Uncle Sam wants you to be obese!

The other day, I went with the friend to eat at Chipotle.  Hey, the term is underway and I do not have the time anymore to cook every meal at home, and the friend is getting tired of cooking and baking for me ;)  Sanitas per escam is, thus, sometimes put to test, not because I am worried that the restaurant staff might not have washed their hands, but because restaurant foods are not really intended to be healthy.

"Just because of their marketing gimmick about GMOs, do not be fooled that this is healthy food" I warned the friend.  I tell ya, I know how to be a party-pooper! ;)  But then I am not merely opining, especially when I read pieces like this in the New Yorker:

Chipotle, with nineteen hundred locations, is the most successful of the new chains. The company has admirable goals, but, more often than not, meals from Chipotle are high in both saturated fat and calories, and often exceed the recommended daily allowance of sodium.

Calories, fat, and sodium.  No wonder that restaurant foods are way tastier.  As my grandmother used to say, restaurants want to serve you tasty foods, while mothers want to serve you healthy food.  Of course, in my case I lucked out with my mother, grandmothers, and aunts, all making healthy food that was also wonderfully tasty.  When I spoke with my parents yesterday, my father said that mother had just finished making பொரிச்ச குழம்பு (Porichcha Kuzhambu) and I started drooling here ... hmmm, where was I?

Ah, yes, even a Chipotle often serves foods high in fat and calories, and one meal can deliver more than the salt that you body ever needs in a day.

“Chipotle has a health halo”—a term Wansink and a colleague coined several years ago to describe the general aura of eating at places that advertise themselves as healthy. “They are organic and use the word sustainable a lot. That’s not a bad thing, but it doesn’t make the food healthier.”

I know what you are thinking: just who the hell does Wansink think he is?

Brian Wansink is the director of Cornell University’s Food and Brand Laboratory, and more:

Wansink has also served as the executive director of the U.S.D.A.’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion. (In addition, he is a member of McDonald’s Global Advisory Council, which makes nutritional recommendations to the company’s leadership.) His book “Mindless Eating” demonstrated the gulf between what we think we are eating and what we actually eat.

So, if Chipotle's food is not all healthy, then you can imagine calories, fat, sodium, and sugar at the likes of McDonald's.  But, and this is a big butt--er, but--the food at those fast-food places are way less expensive too.  What gives?

[Taxpayers] heavily subsidize corn and soybeans, two crops that feed livestock and help create the processed food that public health officials have warned us for years to stop eating. Few federal incentives exist for farmers to grow a more varied selection of vegetables or to motivate consumers to eat them. And at least half of our calories come from food that is subsidized by the government, a figure that has held steady for years.
“A value meal at these places is a big burger, some fries, and a sugary beverage,’’ Kelly Brownell said. “Every time you buy one of those meals, Uncle Sam is standing there with his wallet open. The grain that feeds the cows is subsidized. The oil used to cook the fries is subsidized, and the high-fructose corn syrup used in sodas is subsidized, too. But if you walk in the next day and order a salad, a piece of fruit, and some tea you will be on your own. Uncle Sam will not be there to help you.”

We have created a system thanks to which foods that are high in calories, fat, sodium, and sugar, are less expensive than the healthier options.  Should we then be shocked at the ever growing obesity rate in these United States?

fatty, salty meals remain far cheaper to produce, distribute, and buy than healthier alternatives. For that to change, America’s agricultural priorities will need to fall in line with its health priorities.

Don't you hold your breath and suck in your tummy waiting for those policy changes to happen.  Definitely not with this dysfunctional Congress.  

It will be a sad day when "Sanitas Per Escam" becomes"Health via Soylent"

The vegetable vendor is one of the many un-American experiences when visiting with the parents in the old country.  Pushing his cart, he bellows the names of the vegetables he has to sell.  He is so loud that sometimes I can hear him over the phone if I happen to call my parents at the time he is hawking his goods.

He brings the vegetables to people.  Round the corner from where my parents live is a modern supermarket that sells vegetables and more.  The old and the new coexist in the old country.  But, as with many other aspects of life, the vendor pushing his cart is also becoming a rarity.

Here in my adopted country, cities like where I live feature Saturday Markets, through the growing season and when the weather is not atrocious--here, it is from early spring until mid-fall.  Instead of vendors pushing their carts along the neighborhood streets, they congregate at a place.  

The Saturday Market is a diversion from the routine, which is to get the supplies from supermarkets.   "[Buying] food can even be enjoyed as a leisure pursuit, rather than a daily chore"

In generations gone by, before the ubiquity of refrigeration and food preservatives, people were forced to go shopping every day – visiting half-a-dozen different shops to get what they needed for a single family meal. ... The arrival of supermarkets in the Fifties and Sixties was revolutionary. For the first time in history, ordinary people had access to an array of exotic foods from around the world, never before available under one roof. And, what’s more, it was affordable; large chains were able to buy mass-produced food in such bulk that food producers were lining up to offer them the lowest prices possible.

Even in the old country, mother does not buy vegetables every single day from that vendor, or from the supermarket, thanks to the fridge at home.  It is a different world there, here, and everywhere.

But, I suppose even buying groceries in order to cook at home is becoming rarer anymore.  Fancy kitchens seem to be more for decorative purposes than for cooking at home, it feels like.  It is also a phenomenal piece of evidence on the choices we have, without being restricted to eat at home after spending hours working with primary ingredients.  As Rachel Laudan noted:

If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, fresh, and natural foods. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the processed staples—salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea—produced by food corporations.

Even though cooking at home is easier with pre-processed ingredients, so that people like me can jump into a step 6 of the process, apparently quite a few think that cooking at home is a time consuming chore.  Why?

According to the researchers, the answer has to do with a reduction of mental effort. ‘Perhaps the most important and clear-cut effect of packaged foods is that they reduce the complexity of meal planning,’ they write. ‘The family chef can invest less time thinking about the week’s meals.’
In other words, in a world where nearly 100,000 new food and drink products are added to supermarket shelves each year, convenience food offers a valuable freedom from decision-making – a signposted shortcut through the bewildering cornucopia and competing claims of the contemporary food environment.

And, therefore, there are even folks even now who would rather chug synthesized "nutrition."  Even though I intellectually and emotionally understand the changes that have happened even within my lifetime thus far, reading about "Soylent," a few months ago, in "the end of food" made me highly uncomfortable, to say the least.  

Soylent has been heralded by the press as “the end of food,” which is a somewhat bleak prospect. It conjures up visions of a world devoid of pizza parlors and taco stands—our kitchens stocked with beige powder instead of banana bread, our spaghetti nights and ice-cream socials replaced by evenings sipping sludge. But, Rhinehart says, that’s not exactly his vision. “Most of people’s meals are forgotten,” he told me. He imagines that, in the future, “we’ll see a separation between our meals for utility and function, and our meals for experience and socialization.”

When the author of that piece lived a three-day weekend essentially on Soylent, she realized how much eating is more than merely about food:

You begin to realize how much of your day revolves around food. Meals provide punctuation to our lives: we’re constantly recovering from them, anticipating them, riding the emotional ups and downs of a good or a bad sandwich. With a bottle of Soylent on your desk, time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad. On Saturday, I woke up and sipped a glass of Soylent. What to do? Breakfast wasn’t an issue. Neither was lunch. I had work to do, but I didn’t want to do it, so I went out for coffee. On the way there, I passed my neighborhood bagel place, where I saw someone ordering my usual breakfast: a bagel with butter. I watched with envy. I wasn’t hungry, and I knew that I was better off than the bagel eater: the Soylent was cheaper, and it had provided me with fewer empty calories and much better nutrition. Buttered bagels aren’t even that great; I shouldn’t be eating them. But Soylent makes you realize how many daily indulgences we allow ourselves in the name of sustenance.

Eating is not merely about food.  It is about relationships of various kinds:

With the people from whom we buy the groceries.

With the people who share meals with us.

With people who listen to our stories about dining experiences.

Oh well, maybe this is more evidence that I am becoming an old curmudgeon!  

Fast food, "buy local", and insanity

Every once in a rare while, a student, like "M", walks over to my office, slowly sits on the chair and says something like "I am surprised you had that article for us to read."  The explanation they have is that their expectation and understanding that I walk around with a certain political ideology does not match the readings I have for the class.

I suppose it is because of two streaks in me--the "libertarian" within the left-of-center framework, and the preference for clarity and truth irrespective of ideology!  I think these are the same reasons why I have always been drawn to George Orwell, and in contemporary times, to Christopher Hitchens.  Orwell's sympathies for the left-of-center did not prevent him from writing the powerfully influential 1984 and Animal Farm, which were/are both highly critical of socialism and the Soviet Union, when it was not at all fashionable for intellectuals to be anti-socialism.  There was then only only one breed of intellectuals--leftists.  All others were deemed not only as not being intellectual, but as anti-intellectuals.  (Such a world still exists at my place of work which has quite a few self-professed socialist colleagues!)

I am sure that Orwell would not like to be associated with fans like me, though :)

One of the "contrarian" readings that throws off students is anything that critiques the fashionable "buy local" movement.  In the first place, it irritates me that they could not even employ proper grammar--it ought to be "buy locally" and not "buy local"--if the latter, then "local" is a product that we can purchase as much as we can say "buy tomatoes."  It ought to be "buy locally" because, well, brush up on the verb/adverb aspects of English grammar!

"Locavore" which gained enough popularity to even sneak into the dictionary, makes us focus on the geography--local--as opposed to the larger issues of health and well being.  Locavore does not make any economic sense:

Local food is generally more expensive than non-local food of the same quality. If that were not so, there would be no need to exhort people to "buy local." However, we are told that spending a dollar for a locally produced tomato keeps the dollar circulating locally, stimulating the local economy. But, if local and non-local foods are of the same quality, but local goods are more expensive, then buying local food is like burning dollar bills—dollar bills that could have been put to more productive use. The community does not benefit when we pay more for a local tomato instead of an identical non-local tomato because the savings realized from buying non-local tomatoes could have been used to purchase other things. 

 The "rootedness" of the locavore movement is remarkably stupid when you compare it against the history of humans on this planet:

Our agrarian ancestors may well have been more connected to the land, but they died younger, spent little time in education due to the need for human labour and rarely travelled far from their place of birth. They also made appallingly inefficient use of the land and natural resources.

But, how about locavores as an environmental movement?

After an extensive literature review, other researchers have concluded that "it is currently impossible to state categorically whether or not local food systems emit fewer [greenhouse gasses] than non-local food systems."8 Minimizing the use of natural resources entails producing food in the least-cost location, which will not typically be local.

And other effects of closing off:

The idea that localism will bring resilience is also seriously mistaken. An insular community which does not trade regionally or internationally is at risk from the most basic threats, such as crop failure due to local extremes of weather. The evidence for this is all too apparent in the developing world. In a global community, local crop failure is not a life-or-death issue since food can be temporarily imported in exchange for other goods or services. During times of plenty, excess food can be exported and the long-term surplus and deficit balanced out. The community is buffered against extremes of weather through international trade. While an isolated village has to depend on its own grain store to smooth out times of feast and famine, a trading nation has the entire world as its grain store.

I suppose locavores will be great fans of North Korea then :)

In urban planning, we often reminded ourselves that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  I am a fellow traveler when it comes to the feel good intentions of localism.  When I travel, I try--as much as possible--to eat local foods.  I do enjoy the fresh-off-the-garden tomato, whenever a neighbor gives me a few.  But, that is it.

How much such insanity exists is best illustrated in this following Daily Show clip.  While it is not about localism, it is about the idiocy that results from wanting to do the right thing but in the most illogical ways

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In Praise of Fast Food ... well, not "fast food" itself ...

I like cooking. I do not have an extensive repertoire, but I do all right. The more I cook, the less I find foods at restaurants tasty anymore--particularly for the price they charge for the quality they offer. 

But, and despite this, I don't diss the extensive practice of eating food that somebody else has prepared: fast food in many variations. Because, as I tell my students when we discuss geographic patterns in agriculture and food, the "old ways" were also the times when women had pretty much no choice but to be cooks, or most men had no choice but to be farmers.

The story of economic progress has been one of walking away from such limited choices into exercising freedom in terms of what we want to do.

It is quite possible that my grandmother hand-made a lot more dishes and snacks than my mother did--and she made some wonderful sweets that I always, always, looked forward to.  And, yes, my sister makes way fewer eats than what my mother did.

But, the differences in terms of what my sister has done/does versus the previous generations of women, include everything from, say, my sister having a masters degree in the sciences ...

The productivity difference is also enormous. For instance, the electric rice grinder that mom bought about thirty years ago, which she still uses, gained her the two hours that she would have otherwise had to spend at the "aattukkal". (The large version of the mortar/pestle in the photo here.)  Now, both mom and sister have yet another choice--they can directly purchase from the grocery store the machine-mass-produced ready to cook ground mix!  It is their choice now, if they want to do anything the "old way" ... to be able to exercise that choice is freedom.

Freedom in our daily lives matter a lot.  These are not freedoms that a constitution can guarantee, but can only come from economic progress.  Thus, when I feel like having vadas while visiting India, mom does not have to slave in the hot kitchen and fry those delicious vadas and come out of the kitchen drenched in sweat--a two minute walk takes me to the restaurant where I can pick up any number of vadas I want.

So, why such thoughts?
It is not only because I think of food a lot :)

I have started thinking about the kind of topics that I would like to discuss with students, or at least keep them in my mental back-pocket, which I can then appropriately use in discussions. And I ran into this article (ht), which is a wonderful essay.  Even though to excerpt from that is a crime--it really needs to be read from the start to the end--well, here are the concluding observations:

If we do not understand that most people had no choice but to devote their lives to growing and cooking food, we are incapable of comprehending that modern food allows us unparalleled choices not just of diet but of what to do with our lives. If we urge the Mexican to stay at her metate, the farmer to stay at his olive press, the housewife to stay at her stove, all so that we may eat handmade tortillas, traditionally pressed olive oil, and home-cooked meals, we are assuming the mantle of the aristocrats of old.

If we fail to understand how scant and monotonous most traditional diets were, we can misunderstand the “ethnic foods” we encounter in cookbooks, at restaurants, or on our travels. We can represent the peoples of the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, India, or Mexico as pawns at the mercy of multi­national corporations bent on selling trashy modern products—failing to appreciate that, like us, they enjoy a choice of goods in the market. A Mexican friend, suffering from one too many foreign visitors who chided her because she offered Italian food, complained, “Why can’t we eat spaghetti, too?”

If we assume that good food maps neatly onto old or slow or homemade food, we miss the fact that lots of industrial foods are better. Certainly no one with a grindstone will ever produce chocolate as suave as that produced by conching in a machine for 72 hours. And let us not forget that the current popularity of Italian food owes much to two convenience foods that even purists love, factory pasta and canned tomatoes. Far from fleeing them, we should be clamoring for more high-quality industrial foods.

If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, fresh, and natural foods. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the processed staples—salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea—produced by food corporations.

Culinary Luddites are right, though, about two important things: We need to know how to prepare good food, and we need a culinary ethos. As far as good food goes, they’ve done us all a service by teaching us how to use the bounty delivered to us by (ironically) the global economy. Their ethos, though, is another matter. Were we able to turn back the clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen; many of us would be starving.

Nostalgia is not what we need. What we need is an ethos that comes to terms with contemporary, industrialized food, not one that dismisses it; an ethos that opens choices for everyone, not one that closes them for many so that a few may enjoy their labor; and an ethos that does not prejudge, but decides case by case when natural is preferable to processed, fresh to preserved, old to new, slow to fast, artisanal to industrial. Such an ethos, and not a timorous Luddism, is what will impel us to create the matchless modern cuisines appropriate to our time.

Yes!
I am already pumped up for my classes; I wonder if my students are ready as well :)

Chew-S-A, Chew-S-A, USA :)

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The top 10 of the worst meals!

Time lists the top ten from fast food and restaurant chains.  The worst of 'em all?

2,140 Calories
Yes, it's meant to be shared, but this Outback Steakhouse appetizer has more calories than you should eat all day. Health advocates are hoping restaurant chains will be forced to post calorie counts on their menus through a provision the Senate approved this month.

The entire list is pretty fascinating--I haven't ever had any of the ten items listed there.  I am all the more thankful for the sheltered life I lead :)

And, I am thankful that two of my favorites are not in the list:

Krispy Kreme's original glazed doughnut, and .... drum roll please ...
In-n-Out's cheesburger with fries :)

Why are affluent people healthier?

Marion Nestle, in her blog entry, writes about this question, which has often intrigued me. A student, who is quite big framed, was once talking about his younger days when they did not have money and his mother was relying on government assistance to take care of the family that included four children. So, this student remarked that eating up all that unhealthy food that was cheap was the reason for his large size. When Taco Bell has 79-cent items, and when an apple is more expensive than that, even a third-grader can figure out that people without money will choose that cheaper and unhealthy food.

Speaking of Taco Bell, I liked this observation in Sarah Hepola's piece on cheap and fast foods during this Great Rececssion:

There is something unsettling about the audaciously punctuated "Why Pay More!" Taco Bell value menu. I don't mean health concerns -- though those are aplenty -- but the confounding question of how a restaurant could possibly profit selling nachos at 79 cents. The nachos come covered in refried beans and goopy fluorescent orange cheese drizzled with red sauce, a wan imitation of Tex-Mex that made me weep for my years spent in Austin, Texas, but still … 79 cents! Even for recession prices, that feels low. The 89 cent Cheesy Double Beef Burrito, meanwhile, was so hefty I could practically bench-press it. It was crammed with the chain's signature chili-cheese artery-clogging mix.

Anyway, Nestle writes:

Adam Drewnowski and his colleagues at the University of Washington have been doing a series of papers on the cost of food per calorie. The latest is a research brief answering the question, "Can low-income Americans afford a healthy diet?" Not really, they say. Federal food assistance assumes that low-income people spend 30 percent of their income on food, but that assumption was based on figures from an era when housing, transportation, and health care costs were much less.

As Drewnowski has shown repeatedly, healthier foods cost more, and sometimes a lot more, when you look at them on a per-calorie basis.

America, fast food, and the future?

A hilarious satire from The Onion, of course!

New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less