"Killers of the Flower Moon" provides an occasion for a Slate writer named Rebecca Onion to decry "the white man’s food."

If the idea is to stir up interest in a big new movie when a strike is depriving the press of access to actors, this is not the way to do it. I'd consider going out to see "Killers of the Flower Moon" just because it's a Martin Scorsese movie that reviewers have praised. I'm hesitant though, because I know the thing is 3 hours and 26 minutes long, so I need to believe it's not boring. And then I see this:

 

First, it's "Killers of the Flower Moon" not "Killers of the Flowers Moon."

But is this a movie about diabetes? Diabetes is a very important disease. I wish we'd heard a lot more about it during the pandemic, and I hope I'm not being disrespectful to the millions of people who suffer from diabetes, but I can't imagine going to go out to see a long drama about the problem of a lousy diet and the disease that ensues.

"The Real History Behind Diabetes’ Pivotal Role in Killers of the Flowers Moon What the disease has to do with colonialism, reservations, and 'the white man’s food'" — I already know what the pivotal role is. I have the book on Kindle and it's easy to search it for a distinctive word like "diabetes." Knowing that it's a murder mystery, you can probably easily guess.

But — as the botching of the movie's title suggests — this article is not an effort to convince us to go out and see the movie. In fact, the movie is only an occasion for discussing the problem of diabetes among Native Americans, a problem blamed on "the white man."

Onion interviews the anthropologist Margaret Pollak:

ONION: In the movie, there’s a throwaway line: Oh, a lot of Osage have it because of the “white man’s food.” What are the theories, and is any one of them provably true?

POLLAK: We don’t actually know precisely what causes diabetes.... But I think, looking at the research, you could very strongly argue that colonialism is to blame for the current diabetes epidemic faced by Indigenous Americans.... If you think of the Indigenous communities that were relocated through the reservation system, they oftentimes struggled in their new location. The environment that they moved to would not have been the same environment that their ancestors had traditionally worked in and lived in. We see, in the history of Indigenous communities who relocated to reservations, that there were struggles with securing adequate food. This led to the United States federal government opening a food rationing program at the turn of the 20th century, that later shifted to a commodity food program by the 1950s. The foods that came in through both the food rationing program and the commodity food programs included things that were high in refined carbohydrates—things like white sugar, white flour, fruits that were canned in syrup, foods that were also high in fat, lard, and shortening.... Certainly, I had a number of people in interviews say it was a white man’s disease. I had this really great statement from an Apache-Sioux woman who described diabetes as being caused by the white flour, the white sugar, and all of these white things that she then associated with white folks coming in...