Dia Darcey
Dr. Holland
Sociology 112
16 November 2009
Don't take this too seriously, kids; it was a quick opinion essay for a class.
The facts are clear: America is getting wider, and not from sea to shining sea. More Americans are overweight than ever before—a whopping two of three adults and almost one of three children. Overweight people are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, high cholesterol and debilitating stress on joints and bones; the condition is definitely no walk in the park.
The obvious, looming question about obesity in America is why. Can we point the finger of blame at the school system for only providing sugary soft drinks and cheesy fried snacks for lunch? Can we malign the government for neglecting to inform us of health risks before it was too late? Or can we only hang our heads in shame, muttering that it must be a late offshoot of McManifest Destiny (now bigger than ever!) and we, like our great-great-great-grandparents, are just trying to increase America’s magnitude? Such a huge problem could never have stemmed from one origin, and it is ignorant to blame a single factor (like fast food) for these shocking statistics. Also, it is impossible to blame only the individual for their obesity because we are so affected by the society around us—and the occurrence of obesity is higher in African-American and Hispanic populations, which would imply that they have less self control than Caucasians or Asians. Several of the most basic causes of the rapid, recent increase in the occurrence of obesity in America are the breakdown of family structure and a general and increasing ignorance of nutrition and biology, exacerbated by a healthy capitalist economy.
The family structure provides innumerable benefits to individuals and society; many of these benefits relate to weight management. Close families spend time together playing—and it’s awfully hard to get an entire family onto a computer. Outside activities and play have decreased exponentially in the lives of children, perhaps because their parents simply don’t have time to encourage creative and active play. Eating together as a family reduces the calories which would be consumed by each member eating individually, especially if the meal is home-made and includes plenty of vegetables and fruits. Family relations also provide needed education to children about healthy eating habits.
The general ignorance of and apathy toward essential nutrition facts has worsened in recent years which has aided the media and food companies in making a couple bucks while everyone gets a little rounder. Even the calorie is not understood by five out of six roommates at Regency #309, and surely the statistics aren’t much better for the rest of America. The “big, bad” media and food companies cannot be blamed for making food cheaper and more attractive—that’s what the competition of capitalism encourages, usually providing us with excellent results—even if they use high fructose corn syrup and celebrity promos to do it. The problem results when these two circumstances combine and ignorant consumers cook Hamburger Helper for a “healthy” family meal or provide “low-cal” (but high everything else) soda for refreshment.
Whether the obesity problem busting America’s Bible Belt and clogging up the Continental Divide lays with society or the individual or, most likely, some combination of the two, it is ballooning to ridiculous proportions. As the occurrence of obesity has increased, the average life expectancy for an American citizen has turned begun to decrease. Only a return to the close relationships of the family and a revolution in nutritional education could even begin to contain this epidemic which is truly affecting everyone in the home of the broad.
Showing posts with label food rants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food rants. Show all posts
Monday, November 16, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Hem, Hem: A Literary Essay about, You Guessed It... FOOD
Forgotten Fruit
The falling fruits,
Through the still night, forsake the parent-bough,
That, in the first grey glances of the dawn,
Looks wild, and wonders at the wintry waste.
–James Thompson
It was on a recent ward temple trip that I realized that no species of food has lately been so much multiplied as the extent of pizza restaurants. Once again, the committee for the planning and accomplishment of activities forwent the possible intricacies and new delights of an extended taste pallet, instead choosing the always-safe marinara reds, limp greens and crusty browns of an always appreciated, never novel restaurant choice. Again, our limited perspective was reinforced by the mores of ease.
The college experience is an Eden of forgotten fruit. Sustenance, sleep, studying and socializing are the four necessities at college, but it is widely believed that the industrious scholar can only really focus on two or three of these objectives at a time. Nourishment’s nutrition and diversity are the first martyrs to the college cause—not only is it more time consuming to plan and create healthy meals, it’s also considered more expensive. As students count pennies and minutes, cheap chow and mindless meals are first endured, then pitied, then embraced.
Oft times, a student’s only contact with the sweet flesh of an earth-grown item is through the straw of a Jamba Juice cup. Even Emerson had a passing relationship with the vegetable, however odd (it nods to me, and I nod to them??). Though unexcited eaters are perhaps not aware of their denial of the body’s relationship with the intellect, the consequences are fixed: both mental and spiritual capacity to create and invent are crippled by a dull diet.
What good are the mental powers given man if our senses are degraded to the point at which we cannot tell Splenda from the healing dew of honey? Ease, price, the quickness of preparation—each specter with a pleasant face denies poor students the joys of taste and the rapture of real food. Months of Easy Ramen, burnt eggs and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on store-bought bread do more than bore the body senseless; they stunt the common college student’s taste buds from a spring of growth to lifeless winter. Ah, smooth is the descent and easy the way to a damnation of taste’s progression!
What hope have we to awake slumbering students from their sleep of snacking sameness? What chance can we cherish to save students from their troubles of tide-me-over tedium? What actions must we take to alert and divert these wanderers from their paths of repetitive rations, minute-meals and green-less groceries?
Few who chew comfortably on their Hamburger Helper think what others undergo who have perhaps been as tenderly educated and have as acute sensations as themselves—but who are incapable of enjoying the same easy pleasures because of allergies, sensitivities or other disruptions of the digestive system. Could it be that these seemingly cursed consumers are blessed with the teachings of the school of experience—an institution which teaches by first exposing the student to everything they do not know?
A knowledge of good food must be bought dear by knowing ill baked goods. Only when we have experienced the absolute dark can we begin to recognize day again—and to appreciate the intricacies of light instead of stumbling around, blinded, in a bright haze of tasteless and empty foodstuffs. Desperation is the mother of all experimentation and nutritional expansion, for really, what well-fed fellow would ever look at a cow and decide to drink whatever came from …it?
For this reason, my tongue may envy the Ho-Ho thoughtlessly sucked down by some oblivious passerby, but my intellect is untouched. Though seemingly innocent Little Debby’s baked confections bestow delicious sugar rushes and delights to the purchasing student, the ease of acquisition cheapens the joy acquired from negotiations with this she-devil—and as Faustus warns, she shows herself to certainly be a hot ho (ho).
Ah, but we may well say that all the schools of cuisine are already catalogued carefully into numberless cookbooks and food magazines; nothing remains to be learned about the subject. So quothe the followers of Ptolemy and the priests before Martin Luther or Joseph Smith—the heavens are still open!
Menus are not dead. They live and change under the hands of those who would dare to experience their pages. Those who have much leisure to cook will always be enlarging the stock of recipes. Creativity surely has its costs: predictability, comfort, ease, even reason, logic, sanity and previous epistemologies—but the price is worth the product, and, more crucially, is much less than the cost of inaction.
Milton’s blossoming ambrosial fruit surely pales in comparison with my fresh banana pancakes—a product of invention, desperation, need, creativity, time and the willingness to laugh in the face of danger.
Repeated experiences may be the stuff that creates wisdom, but new experiences give new knowledge—which, when allowed to develop and evolve, becomes wisdom. Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it. As a newly politically correct Cookie Monster rapped in the nineties, “Me promise that when you eat varied menu, you get more out of every meal— You need balanced diet, come on and try it, not believe how great you'll feel! Word up.”
The falling fruits,
Through the still night, forsake the parent-bough,
That, in the first grey glances of the dawn,
Looks wild, and wonders at the wintry waste.
–James Thompson
It was on a recent ward temple trip that I realized that no species of food has lately been so much multiplied as the extent of pizza restaurants. Once again, the committee for the planning and accomplishment of activities forwent the possible intricacies and new delights of an extended taste pallet, instead choosing the always-safe marinara reds, limp greens and crusty browns of an always appreciated, never novel restaurant choice. Again, our limited perspective was reinforced by the mores of ease.
The college experience is an Eden of forgotten fruit. Sustenance, sleep, studying and socializing are the four necessities at college, but it is widely believed that the industrious scholar can only really focus on two or three of these objectives at a time. Nourishment’s nutrition and diversity are the first martyrs to the college cause—not only is it more time consuming to plan and create healthy meals, it’s also considered more expensive. As students count pennies and minutes, cheap chow and mindless meals are first endured, then pitied, then embraced.
Oft times, a student’s only contact with the sweet flesh of an earth-grown item is through the straw of a Jamba Juice cup. Even Emerson had a passing relationship with the vegetable, however odd (it nods to me, and I nod to them??). Though unexcited eaters are perhaps not aware of their denial of the body’s relationship with the intellect, the consequences are fixed: both mental and spiritual capacity to create and invent are crippled by a dull diet.
What good are the mental powers given man if our senses are degraded to the point at which we cannot tell Splenda from the healing dew of honey? Ease, price, the quickness of preparation—each specter with a pleasant face denies poor students the joys of taste and the rapture of real food. Months of Easy Ramen, burnt eggs and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on store-bought bread do more than bore the body senseless; they stunt the common college student’s taste buds from a spring of growth to lifeless winter. Ah, smooth is the descent and easy the way to a damnation of taste’s progression!
What hope have we to awake slumbering students from their sleep of snacking sameness? What chance can we cherish to save students from their troubles of tide-me-over tedium? What actions must we take to alert and divert these wanderers from their paths of repetitive rations, minute-meals and green-less groceries?
Few who chew comfortably on their Hamburger Helper think what others undergo who have perhaps been as tenderly educated and have as acute sensations as themselves—but who are incapable of enjoying the same easy pleasures because of allergies, sensitivities or other disruptions of the digestive system. Could it be that these seemingly cursed consumers are blessed with the teachings of the school of experience—an institution which teaches by first exposing the student to everything they do not know?
A knowledge of good food must be bought dear by knowing ill baked goods. Only when we have experienced the absolute dark can we begin to recognize day again—and to appreciate the intricacies of light instead of stumbling around, blinded, in a bright haze of tasteless and empty foodstuffs. Desperation is the mother of all experimentation and nutritional expansion, for really, what well-fed fellow would ever look at a cow and decide to drink whatever came from …it?
For this reason, my tongue may envy the Ho-Ho thoughtlessly sucked down by some oblivious passerby, but my intellect is untouched. Though seemingly innocent Little Debby’s baked confections bestow delicious sugar rushes and delights to the purchasing student, the ease of acquisition cheapens the joy acquired from negotiations with this she-devil—and as Faustus warns, she shows herself to certainly be a hot ho (ho).
Ah, but we may well say that all the schools of cuisine are already catalogued carefully into numberless cookbooks and food magazines; nothing remains to be learned about the subject. So quothe the followers of Ptolemy and the priests before Martin Luther or Joseph Smith—the heavens are still open!
Menus are not dead. They live and change under the hands of those who would dare to experience their pages. Those who have much leisure to cook will always be enlarging the stock of recipes. Creativity surely has its costs: predictability, comfort, ease, even reason, logic, sanity and previous epistemologies—but the price is worth the product, and, more crucially, is much less than the cost of inaction.
Milton’s blossoming ambrosial fruit surely pales in comparison with my fresh banana pancakes—a product of invention, desperation, need, creativity, time and the willingness to laugh in the face of danger.
Repeated experiences may be the stuff that creates wisdom, but new experiences give new knowledge—which, when allowed to develop and evolve, becomes wisdom. Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it. As a newly politically correct Cookie Monster rapped in the nineties, “Me promise that when you eat varied menu, you get more out of every meal— You need balanced diet, come on and try it, not believe how great you'll feel! Word up.”
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
I Don't Make Food in "Small"
I volunteered to bring the potatoes.
Grandma said that only the Atkinson family, the Chandlers, the grandparents and me would be at Thanksgiving this year, so "We won't need as much food as usual, I think."
Apparently I wasn't listening.
...apparently.
Potatoes were a three-day affair. I bought spuds, sour cream, garlic, milk and butter Tuesday night. I did, admittedly, already have all of these things at home, but... better too much, than too little, right? Wednesday was a torturous day filled with scrubbing. I like to make mashed potatoes with the skins on (WHY?! WHYYYY?) so I scoured the living daylights out of about fifteen pounds of potatoes for several eternities.
Next came the boiling. I HAD realized that I didn't own a pot--more like, a pot does not EXIST-- that would hold so many potatoes, but I had not foreseen that EVERY POT IN THE HOUSE would not hold that many potatoes.
I put in several hours of boiling, dumping and tasting (raw potato... not my favorite), then stabbing (the POTATOES, you guys!), reboiling, redumping, retasting... and sitting-on-the kitchen-floor-crying.
My cousin came over after work.
"What happened, silly?" he asked the tear-and-potato stained loony person.
"I'm making potatoes... for all of Ireland," I replied.
.
Well, all's well that ends well, and those potatoes DID end up crazy delicious. AND I've discovered the root cause of all of my insanity: genetics. When I walked in to the Thanksgiving feast with two huge bowls of potatoes, my aunts started cracking up.
"You ARE your mother!"
Apparently she doesn't make small, either...
A Huge Amount of Delicious Mashed Potatoes
"Several" potatoes
about 1/2 cup milk
1 cup of butter or 1/4 c for every 5 lbs of potatoes
garlic-- powdered or smashed-- to taste
8 ounces sour cream
salt to taste
Scrub potatoes. Dice and drop into boiling water. Let potatoes boil until they are soft when poked with a fork--no shorter, and no longer! Drain and mash. Add warm milk, butter, sour cream, garlic, salt, and whatever else your heart desires. Be prepared to never want to eat another potato, ever again, if you did the boiling step wrong.
Grandma said that only the Atkinson family, the Chandlers, the grandparents and me would be at Thanksgiving this year, so "We won't need as much food as usual, I think."
Apparently I wasn't listening.
...apparently.
Potatoes were a three-day affair. I bought spuds, sour cream, garlic, milk and butter Tuesday night. I did, admittedly, already have all of these things at home, but... better too much, than too little, right? Wednesday was a torturous day filled with scrubbing. I like to make mashed potatoes with the skins on (WHY?! WHYYYY?) so I scoured the living daylights out of about fifteen pounds of potatoes for several eternities.
Next came the boiling. I HAD realized that I didn't own a pot--more like, a pot does not EXIST-- that would hold so many potatoes, but I had not foreseen that EVERY POT IN THE HOUSE would not hold that many potatoes.
I put in several hours of boiling, dumping and tasting (raw potato... not my favorite), then stabbing (the POTATOES, you guys!), reboiling, redumping, retasting... and sitting-on-the kitchen-floor-crying.
My cousin came over after work.
"What happened, silly?" he asked the tear-and-potato stained loony person.
"I'm making potatoes... for all of Ireland," I replied.
.
Well, all's well that ends well, and those potatoes DID end up crazy delicious. AND I've discovered the root cause of all of my insanity: genetics. When I walked in to the Thanksgiving feast with two huge bowls of potatoes, my aunts started cracking up.
"You ARE your mother!"
Apparently she doesn't make small, either...
A Huge Amount of Delicious Mashed Potatoes
"Several" potatoes
about 1/2 cup milk
1 cup of butter or 1/4 c for every 5 lbs of potatoes
garlic-- powdered or smashed-- to taste
8 ounces sour cream
salt to taste
Scrub potatoes. Dice and drop into boiling water. Let potatoes boil until they are soft when poked with a fork--no shorter, and no longer! Drain and mash. Add warm milk, butter, sour cream, garlic, salt, and whatever else your heart desires. Be prepared to never want to eat another potato, ever again, if you did the boiling step wrong.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Re-Vision
Revision: an edited version of a project, paper, or diatribe. To "see again".
or...
I'm sick of leftovers.
Leftovers in college have whole new meaning than they did at home. Sure, Mom always made enough food to feed an army, but there was AN ARMY TO FEED.
Here, I make food in the same proportions... and I eat the same thing for a month.
Therefore, revision. The rice dish yesterday becomes a chicken base today, becomes a taco soup tomorrow, will be Spanish casserole next week.
My creative tendencies and "thrifty" (read: CHEAP) tendencies combine to help me create all kinds of things from... all kinds of leftovers.
Just today, I ruined pumpkin muffins. Don't ask me how, they just didn't work (OK, you asked, and I think it has to do with not pre-heating the oven... oops). BUT the point is, How will I make something new out of this dish that probably should've been tossed straight into the trash as it exited the oven?
Revision... gotta love it.
-
or...
I'm sick of leftovers.
Leftovers in college have whole new meaning than they did at home. Sure, Mom always made enough food to feed an army, but there was AN ARMY TO FEED.
Here, I make food in the same proportions... and I eat the same thing for a month.
Therefore, revision. The rice dish yesterday becomes a chicken base today, becomes a taco soup tomorrow, will be Spanish casserole next week.
My creative tendencies and "thrifty" (read: CHEAP) tendencies combine to help me create all kinds of things from... all kinds of leftovers.
Just today, I ruined pumpkin muffins. Don't ask me how, they just didn't work (OK, you asked, and I think it has to do with not pre-heating the oven... oops). BUT the point is, How will I make something new out of this dish that probably should've been tossed straight into the trash as it exited the oven?
Revision... gotta love it.
-
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