Obesity and Balance
I am interested in the problem of obesity. Dieting has been an obsession among my obsessive compulsive people.
It is curious how all of our interest is devoted to choice of foods. At first look, our choice is supermarkets that from my own observation have progressively fewer choices.
Like two year olds, should we choose to accept our role, we are offered survival through purchase of the contents of big box stores. At the store where I shop, I was able at one time to buy canned cherries for a woman at church who could not find unadulterated cans of same for her wonderful cherry pies. They no longer carry these at my store either. I do not know what Mary did for cherry pies this year. Now the choice is heavy syrup or sugar free (the sugar free variety has artificial sweeteners).
Our obsession with low price, constantly reinforced by industry lest we begin to understand that we cannot lower prices to nothing without cost somewhere else, is one problem. (I'm thinking here of the price drop commercials from Wal mart) We can and do import food from across the world and across the country. It is curious to me that in a rush to find the best deal, we look at price only, not the nutritional content of our food and the health giving attributes.
Factory farmed pork, for example, sure it is the other white meat. It also is being factory raised, just like chicken. Leaving the anti-vivisectionist arguments aside, This stuff is not good to put in our mouths, much less to swallow and attempt to digest. Look it up.
As a shopper the other thing that is apparent to me is how many choices we have of what can charitably be called value added foods and the reader will take my meaning, perhaps. Purveyors of food find there is more money in cooking or freezing or making recipes for the hurried and harried consumer.
I knew a young man in the 70's who used to say that after the revolution food will be served on plastic plates with plastic knives and forks. I laughed at the time, but it has come to pass. It is not a bad thing in and of itself, but the body needs nutrition and is not getting it from large artificial environments where there is not food, but product.
So much of our energy goes to the consumer side of things. If we are rich, we can go to a fancy food emporium and get better product and if we are poor we can go to a food pantry or a big box with less quality product unless we live in a food desert (usually an inner city area that has no fresh food for sale in the distance of two miles), where we have to walk far for any sort of food at all, unless we consider Lambs Quarters and other wild greens and roots.
I'm thinking some of the wild things growing near us might not fuel bodies better than product from the big box store. I'm not saying poor people have to eat grass, but that if people, all of us, spent more energy on the production end of food and less on the consumption, there would be less obesity.
Just as an example, I grow carrots in a pot. This year, I felt proudest about the sweet potatoes we had at Thanksgiving dinner, as they grew in a garbage can (a clean one, filled with dirt) in my driveway. The microclimate in our driveway has brick on one side from the house and it is paved. All of that heavy mass absorbs heat in the day and gives it off at night. Sweet potatoes, heat loving plants that they are, love this. As a bonus, the leaves (Manzanitaaaaaa) are beautiful.
I'm just saying, we need to grow more good stuff, even in the city. My cousin Alan says we need more victory gardens. Lets get to it.
It is curious how all of our interest is devoted to choice of foods. At first look, our choice is supermarkets that from my own observation have progressively fewer choices.
Like two year olds, should we choose to accept our role, we are offered survival through purchase of the contents of big box stores. At the store where I shop, I was able at one time to buy canned cherries for a woman at church who could not find unadulterated cans of same for her wonderful cherry pies. They no longer carry these at my store either. I do not know what Mary did for cherry pies this year. Now the choice is heavy syrup or sugar free (the sugar free variety has artificial sweeteners).
Our obsession with low price, constantly reinforced by industry lest we begin to understand that we cannot lower prices to nothing without cost somewhere else, is one problem. (I'm thinking here of the price drop commercials from Wal mart) We can and do import food from across the world and across the country. It is curious to me that in a rush to find the best deal, we look at price only, not the nutritional content of our food and the health giving attributes.
Factory farmed pork, for example, sure it is the other white meat. It also is being factory raised, just like chicken. Leaving the anti-vivisectionist arguments aside, This stuff is not good to put in our mouths, much less to swallow and attempt to digest. Look it up.
As a shopper the other thing that is apparent to me is how many choices we have of what can charitably be called value added foods and the reader will take my meaning, perhaps. Purveyors of food find there is more money in cooking or freezing or making recipes for the hurried and harried consumer.
I knew a young man in the 70's who used to say that after the revolution food will be served on plastic plates with plastic knives and forks. I laughed at the time, but it has come to pass. It is not a bad thing in and of itself, but the body needs nutrition and is not getting it from large artificial environments where there is not food, but product.
So much of our energy goes to the consumer side of things. If we are rich, we can go to a fancy food emporium and get better product and if we are poor we can go to a food pantry or a big box with less quality product unless we live in a food desert (usually an inner city area that has no fresh food for sale in the distance of two miles), where we have to walk far for any sort of food at all, unless we consider Lambs Quarters and other wild greens and roots.
I'm thinking some of the wild things growing near us might not fuel bodies better than product from the big box store. I'm not saying poor people have to eat grass, but that if people, all of us, spent more energy on the production end of food and less on the consumption, there would be less obesity.
Just as an example, I grow carrots in a pot. This year, I felt proudest about the sweet potatoes we had at Thanksgiving dinner, as they grew in a garbage can (a clean one, filled with dirt) in my driveway. The microclimate in our driveway has brick on one side from the house and it is paved. All of that heavy mass absorbs heat in the day and gives it off at night. Sweet potatoes, heat loving plants that they are, love this. As a bonus, the leaves (Manzanitaaaaaa) are beautiful.
I'm just saying, we need to grow more good stuff, even in the city. My cousin Alan says we need more victory gardens. Lets get to it.
posted by Ridgewriters at 8:44 AM
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