Food Attitude: June 2007

Going to grandmas meant having her famous apple crisp, making strawberry jam, and warm bran muffins in the morning. It is no stretch to say that you could feel the love in the food. Food for me started with family dinners, meals and stories shared around the table. The meal started by a trip to the grocery store, usually earlier in the week. Sometimes I got to go and pick out apples and vegetables. Then the meal started in the heart of the house, the kitchen. Preparing the meal was as important as eating it. Shucking the corn, making the salad, and chopping veggies together instilled values; learning the nutrition of a balanced meal, the skills of cooking and bonding with grandma, mom, and sometimes sister. Preparing and sharing a meal instills family values of responsibility, taking care of one another nutritionally and socially.

My family doesn’t get together as often as we used to, because of distance. But my immediate family always makes a point of having dinner together whenever we can.

However meals around America are changing for many families. With both parents working and many single parent families dinner is usually take out, a quick stir together from a package, or worse frozen from a box. Dinner simply is getting further and further away from food. It is now “product” carefully formulated with lots of fat, sugars, salt and preservatives that are unpronounceable. All this for the sake of having a meal in the freezer that will be good tomorrow or six months from tomorrow.

Not only has dinner changed for the average American family, lunch has changed for every member of the family as well. The adults are inhaling fast food, or microwaveable meals in front of the computer or behind the wheel of a car. Lunch is no longer the social event that gives people pleasure in eating and talking like it used to. School lunches for the little ones are filled with fried foods and un-nutritious breaded meat patties, with canned veggies that remained untouched on the lunch tray. Drinks are sugar laden sodas or “fruit juices” from concentrates. No wonder so many kids are “diagnosed” with ADD, they are all on sugar highs with little of the proper nutrition that helps kids to be focused.

Breakfast is almost the worst out of the meals that people are eating now, if they choose to eat it at all. Sugar cereals, pop tarts, toaster pastries that have been marketed to kids and parents buy because something seems to be better than nothing. Most adults are now grabbing a breakfast bar or just having coffee in the morning. Some even start off the morning with hash browns and an egg and sausage McMuffin that has a thirty percent of the recommended daily calories that are needed for the average American male.

Why has all of this happened? The new corporate world. With both parents working in order to provide their children with all they need. To be able to send their kids to outrageously priced colleges, buy SUVs, and once in a while go on vacation. So they can be without want. But what have we created? A fast paced life where we are too busy to sit down to a home made meal and discuss our days, desires, our dreams, what we want to do on the weekend. We have created a void in our lives.

Millions of Americans suffer from depression, stress related illness, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, other ailments that affect the quality of our lives. But what is it that caused this? It is the way we live our lives that affects our health, which in turn affects our quality of life whether mentally or physically, or both. We should be the healthiest we have ever been with therapists, nutritionists, personal trainers, spas, dermatologists, specialists, and all other assortments of doctors. But we only go to these people when there is a problem. We go to the doctors to fix what we have broken, what we have caused. We don’t treat our bodies well enough to prevent illness, and barley change our habits to fix the problem. Instead, we rely on pharmaceutical companies to come up with that miracle drug that will lower or blood pressure, change the chemical imbalance in our brains, and suppress our appetites. We have allowed our habits to pass onto our children who are developing the same diseases that an overweight 45 year old would, type two diabetes at 8, high blood pressure, heart disease, arthritis the list goes on.

This lifestyle is not only making us unhappy and sick, it has caused our children, the future generation, to have a life span less then our own. The first generation to live a shorter life than our own! How can we ignore this any longer? What is the cause? Our life style, poverty (relying on food stamps and cheap fast food for sustenance), our lack of prevention and or obsession with fixing the problem with a band aid of a pill instead of changing our life styles.

Many people may be saying that this does not start with food. But I beg to differ. We make choices every day what we put into our bodies and how we put it into our bodies. This can have consequences if the decisions are poor. If we take the time to go shopping, and prepare our own meals and eat them slowly with family or friends we will make conscious decisions about our nutrition. About how much, and what we allow ourselves to eat and what we allow our children to eat. If we continue the unconscious food choices that we are making, and eat high calorie low nutritious foods more and more we will continue to have a nation that is increasing it’s waistline and a decreasing quality of life.