sister’s apartment. Many prized the apartments in St. Edmund’s Towers for their size, but Britt refused to see it. She looked at the walls they had painted as a trap. Her mother and sister were sleeping in each family’s respective bedroom. Her two small nephews smeared jam on their faces in the living room as they waited for the cartoons to start. Her two younger brothers, Carlos and Darin, whispered in the bathroom, forgetting their argument over who got the sink first might wake their sleeping mother. Welcome to another merry day in the projects. The teen huffed as she waited for her brothers to get ready to sneak away to go see their father uptown. Her thoughts switched to getting revenge on her absentee father. He’d missed his last two court-ordered visits, but she’d get him today, even if her mother forbade them to annoy him. The court said he could see his kids every third Sunday of the month. See them he would. Her brothers had a right to visit him even if his new wife hated them like cooties. Britt was going to make sure they did. Wish I could make him suffer for the visits he’s missed. A vision of Britt sticking him with a knitting needle in each hand like his Granny Nan made her smile. No. That’s not vicious enough. A vision of a steamroller with thousands of pins on its roller popped into Britt’s mind. In seconds, the machine squashed her father into the ground. When he emerged from underneath, he was a bleeding mess. A low volume fanfare announced the TV news. Just as she was about to yank her brothers out of the bathroom, her favorite reporter came on. Jessica Hawthorne of the The Trebridge Channel wore a stunning form-fitting green outfit that Britt coveted. The color would go as well with her dark hair as the reporter’s blond, blue-eyed looks. Hawthorne took a deep breath, ready to deliver her morning spiel. Britt swallowed hard. Before the Divorce, Britt had worn expensive clothes like Hawthorne’s, not thrift shop junk like she wore now. When they lost their uptown apartment after her mom got sick, the county sheriff had dumped all their belongings on the sidewalk. Most of their stuff got stolen. Dad could’ve helped us. At least buy us some new clothes for school. He’s still got plenty of money. Mom couldn’t help getting sick. The small living room swallowed Jessica Hawthorne’s breathy voice. Britt strained to hear her over the bratbies’ sporadic giggles as they shoved pieces of toast in each other’s faces. “Enough about the underage Crown Prince of Andor getting caught in a strip joint when he should have been at school. Closer to home and our thought for the day. The Guarda assures the citizens of Trebridge the new curfew will end the vandalism and muggings. Stronger measures are needed, I tell you. Scores of people appear at hospitals with the most dreadful wounds and can’t remember how they got them.” The reporter blathered on, an earnest expression knitting her brows. “We need more guarda on the streets, especially in the river districts. These hoodlums need to be stopped.” Britt concentrated harder, not daring to turn up the volume while her mother slept. She worked the swing shift now and didn’t get home until four in the morning. Someday I’ll look that polished again, I swear. Granny Nan would bawl Dad out for how we live now if she were still alive. Britt shut her complaints down, feeling embarrassed at how proud she had once been to be called her daddy’s ‘little princess’. “While the guarda say their investigations are ongoing, I don’t see any results. Why have so many people disappeared? The police haven’t a clue.” Her lip curled. “You’d almost think we’re being invaded by demons and our fine protectors are too scared to investigate.” Her contempt poured from the screen. Britt tapped her foot, wishing her brothers would stop giggling. She wished she lived uptown where she still had a room of her own. Granted, they didn’t live on the streets, but four people stuffed in one bedroom in her half-sister’s apartment was torture. Her father deserved to be kicked in the ass. Britt wanted revenge. Her father needed to pay for abandoning his family and her. The noise in the bathroom grew louder. Those buttheads better not wake Mom up. Britt twitched the draped folds of her new V-neck blouse wishing she had the boobs to fill it out. It did have a designer label, just the thing she needed to sneak into the posh condos where her father now lived. Just like the boys can’t wear their grubs today. “I want to wear a T-shirt to Dad’s, Britt.” Quarrelsome Darin whined behind her, making her jump. He had become a total pain since their parents’ divorce. Britt hoped seeing their dad would stop his constant bitching. Britt didn’t feel any guilt for disobeying their mother’s orders. The boys deserved to see their cockroach of a father. His ice-blooded new wife could just tough out their visit. Britt’s muscles tightened in the cold, funny way they did when something bad was going to happen. She shook her head, forcing herself to ignore the bothersome feeling that was happening too often for comfort. Glancing at the closed bedroom doors, she put a finger to her lips. Mom’s going to blister our ears if we wake her. Darin opened his mouth. Lifting her hand to smack him, she brushed back the thick fall of hair across her eyes instead. If she hit him, Darin’s screams would wake their mom and Pietra, their half-sister. Keeping her voice low, she said, “Get your butt in gear. You’re wearing what you’re wearing. End of questions, comments, and complaining.” Darin did not give up. “My tees are clean. Dad don’t like fancy either. He sat in front of the TV with his shirt and shoes off all the time. In summer, he only wore his boxers. Remember? Mom always got mad at him for leaving beer cans on the coffee table. Always.” “Shh. Don’t wake Mom or Pietra.” Britt held a finger to her lips. “Get your shoes on, and we can talk in the hall.” “I don’t like dress shirts either.” Carlos, her older, calmer brother, carefully left the bathroom door partly ajar. “It’s not fair to make us wear them. You’re just a kid like us even if you’re taller. Being a high school freshmen ain’t no bigger deal than being in fifth grade.” “Stop being buttheads, both of you.” Britt jerked the apartment door open. “You begged to visit Dad. I’m doing the best I can to see you do, so shut up and move your ass before Mom wakes up.” Her mother did her best to push their father out of their lives. Britt refused to let her have her wish. Since the messy divorce and his marriage to the Ice-Bitch, Timothy Kelly had seldom spent more than an hour with them. Their dad mostly offered excuses when his visitation weekend came.When he did see them, they barely ate a fast lunch before he sent them off to a movie on their own. The last time was three months ago. Britt missed him and his compliments terribly. He’s not going to escape today. Britt remembered their one visit to the posh high-rise, so different from both their suburban and project homes. The pristine rooms, sprinkled with figurines and trinkets, made her nervous enough to get the cold crawls down her back every time she moved. The Ice-Bitch’s rat-dog had barked and snapped at them the whole time. Carlos didn’t mean to break the stupid shepherd figurine when he jumped. The damn dog would’ve bit him if I hadn’t kicked the yapping rat in the head. I don’t care if the cabrona told us never to come back again. It’s our right to see him. Outside the apartment, the hallway reeked from years of cooking in the eight apartments of the fifth floor, B-wing. In spite of the blinking light of the security camera in its wire cage, someone had tagged both sides of the hall. Thankfully, they left the picture Britt called the “Tree of Life” undamaged. Someone had painted a huge tree with birds flittering through the leaves. No one told the artist that real trees didn’t grow alone, especially the big ones. Britt missed the trees lining the streets of their lost home, and the painting’s survival gave Britt hope she might survive living in the slums, too. Be glad you don’t down near the docks. The thought of trees made Britt smile as memories of her summers at Granny Nan’s flitted through her mind, the pines sighing in the breeze while the oaks rustled with a brisker note. Her huge white dogs slipping out of the house to silently disappear into the tree-covered hillsides. Granny Nan standing lost in thought, rubbing her hidden necklace with the tips of her fingers until the gems glowed, when she thought she was alone. The three guard dogs, Nan called her guardians, licking Britt’s face. Britt’s heart clutched when she recalled their goodbye last summer. Granny Nan had bustled about the kitchen, packing a lunch with extra snickerdoodles for the drive back to Trebridge. Just before she shoved the paper bag into her hands, she rose to her tiptoes to kiss Britt on the forehead. “Cheer up, my girl. Next summer will be loads of fun. You’re going to learn all sorts of new stuff. Our secret now. Remember.” The last word had held force as she tapped Britt’s forehead. She’d loved Granny Nan. Staying with her was always fun, except when she trained Britt in self-control. Britt had looked forward to her coming summer, not ever imagining the old woman would die. Britt shoved the memory away because it hurt too much to remember. Won’t learn anything now since she’s dead. A shuffling noise on the stairs put Britt on alert, living in the projects wasn’t as safe as Uptown. The head of the girl from across the hall appeared, followed by some older guy with broad shoulders carrying a sack. The girl took one look at Britt and dropped her gaze before scurrying toward her door. On her way, the girl said, “Hi, tree.” “Why do you always talk to that silly tree, Sara?” asked the guy following her. His gaze rested on where Britt’s boobs should be and sank to her crouch area. When he smirked, Britt was glad her skirt was loose, happy she did not share Pietra and her mom’s busty figures. The dark-haired Tejano girl pushed the door open after unlocking it. “Gerome, Hurry up. Mama wants that milk yesterday.” He scooted into the door, throwing a backward glance at Britt. “Okay, Sara. Okay.” Carlos slipped into the hallway, pulling their door shut without closing it. “Okay, Britt. Now tell me why I gotta do the dress-shirt shit before school starts.” He stopped and folded his arms across his chest. His expression mirrored his father’s when the old man was ready to start a tantrum and throw things when something didn’t go his way. “I’m not going to move an inch until you let me go back and get a t-shirt.” “Yeah,” said Darin, joining them. “We gotta sneak by the co-op’s security, buttheads. If you don’t blend in, they’ll check their list of undesirables and bounce you out the door faster than you can spit. So, you’re wear prissy clothes. Comprendes? Or are you guys totally too stupid to understand?” “Dad don’t like you speaking Spanish,” said Carlos. Darin parroted in the high-pitched voice that grated her patience raw. “Yeah, we’re Andorians. Have been forever. You can even join the Daughters of the Kingscourt.” “Shut up, or go watch TV with the bratbies.” Britt gave him a cold stare. Her fifth-grade brothers hated being lumped with Pietra’s pre-school sons. “Carlos and I’ll visit Dad by ourselves and get bigger ice creams afterward.” Carlos gasped. “You won’t really leave Darin behind?” Britt’s glare heated. “Damn sure I would, if he don’t stop whining like a baby.” “Okay, but I still don’t like dress shirts,” said Darin. “All the guys around here wear tees.” “Duh. Wear a tee to school tomorrow. Now move your ass. We gotta catch the tram.” Once on the street, the boys forgot the argument in a game of shoving and giggling. Was I ever so young? Maybe before Pietra fell down the stairs and everyone blamed me for pushing her. Memories of her father’s great-grandmother who lived back in the hills flooded through her mind. Longing pulsed through Britt as she thought of the summers when she lived with her. Britt should’ve hated the old woman, but she loved her. When she was nine, Britt had been sent away because everyone thought she shoved Pietra down the stairs, breaking her leg. Pietra had been teasing her by lifting her Mr. Pongo over her head, and she had been jumping trying to grab him away. But she slipped. Pietra had fallen down the stairs when Britt had grabbed her for balance. No one believed her when Britt said it was an accident. The summer after, Granny Nan had invited her back. She did teach her to “control” her temper. She taught her imagination games. Made her use her use all her senses to examine the world around her. Taught her to sing in descant during the long evenings with the mages who came to visit her. Granny Nan was a Dissenter who disliked the Kingscourt and all it stood for. Still, Britt had loved Granny Nan’s mountain valley. The summers had been the most wonderful of Britt’s life. Author Bio: A Northern California gal, M. K. Theodoratus has been intrigued by fantasy since she started reading comic books. She has traveled through many fantasy worlds since then. When she's not disappearing into other writer's worlds, she's creating her own alternative worlds--that of Andor where demons prey on humans and the Far Isle Half-Elven where she explores the social and political implications of genetic drift on a hybrid elf/human people.

A sixth grade English assignment introduced Theodoratus to story writing. The teacher asked for a short story and gave a "C" for an incomplete, 25-page Nancy Drew pastiche which turned into a novel the next summer. Theodoratus has been addicted to writing stories happily ever after. Currently, Theodoratus lives with her old man and two lap-cats in Colorado.

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trendingnews-love · 7 years ago

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How Big Business Got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food

FORTALEZA, Brazil — Children’s squeals rang through the muggy morning air as a woman pushed a gleaming white cart along pitted, trash-strewn streets. She was making deliveries to some of the poorest households in this seaside city, bringing pudding, cookies and other packaged foods to the customers on her sales route.

Celene da Silva, 29, is one of thousands of door-to-door vendors for Nestlé, helping the world’s largest packaged food conglomerate expand its reach into a quarter-million households in Brazil’s farthest-flung corners.

As she dropped off variety packs of Chandelle pudding, Kit-Kats and Mucilon infant cereal, there was something striking about her customers: Many were visibly overweight, even small children.

She gestured to a home along her route and shook her head, recalling how its patriarch, a morbidly obese man, died the previous week. “He ate a piece of cake and died in his sleep,” she said.

Mrs. da Silva, who herself weighs more than 200 pounds, recently discovered that she had high blood pressure, a condition she acknowledges is probably tied to her weakness for fried chicken and the Coca-Cola she drinks with every meal, breakfast included.

Nestlé’s direct-sales army in Brazil is part of a broader transformation of the food system that is delivering Western-style processed food and sugary drinks to the most isolated pockets of Latin America, Africa and Asia. As their growth slows in the wealthiest countries, multinational food companies like Nestlé, PepsiCo and General Mills have been aggressively expanding their presence in developing nations, unleashing a marketing juggernaut that is upending traditional diets from Brazil to Ghana to India.

A New York Times examination of corporate records, epidemiological studies and government reports — as well as interviews with scores of nutritionists and health experts around the world — reveals a sea change in the way food is produced, distributed and advertised across much of the globe. The shift, many public health experts say, is contributing to a new epidemic of diabetes and heart disease, chronic illnesses that are fed by soaring rates of obesity in places that struggled with hunger and malnutrition just a generation ago.

The new reality is captured by a single, stark fact: Across the world, more people are now obese than underweight. At the same time, scientists say, the growing availability of high-calorie, nutrient-poor foods is generating a new type of malnutrition, one in which a growing number of people are both overweight and undernourished.

“The prevailing story is that this is the best of all possible worlds — cheap food, widely available. If you don’t think about it too hard, it makes sense,” said Anthony Winson, who studies the political economics of nutrition at the University of Guelph in Ontario. A closer look, however, reveals a much different story, he said. “To put it in stark terms: The diet is killing us.”

Even critics of processed food acknowledge that there are multiple factors in the rise of obesity, including genetics, urbanization, growing incomes and more sedentary lives. Nestlé executives say their products have helped alleviate hunger, provided crucial nutrients, and that the company has squeezed salt, fat and sugar from thousands of items to make them healthier. But Sean Westcott, head of food research and development at Nestlé, conceded obesity has been an unexpected side effect of making inexpensive processed food more widely available.

“We didn’t expect what the impact would be,” he said.

Part of the problem, he added, is a natural tendency for people to overeat as they can afford more food. Nestlé, he said, strives to educate consumers about proper portion size and to make and market foods that balance “pleasure and nutrition.”

There are now more than 700 million obese people worldwide, 108 million of them children, according to research published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine. The prevalence of obesity has doubled in 73 countries since 1980, contributing to four million premature deaths, the study found.

Obesity’s Spread Across the World

Obesity rates in the United States, the South Pacific and the Persian Gulf are among the highest in the world — more than one in four Americans is obese. But over the last 35 years, obesity, defined as having a body mass index over 30, has grown the fastest in countries throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Percent of population with obesity

U.S. 10%

Brazil 7%

China 0.7%

Mali 0.7%

1980

U.S. 27%

Brazil 18%

China 5%

Mali 11%

2015

Change in obesity rates since 1980

U.S. +154%

Brazil +153%

China +674%

Mali +28%

By Audrey Carlsen | Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Data not available for French Guiana and Western Sahara.

The story is as much about economics as it is nutrition. As multinational companies push deeper into the developing world, they are transforming local agriculture, spurring farmers to abandon subsistence crops in favor of cash commodities like sugar cane, corn and soybeans — the building blocks for many industrial food products. It is this economic ecosystem that pulls in mom-and-pop stores, big box retailers, food manufacturers and distributors, and small vendors like Mrs. da Silva.

In places as distant as China, South Africa and Colombia, the rising clout of big food companies also translates into political influence, stymieing public health officials seeking soda taxes or legislation aimed at curbing the health impacts of processed food.

For a growing number of nutritionists, the obesity epidemic is inextricably linked to the sales of packaged foods, which grew 25 percent worldwide from 2011 to 2016, compared with 10 percent in the United States, according to Euromonitor, a market research firm. An even starker shift took place with carbonated soft drinks; sales in Latin America have doubled since 2000, overtaking sales in North America in 2013, the World Health Organization reported.

The same trends are mirrored with fast food, which grew 30 percent worldwide from 2011 to 2016, compared with 21 percent in the United States, according to Euromonitor. Take, for example, Domino’s Pizza, which in 2016 added 1,281 stores — one “every seven hours,” noted its annual report — all but 171 of them overseas.

“At a time when some of the growth is more subdued in established economies, I think that strong emerging-market posture is going to be a winning position,” Mark Schneider, chief executive of Nestlé, recently told investors. Developing markets now provide the company with 42 percent of its sales.

For some companies, that can mean specifically focusing on young people, as Ahmet Bozer, president of Coca-Cola International, described to investors in 2014. “Half the world’s population has not had a Coke in the last 30 days,” he said. “There’s 600 million teenagers who have not had a Coke in the last week. So the opportunity for that is huge.”

Industry defenders say that processed foods are essential to feed a growing, urbanizing world of people, many of them with rising incomes, demanding convenience.

“We’re not going to get rid of all factories and go back to growing all grain. It’s nonsense. It’s not going to work,” said Mike Gibney, a professor emeritus of food and health at University College Dublin and a consultant to Nestlé. “If I ask 100 Brazilian families to stop eating processed food, I have to ask myself: What will they eat? Who will feed them? How much will it cost?”

In many ways, Brazil is a microcosm of how growing incomes and government policies have led to longer, better lives and largely eradicated hunger. But now the country faces a stark new nutrition challenge: over the last decade, the country’s obesity rate has nearly doubled to 20 percent, and the portion of people who are overweight has nearly tripled to 58 percent. Each year, 300,000 people are diagnosed with Type II diabetes, a condition with strong links to obesity.

There are now more obese than underweight adults in the world. Sales of ultraprocessed foods have more than doubled over the last decade — even spreading into developing countries. Here’s what the junk food transition looks like in Brazil. By Neil Collier and Ora DeKornfeld

Brazil also highlights the food industry’s political prowess. In 2010, a coalition of Brazilian food and beverage companies torpedoed a raft of measures that sought to limit junk food ads aimed at children. The latest challenge has come from the country’s president, Michel Temer, a business-friendly centrist whose conservative allies in Congress are now seeking to chip away at the handful of regulations and laws intended to encourage healthy eating.

“What we have is a war between two food systems, a traditional diet of real food once produced by the farmers around you and the producers of ultra-processed food designed to be over-consumed and which in some cases are addictive,” said Carlos A. Monteiro, a professor of nutrition and public health at the University of São Paulo.

“It’s a war,” he said, “but one food system has disproportionately more power than the other.”

Mrs. da Silva reaches customers in Fortaleza’s slums, many of whom don’t have ready access to a supermarket. She champions the product she sells, exulting in the nutritional claims on the labels that boast of added vitamins and minerals.

“Everyone here knows that Nestlé products are good for you,” she said, gesturing to cans of Mucilon, the infant cereal whose label says it is “packed with calcium and niacin,” but also Nescau 2.0, a sugar-laden chocolate powder.

She became a Nestlé vendor two years ago, when her family of five was struggling to get by. Though her husband is still unemployed, things are looking up. With the $185 a month she earns selling Nestlé products, she was able to buy a new refrigerator, a television and a gas stove for the family’s three-room home at the edge of a fetid tidal marsh.

The company’s door-to-door program fulfills a concept that Nestlé articulated in its 1976 annual shareholder report, which noted that “integration with the host country is a basic aim of our company.” Started a decade ago in Brazil, the program serves 700,000 ��low-income consumers each month,” according to its website. Despite the country’s continuing economic crisis, the program has been growing 10 percent a year, according to Felipe Barbosa, a company supervisor.

He said sagging incomes among poor and working-class Brazilians had actually been a boon for direct sales. That’s because unlike most food retailers, Nestlé gives customers a full month to pay for their purchases. It also helps that saleswomen — the program employs only women — know when their customers receive Bolsa Família, a monthly government subsidy for low-income households.

“The essence of our program is to reach the poor,” Mr. Barbosa said. “What makes it work is the personal connection between the vendor and the customer.”

Nestlé increasingly also portrays itself as a leader in its commitment to community and health. Two decades ago, it anointed itself a “nutrition health and wellness company.” Over the years, the company says it has reformulated nearly 9,000 products to reduce salt, sugar and fat, and it has delivered billions of servings fortified with vitamins and minerals. It emphasizes food safety and the reduction of food waste, and it works with nearly 400,000 farmers around the world to promote sustainable farming.

In an interview at Nestlé’s new $50 million campus in suburban Cleveland, Mr. Westcott, head of food research and development, said the door-to-door sales program reflected another of the company’s slogans: “Creating shared values.”

“We create shared value by creating micro-entrepreneurs — people that can build their own businesses,” he said. A company like Nestlé can bolster the well-being of entire communities “by actually sending positive messages around nutrition,” he said.

Nestlé’s portfolio of foods is vast and different from that of some snack companies, which make little effort to focus on healthy offerings. They include Nesfit, a whole-grain cereal; low-fat yogurts like Molico that contain a relatively modest amount of sugar (six grams); and a range of infant cereals, served with milk or water, that are fortified with vitamins, iron and probiotics.

Dr. Gibney, the nutritionist and Nestlé consultant, said the company deserved credit for reformulating healthier products.

But of the 800 products that Nestlé says are available through its vendors, Mrs. da Silva says her customers are mostly interested in only about two dozen of them, virtually all sugar-sweetened items like Kit-Kats; Nestlé Greek Red Berry, a 3.5-ounce cup of yogurt with 17 grams of sugar; and Chandelle Pacoca, a peanut-flavored pudding in a container the same size as the yogurt that has 20 grams of sugar — nearly the entire World Health Organization’s recommended daily limit.

Until recently, Nestlé sponsored a river barge that delivered tens of thousands of cartons of milk powder, yogurt, chocolate pudding, cookies and candy to isolated communities in the Amazon basin. Since the barge was taken out of service in July, private boat owners have stepped in to meet the demand.

“On one hand, Nestlé is a global leader in water and infant formula and a lot of dairy products,” said Barry Popkin, professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina. “On the other hand, they are going into the backwoods of Brazil and selling their candy.”

Dr. Popkin finds the door-to-door marketing emblematic of an insidious new era in which companies seek to reach every doorstep in an effort to grow and become central to communities in the developing world. “They’re not leaving an inch of country left aside,” he said.

Public health advocates have criticized the company before. In the 1970s, Nestlé was the target of a boycott in the United States for aggressively marketing infant formula in developing countries, which nutritionists said undermined healthful breast-feeding. In 1978, the president of Nestlé Brazil, Oswaldo Ballarin, was called to testify at highly publicized United States Senate hearings on the infant formula issue, and he declared that criticisms were the work of church activity aimed at “undermining the free enterprise system.”

On the streets of Fortaleza, where Nestlé is admired for its Swiss pedigree and perceived high quality, negative sentiments about the company are rarely heard.

The home of Joana D’arc de Vasconcellos, 53, another vendor, is filled with Nestlé-branded stuffed animals and embossed certificates she earned at nutrition classes sponsored by Nestlé. In her living room, pride of place is given to framed photographs of her children at age 2, each posed before a pyramid of empty Nestlé infant formula cans. As her son and daughter grew up, she switched to other Nestlé products for children: Nido Kinder, a toddler milk powder; Chocapic, a chocolate-flavored cereal; and the chocolate milk powder Nescau.

“When he was a baby, my son didn’t like to eat — until I started giving him Nestlé foods,” she said proudly.

Ms. de Vasconcellos has diabetes and high blood pressure. Her 17-year-old daughter, who weighs more than 250 pounds, has hypertension and polycystic ovary syndrome, a hormonal disorder strongly linked to obesity. Many other relatives have one or more ailments often associated with poor diets: her mother and two sisters (diabetes and hypertension), and her husband (hypertension.) Her father died three years ago after losing his feet to gangrene, a complication of diabetes.

“Every time I go to the public health clinic, the line for diabetics is out the door,” she said. “You’d be hard pressed to find a family here that doesn’t have it.”

Ms. de Vasconcellos previously tried selling Tupperware and Avon products door to door, but many customers failed to pay. Six years ago, after a friend told her about Nestlé’s direct sales program, Ms. Vasconcellos jumped at the chance.

She says her customers have never failed to pay her.

“People have to eat,” she said.

In May 2000, Denise Coitinho, then director of nutrition for the Ministry of Health, was at a Mother’s Day party at her children’s school when her mobile phone rang. It was Nestlé’s chief of government relations. “He was really upset,” she recalled.

The source of Nestlé’s concern was a new policy that Brazil had adopted and was pushing at the World Health Organization. If adopted, the policy would have recommended that children around the world breast-feed for six months, rather than the previous recommendation of four to six months, she said.

“Two months may not seem like a lot, but it’s a lot of revenue. It’s a lot of selling,” said Ms. Coitinho, who left her position in 2004 and is now an independent nutrition consultant to, among others, the United Nations. In the end, infant food companies succeeded in stalling the policy for a year, she said. Asked about her story, Nestlé said that it “believes breast milk is the ideal nutrition for babies” and that it supports and promotes the W.H.O. guidelines.

It is hard to overstate the economic power and political access enjoyed by food and beverage conglomerates in Brazil, which are responsible for 10 percent of the nation’s economic output and employ 1.6 million people.

In 2014, food companies donated $158 million to members of Brazil’s National Congress, a threefold increase over 2010, according to Transparência Brasil. A study the organization released last year found that more than half of Brazil’s current federal legislators had been elected with donations from the food industry – before the Supreme Court banned corporate contributions in 2015.

The single largest donor to congressional candidates was the Brazilian meat giant JBS, which gave candidates $112 million in 2014; Coca-Cola gave $6.5 million in campaign contributions that year, and McDonald’s donated $561,000.

So the stage was set for a mammoth political battle when, in 2006, the government sought to enact far-reaching food-industry regulations to curb obesity and disease. The measures, growing out of the earlier breast-feeding policy, included advertising alerts to warn consumers about foods high in sugar, salt and saturated fats, as well as marketing restrictions to dampen the lure of highly processed foods and sugary beverages, especially those aimed at children.

Taking a page from the government’s successful efforts to limit tobacco marketing, the new rules would have barred brands like Pepsi and KFC from sponsoring sports and cultural events.

“We thought that Brazil could be a model for the rest of the world, a country that puts the well-being of its citizens above all else,” said Dirceu Raposo de Mello, then director of the government’s health surveillance agency, widely known by the Portuguese acronym Anvisa. “Unfortunately, the food industry did not feel the same way.”

The food companies took a low profile, mustering behind the Brazilian Association of Food Industries, a lobbying group whose board of vice presidents included executives from Nestlé; the American meat giant Cargill; and Unilever, the European food conglomerate that owns brands like Hellmann’s, Mazola oil and Ben & Jerry’s. The association declined to comment for this article.

During the early days of public hearings, the industry seemed to be negotiating the rules in good faith but behind the scenes, health advocates say corporate lawyers and lobbyists were quietly waging a multipronged campaign to derail the process.

Industry-financed academics began appearing on TV to assail the rules as economically ruinous. Other experts wrote newspaper editorial pieces suggesting that exercise and stricter parenting might be more effective than regulations aimed at fighting childhood obesity.

The industry’s most potent rallying cry, analysts say, was its strident denunciation of the proposed advertising restrictions as censorship. The accusation had particular resonance given the nearly two decades of military dictatorship that ended in 1985.

At one meeting, a representative from the food industry accused Anvisa of trying to subvert parental authority, saying mothers had the right to decide what to feed their children, recalled Vanessa Schottz, a nutrition advocate. In another meeting, she said, a toy industry representative stood up and assailed the proposed marketing rules, saying they would deprive Brazilian children of the toys that sometimes accompany fast-food meals. “He said we were killing the dreams of children,” Ms. Schottz recalled. “We were dumbfounded.”

Chastened by the industry criticism, Anvisa in late 2010 withdrew most of the proposed restrictions. What remained was a single proposal requiring that ads include a warning about unhealthy food and beverages.

Then came the lawsuits.

Over the course of several months, a disparate collection of industry groups filed 11 lawsuits against Anvisa. The plaintiffs included the national association of biscuit manufacturers, the corn growers lobby and an alliance of chocolate, cocoa and candy companies. Some of the lawsuits claimed that the regulations violated constitutional protections on free speech, while others said the agency did not have the standing to regulate the food and advertising industries.

Although health advocates say the litigation was not entirely unexpected, they were blindsided by the response of the federal government’s top lawyer, Attorney General Luís Inácio Adams, a presidential appointee. Shortly after the proposed rules were officially published in June 2010, Mr. Adams sided with the industry. A few weeks later, a federal court suspended the regulations, citing his written opinion, which suggested that Anvisa did not have the authority to regulate the food and advertising industries. Mr. Adams declined to comment for this article.

Mr. Raposo de Mello, the former Anvisa president, says he was stunned by Mr. Adam’s change of heart, given the attorney general office’s longstanding support for Anvisa. Seven years later, with most of the 11 lawsuits still unresolved, the regulations remain frozen.

“The industry,” Mr. Raposo de Mello said, “did an end run around the system.”

In the meantime, the food and beverage industry became more aggressive as it sought to neutralize Anvisa, which it viewed as its greatest adversary.

In 2010, in the midst of the battle against the agency’s proposed regulations, a group of 156 business executives took its grievances to the campaign of Dilma Rousseff, who was running for president.

Marcello Fragano Baird, a political scientist in São Paulo who has studied the food lobby’s campaign against the nutrition regulations, said Ms. Rousseff assured the executives she would shake up Anvisa. “She promised them she would ‘clean house’ once elected,” he said, adding that he learned about the encounter through interviews with participants.

Ms. Rouseff won, and soon after her inauguration, she replaced Mr. Raposo de Mello with Jaime César de Moura Oliveira, a longtime political ally and a former lawyer for the Brazilian subsidiary of the food giant Unilever.

A spokesman for Ms. Rouseff declined to make her available for an interview.

In 2012, Anvisa hosted a traveling anti-obesity exhibit at its offices. Titled “Lose Weight Brazil,” the exhibit extolled exercise and moderation as the keys to tackling obesity, but largely ignored mainstream scientific evidence about the dangers of consuming too much sugar, soda and processed food.

The exhibition’s sponsor? Coca-Cola.

More than 1,000 miles south of Fortaleza, the effects of changing eating habits are evident at a brightly painted day care center in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. Each day, more than a hundred children pack classrooms, singing the alphabet, playing and taking group naps.

When it was started in the early 1990s, the program, run by a Brazilian nonprofit group, had a straightforward mission: to alleviate undernutrition among children who were not getting enough to eat in the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods.

These days many of those who attend are noticeably pudgy and, the staff nutritionists note, some are worryingly short for their age, the result of diets heavy in salt, fat and sugar but lacking in the nourishment needed for healthy development.

The program, run by the Center for Nutritional Recovery and Education, includes prediabetic 10-year-olds with dangerously fatty livers, adolescents with hypertension and toddlers so poorly nourished they have trouble walking.

“We are even getting babies, which is something we never saw before,” said Giuliano Giovanetti, who does outreach and communications for the center. “It’s a crisis for our society because we are producing a generation of children with impaired cognitive abilities who will not reach their full potential.”

Nearly 9 percent of Brazilian children were obese in 2015, more than a 270 percent increase since 1980, according to a recent study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. That puts it in striking distance of the United States, where 12.7 percent of children were obese in 2015.

The figures are even more alarming in the communities served by the center: In some neighborhoods, 30 percent of the children are obese and another 30 percent malnourished, according to the organization’s own data, which found that 6 percent of obese children were also malnourished.

The rising obesity rates are largely associated with improved economics, as families with increasing incomes embrace the convenience, status and flavors offered by packaged foods.

Busy parents ply their toddlers with instant noodles and frozen chicken nuggets, meals that are often accompanied by soda. Rice, beans, salad and grilled meats — building blocks of the traditional Brazilian diet — are falling by the wayside, studies have found.

Compounding the problem is the rampant street violence that keeps young children cooped up indoors.

“It’s just too dangerous to let my kids play outside, so they spend all their free time sitting on the couch playing video games and watching TV,” said Elaine Pereira dos Santos, 35, the mother of two children, 9 and 4 years old, both overweight.

Isaac, the 9-year-old, weighs 138 pounds and can wear only clothing intended for adolescents. Ms. dos Santos, who works at a hospital pharmacy, shortens the pants legs for him.

Like many Brazilian mothers, she was pleased when Isaac began to gain weight as a toddler, not long after he tasted his first McDonald’s French fry. “I always thought fatter is better when it comes to babies,” she said. She happily indulged his eating habits, which included frequent trips to fast-food outlets and almost no fruits and vegetables.

But when he began having trouble running and complained about achy knees, Ms. dos Santos knew something was wrong. “The hardest part is the ridicule he gets from other children,” she said. “When we go out shopping, even adults point and stare” or call him gordinho, roughly translated to “little fatty.”

At the São Paulo nursery, health care workers keep tabs on the children’s physical and cognitive development, while nutritionists teach parents how to prepare inexpensive, healthy meals. For some children, the center’s test kitchen provides their first introduction to cabbage, plums and mangos.

One of the fundamental challenges is persuading parents that their children are sick. “Unlike cancer or other illnesses, this is a disability you can��t see,” said Juliana Dellare Calia, 42, a nutritionist with the organization.

Although staff members say the program has made significant strides in changing the way families eat, many children will nonetheless face a lifelong battle with obesity. That’s because a growing body of research suggests that childhood malnutrition can lead to permanent metabolic changes, reprogramming the body so that it more readily turns excess calories into body fat.

“It’s the body’s response to what’s perceived as starvation,” Ms. Dellare Calia said.

Even as nutrition experts bemoan the growing obesity crisis — and the potential long-term medical costs — one aspect of Brazil’s processed food revolution is undeniable: The industry’s expansion provides economic benefits to people up and down the ladder. Nestlé, which says it employs 21,000 people in Brazil, two years ago started an apprenticeship program that has trained 7,000 people under 30.

Near the bottom of the food chain is Mrs. da Silva, the vendor in Fortaleza, who feels optimistic about the future despite her mounting health woes. Life has been a struggle since she dropped out of school at 14 when she became pregnant with her first child. Now she talks about fixing the missing teeth that mar her tentative smile and buying a proper home, one that does not leak during heavy rains.

She has Nestlé to thank.

“For the first time in my life, I feel a sense of hope and independence,” she said.

She is aware of the connection between her diet and her persistent health problems, but insists that her children are well nourished, gesturing to the Nestlé products in her living room. Being a Nestlé vendor has another advantage: the cookies, chocolate and puddings that often sustain her family are bought wholesale.

With an expanding roster of customers, Mrs. da Silva has set her sights on a new goal, one she says will increase business even more.

“I want to buy a bigger refrigerator.”

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newstfionline · 7 years ago

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How Big Business Got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food

By Andrew Jacobs and Matt Richtel, NY Times, Sept. 16, 2017

FORTALEZA, Brazil--Children’s squeals rang through the muggy morning air as a woman pushed a gleaming white cart along pitted, trash-strewn streets. She was making deliveries to some of the poorest households in this seaside city, bringing pudding, cookies and other packaged foods to the customers on her sales route.

As she dropped off variety packs of Chandelle pudding, Kit-Kats and Mucilon infant cereal, there was something striking about her customers: Many were visibly overweight, even small children.

She gestured to a home along her route and shook her head, recalling how its patriarch, a morbidly obese man, died the previous week. “He ate a piece of cake and died in his sleep,” she said.

Mrs. da Silva and other vendors like her make regular deliveries for Nestlé to a quarter of a million households in Brazil.

A New York Times examination of corporate records, epidemiological studies and government reports--as well as interviews with scores of nutritionists and health experts around the world--reveals a sea change in the way food is produced, distributed and advertised across much of the globe. The shift, many public health experts say, is contributing to a new epidemic of diabetes and heart disease, chronic illnesses that are fed by soaring rates of obesity in places that struggled with hunger and malnutrition just a generation ago.

“The prevailing story is that this is the best of all possible worlds--cheap food, widely available. If you don’t think about it too hard, it makes sense,” said Anthony Winson, who studies the political economics of nutrition at the University of Guelph in Ontario. A closer look, however, reveals a much different story, he said. “To put it in stark terms: The diet is killing us.”

“We didn’t expect what the impact would be,” he said.

The story is as much about economics as it is nutrition. As multinational companies push deeper into the developing world, they are transforming local agriculture, spurring farmers to abandon subsistence crops in favor of cash commodities like sugar cane, corn and soybeans--the building blocks for many industrial food products. It is this economic ecosystem that pulls in mom-and-pop stores, big box retailers, food manufacturers and distributors, and small vendors like Mrs. da Silva.

The same trends are mirrored with fast food, which grew 30 percent worldwide from 2011 to 2016, compared with 21 percent in the United States, according to Euromonitor. Take, for example, Domino’s Pizza, which in 2016 added 1,281 stores--one “every seven hours,” noted its annual report--all but 171 of them overseas.

Industry defenders say that processed foods are essential to feed a growing, urbanizing world of people, many of them with rising incomes, demanding convenience.

“It’s a war,” he said, “but one food system has disproportionately more power than the other.”

The company’s door-to-door program fulfills a concept that Nestlé articulated in its 1976 annual shareholder report, which noted that “integration with the host country is a basic aim of our company.” Started a decade ago in Brazil, the program serves 700,000 “low-income consumers each month,” according to its website. Despite the country’s continuing economic crisis, the program has been growing 10 percent a year, according to Felipe Barbosa, a company supervisor.

He said sagging incomes among poor and working-class Brazilians had actually been a boon for direct sales. That’s because unlike most food retailers, Nestlé gives customers a full month to pay for their purchases. It also helps that saleswomen--the program employs only women--know when their customers receive Bolsa Família, a monthly government subsidy for low-income households.

“The essence of our program is to reach the poor,” Mr. Barbosa said. “What makes it work is the personal connection between the vendor and the customer.”

Dr. Gibney, the nutritionist and Nestlé consultant, said the company deserved credit for reformulating healthier products.

But of the 800 products that Nestlé says are available through its vendors, Mrs. da Silva says her customers are mostly interested in only about two dozen of them, virtually all sugar-sweetened items like Kit-Kats; Nestlé Greek Red Berry, a 3.5-ounce cup of yogurt with 17 grams of sugar; and Chandelle Pacoca, a peanut-flavored pudding in a container the same size as the yogurt that has 20 grams of sugar--nearly the entire World Health Organization’s recommended daily limit.

In 2014, food companies donated $158 million to members of Brazil’s National Congress, a threefold increase over 2010, according to Transparency International Brazil. A study the organization released last year found that more than half of Brazil’s current federal legislators had been elected with donations from the food industry--before the Supreme Court banned corporate contributions in 2015.

Taking a page from the government’s successful efforts to limit tobacco marketing, the new rules would have barred brands like Pepsi and KFC from sponsoring sports and cultural events.

Then came the lawsuits. Over the course of several months, a disparate collection of industry groups filed 11 lawsuits against Anvisa. The plaintiffs included the national association of biscuit manufacturers, the corn growers lobby and an alliance of chocolate, cocoa and candy companies. Some of the lawsuits claimed that the regulations violated constitutional protections on free speech, while others said the agency did not have the standing to regulate the food and advertising industries.

“The industry,” Mr. Raposo de Mello said, “did an end run around the system.”

Even as nutrition experts bemoan the growing obesity crisis--and the potential long-term medical costs--one aspect of Brazil’s processed food revolution is undeniable: The industry’s expansion provides economic benefits to people up and down the ladder. Nestlé, which says it employs 21,000 people in Brazil, two years ago started an apprenticeship program that has trained 7,000 people under 30.

She has Nestlé to thank.

“For the first time in my life, I feel a sense of hope and independence,” she said.

With an expanding roster of customers, Mrs. da Silva has set her sights on a new goal, one she says will increase business even more.

“I want to buy a bigger refrigerator.”

#Brazil #junk food in Brazil #Nestle #door-to-door vendors for Nestlé #obesity in Brazil

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deniscollins · 7 years ago

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How Big Business Got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food

There are now more than 700 million obese people worldwide, 108 million of them children. In Brazil, over the last decade, the country’s obesity rate has nearly doubled to 20 percent, and the portion of people who are overweight has nearly tripled to 58 percent. Each year, 300,000 people are diagnosed with Type II diabetes, a condition with strong links to obesity; and high blood pressure is soaring. If you were a Brazilian food and beverage company, how would you react to political measures seeking to limit junk food ads aimed at children: (1) defeat efforts to regulate junk food in Brazil, (2) nothing, (3) something else (if so, what?)? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision.

Children’s squeals rang through the muggy morning air as a woman pushed a gleaming white cart along pitted, trash-strewn streets. She was making deliveries to some of the poorest households in this seaside city, bringing pudding, cookies and other packaged foods to the customers on her sales route.

As she dropped off variety packs of Chandelle pudding, Kit-Kats and Mucilon infant cereal, there was something striking about her customers: Many were visibly overweight, even small children.

She gestured to a home along her route and shook her head, recalling how its patriarch, a morbidly obese man, died the previous week. “He ate a piece of cake and died in his sleep,” she said.

“We didn’t expect what the impact would be,” he said.

Industry defenders say that processed foods are essential to feed a growing, urbanizing world of people, many of them with rising incomes, demanding convenience.

“It’s a war,” he said, “but one food system has disproportionately more power than the other.”

Door-to-Door Delivery

The company’s door-to-door program fulfills a concept that Nestlé articulated in its 1976 annual shareholder report, which noted that “integration with the host country is a basic aim of our company.” Started a decade ago in Brazil, the program serves 700,000 “low-income consumers each month,” according to its website. Despite the country’s continuing economic crisis, the program has been growing 10 percent a year, according to Felipe Barbosa, a company supervisor.

“The essence of our program is to reach the poor,” Mr. Barbosa said. “What makes it work is the personal connection between the vendor and the customer.”

VERY LONG ARTICLE CONTINUES ...

#Obesity #Brazil

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clubofinfo · 7 years ago

Text

Expert: The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep. — Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle It is generally accepted that sports, especially spectator sports, serve many social purposes, good and bad, and that they function to distract people from the cares and worries of everyday life, or the “real world.” No doubt this is true. The etymology of the word sport, derived as it is from the word “disport” – divert, amuse, carry away – tells us that. But often a distraction can also be a reminder, even when that reminder remains shrouded in unconsciousness or forgotten in the moment. Sometimes, however, the reminder can be linked to memories that bring a startling clarity to the present. Two recent sports news items have reminded me of incidents from my own athletic past. And those memories in turn have brought my reflections back to the current news regarding the failure of any National Football League (NFL) team to sign quarterback Colin Kaepernick to a contract, and the recent boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor. Kaepernick’s case is well-known and much discussed. He took a valiant and principled stand last football season by taking a knee during the national anthem to protest the violent treatment of black Americans by the police and American society in general. History was on his side, unless one was a clear-cut white racist and ignorant of American history. But as a terrific football player and a well-known athlete, his stand was unusual in the world of sports where political protest is very rare and not being reminded of the “real” world is the key to success. The NFL, in particular, is a very conservative organization, long infused with a super patriotic ethos wrapped in the American flag and the song that celebrates it, and Kaepernick’s protest was a diversion from the diverting spectacle on the field and not welcomed by NFL owners, to put it mildly. So as of this writing, Kaepernick, a very good football player who would clearly strengthen an NFL team, remains without a job. That this is because he lacks talent is ridiculous. While pressure against the NFL from multiple media and organizational sources is growing to reverse this situation, even well-meaning writers have implicitly used racist language to describe the situation by saying that Kaepernick is being blackballed. Ironic as it is, our language is filled with such subtle reminders of the white mindset that equates white with good and black with bad. But there is a deeper irony involved, and language once again reveals it. First, however, let me briefly tell you of my memories, not because the details are important in themselves, but because they are examples of how we bring to our present perspectives past experiences that can both help to clarify and obfuscate current events. The saying “where you’re coming from” contains truth; our past experiences deeply influence how we see the present. When I was 19-20 years old, a senior in high school and a Division I college freshman on an athletic scholarship, I was involved in two incidents involving sports and violence. The sport was basketball, not football or boxing, and the violence was minimal, but both are etched in my memory. As a young man, I was rarely involved in fighting, but when I felt abused and disrespected, my Irish temper got the best of me and I would physically defend myself. Otherwise, I was a normal young athlete, fueled by the competitive nature of high-level sports and testosterone. But these incidents taught me that the propensity for violence is in us all, and that certain situations and social arrangements can inflame and promote it, especially when you are most unaware and naïve. But what do these memories have to do with the news about Kaepernick and Mayweather/McGregor? What I saw in both sports stories was violence; one quite obvious with boxing, the other involving Kaepernick, less so. I realized that violence has many faces, whether it be minor or major, fisticuffs or “blitzes,” face-to-face or helmet-to-helmet, physical or verbal, racial or political, institutional or personal, etc. It’s largest and most savage one is war, and endless war and preparations for war are the large canvas within which the others lie. Sometimes remembering one’s individual inclinations toward violence can help one see the larger picture. As usual, the Unites States is currently waging multiple wars, and is fomenting many others, including a nuclear one. Most of the victims of U.S. violence are considered “other,” the expendable people, as were slaves, Native Americans, and other people of color. Nothing has changed since that other heroic black American dissenter said that America is “the greatest purveyor of violence on earth.” And we know that Martin Luther King was murdered by those violent U.S. government forces he criticized in his opposition to war, racial inequality, and economic injustice for all Americans. I am not equating Kaepernick with MLK, but his protest follows in the King tradition and that of other black athletes who have taken political stands: Mohammed Ali, Tommy Smith, John Carlos, et al. All suffered for their courageous positions. Of course, Colin Kaepernick has a right to play football, just as Ali had the right to beat people up in the ring. Yet boxing, despite the Mayweather/McGregor extravaganza, has generally been recognized for the brutal “sport” it is, and has grown less popular over the years, perhaps in part because of Ali’s “pugilistic brain syndrome.” Not football. It has grown to become America’s number one sport, despite the growing evidence of what may be called “football brain syndrome,” and all the violence and other crippling injuries suffered by former players, revealed as far back as 1970 when Dave Meggyesy, a former NFL linebacker, published Out of Their League, his expose of the dehumanizing aspects of football. But the unspoken truth in the Kaepernick story is that football is the war sport par excellence, extremely violent, and deeply tied to the spectacle of cruelty that dominates American society today and that has caused so much suffering for black people and other people of color for centuries. In the 1960s, Brazilian television, in an effort to distinguish football (soccer) from American football, aptly termed it “military football.” And while it, like other sports, has been an avenue to wealth and “success” for some black Americans (a tiny minority), its war-like structure and violent nature is noted with a nod and a wink. Heck, it’s fun to play and exciting to watch, and is just a colorful spectacle that we can’t do without. That it’s a conditioning agent for the love of war and violent aggression is usually passed over. Its language, like all good linguistic mind control, becomes powerfully invisible. Colin Kaepernick, like all quarterbacks, is the field general who throws bombs to flankers as he tries to avoid the blitz. Each team defends and conquers the enemy’s territory, pushing its opponent back through frontal assaults and pounding the enemy’s line. This is mixed with deceptive formations and aerial assaults behind the opponent’s line. When none of this works and the enemy goes on the offensive, a different platoon is brought in to defend one’s territory. One’s front line must then defend against a frontal assault and hit back hard. The analogies are everywhere, and as with many aspects of “everywhere,” what’s everywhere is nowhere – its familiarity making it invisible and therefore all the more powerful. In a society of the spectacle, football is the most spectacular and entertaining mass hypnotic induction into the love of violence that we have. Yes, Mayweather and McGregor beating the shit out of each other satisfies the blood lust of gamblers and a much smaller audience, but boxing is small peanuts compared to football. Most American parents wouldn’t bring their children to a boxing match, but football is deeply ingrained in the American psyche and structured into the fabric of our lives from youth onwards, concussions and violence be damned. It is a microcosm of our militaristic, war-loving culture. Our love of violence disguised as fun. As an American man, I understand its appeal. I am sometimes drawn in myself, but against my better nature, which embraces MLK’s non-violent philosophy. I appreciate the great athletic prowess of football players, and know that it is enjoyable and a way to recognition for many, and for a smaller number, a scholarship to college, and, for even less, a lucrative job in the NFL. But as an opponent of American militarism, I find its violent ethos and the way it disfigures the bodies and minds of participants and spectators alike to be appalling. It functions as an arm of the Pentagon and the growing militarization of the country’s police departments. As for Conor McGregor, the slum boy from south Dublin, they say he is an artist, a mixed “martial arts artist.” That violence is an art is good to know. I have been living in a bubble, thinking that art was a counterbalance to violence. When I grew out of my adolescent readiness to defend my dignity with my fists and grew into art, I had hoped that the world would grow up with me. No luck. No luck of the Irish. Conor should read our Irish ancestor, the great poet William Butler Yeats, and take the money and run. “Too long a sacrifice/Can make a stone of the heart.” So too Colin Kaepernick, whom I greatly admire for his courage to take an ethical stand. He deserves to be offered a job by an NFL team. If he is, I hope he turns it down, and speaks out on the propagandistic nature of the sport that made him famous, on its school of violence and its art of war. In doing that, he would be carrying on the legacy of MLK, Malcom X, Mohammed Ali, and other black leaders who said violence must stop now, war must stop, the violence on people of color must stop, and let it begin with me. He would be disclosing the taboo truth of an American sporting distraction that does violence to its participants while it brainwashes its fans into the martial spirit. He would be waking an awful lot of people up from the slumber of the spectacle of cruelty that has this country in its grip. Many people would take a knee in gratitude. http://clubof.info/

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