Thursday, January 28, 2010

What's In That?


A couple of days ago a discussion came up at work about food. Of course this is a common occurrence, we all love to eat, but something interesting came from it. One coworker was telling a story of how she once attended a pot luck where everyone brought a dish that was commonly served within their family. One Vietnamese girl brought a traditional Vietnamese dish which looked quite unappealing to most of the people there, so no one ate it. She went on and on about how disgusting it looked, how it was watery, and no telling what was in it.

The more I think about this, the more interesting it became to me. I wonder how our "Americanized" dishes look to people from other parts of the world? In this country, most of our meat is mass produced at farms where the animals are pumped full of antibiotics and steroids so they will be larger and mature faster, thus getting them to slaughter three times quicker. Some chickens can't even stand up because their legs can't hold their gigantic, steroid filled bodies. Most of the other ingredients we put into our delicious casseroles and appetizers aren't even real food, but edible processed substances and chemicals.

Within the last 100 years the way Americans eat has changed drastically and we are paying dearly for it with obesity related illnesses and Type 2 Diabetes. Even though our grocery bills may seem to be getting higher and higher, the percentage of household income spent on food is actually lower than it's ever been. Ironically, the percentage of household income spent on health care is higher than it's ever been. Not too difficult to figure out that the less we spend for our food, the unhealthier we become.

"Cheap and convenient" is killing us.

So in the grand scheme of things, maybe the traditional Vietnamese dish wasn't so bad after all. Instead, maybe everyone should have been turning their noses up to the loaded nachos and the hash brown casserole.

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