Read it before you eat.
When I read stuff like this (The "oatmeal" has 21 total ingredients and more sugar than a Snickers bar. No joke.) I think about all of those people who angrily post comments on the White House facebook photos of Michelle Obama. Usually these are along the line of "She needs to lose weight before she tells me what my kids can eat!" (Usually this is coupled with a livestock-based epithet.) As some one who has just woken up to the realization that I'll need to wear a bridesmaid's dress in about 2 months, I've decided to do a better job of watching what I eat. This means, for example, that instead of eating 5 of the Star Wars cookies I just baked (and several spoonfuls of dough) I get to have one. It means that, despite the recent realization that my history research paper (10 pages) my final English paper, my Arabic final, my Arabic portfolio and presentation, my applications for 3 different grants for study abroad and my Dear Mr. President book will all need to be finished up in the next 3 weeks, I'm probably going to make a better effort to get outside and jog a few miles a day. I'm tired just thinking about it. (If you don't hear from me until the 15th, I'm not dead, I'm just swamped.)
Anyway, I guess what I mean to say is that no one thinks it's easy to make the right food choices or to stay active. It isn't easy. The First Lady isn't trying to tell us what to eat or what to feed our kids, she trying to make it easier for Americans to make better choices. Why people are so threatened by that- especially when faced with the deceptive practices companies like McDonald's regarding their so-called "healthy" options- is beyond me.
And with that, I give you Star Wars cookies:
The recipe is straight from Smitten Kitchen and, sadly, they do not look so pretty frosted with my from-scratch vanilla mint butter-cream or (for the Darth Vaders) bittersweet chocolate.
Goodnight, all.
People no longer enjoy being told they've made mistakes. Okay, they never actually enjoyed that, but they used to accept that it would happen, that they would make mistakes and people would point it out. Now, everyone in general refuses to accept responsibility for their actions, so that anyone saying they could be doing better is a bad thing. We suck now.
ReplyDeleteI wonder, did we ever not suck? I mean I agree that we refuse to accept responsibility for our actions, but was there a time when we were better at it?
ReplyDeletePlus, I don't think that people who are overweight or make poor health choices have made "mistakes". Food companies and food lobbyists have made it more difficult than ever to know what is actually in your food and to know what is actually "healthy" since everything from fruitloops to acai berries are making claims about magical nutritional qualities. I just don't understand the people who are so forceful about not wanting to know, or not wanting information (like calorie counts or ingredients) to be easily accessible. (I have a conservative friend who refers to such things as examples of the "nanny state".)
understanding nutrition is a nanny state thing? well Reagan made ketchup a vegetable as part of his war against the poor people so that seems ideologically consistent.
ReplyDeletethere are a lot of issues with the whole nutrition thing. it's a science that never really figured out how to send a clear message to the public: years of 'eggs are good!' 'eggs are bad!' 'fat is bad!' 'carbs are bad!', and just this year the FDA finally got it down to "Eat less. Make half of your plate fruits and vegetables". which is great advice but probably about 50 years too late at this point
I think a lot of the problem also ties into suburbian attitudes - when you move away from the traditional country farms selling in city markets model, you end up with this need for hugely distributed networks of consistent corporate mono-culture food, neccessitating monocrops bred for the intensive processing needed for preservation during that distribution. And then economies of scale kick in and you realize that cow meat can be really cheap if you bring all the cows into a few pens and buy half the world's corn to feed them - and then whoops, too much meat, need to sell the excess for $1 a hamburger - and then too much corn, need to find some way of processing it so you can recoup your profit - and you end up with the meat-and-corn-syrup diet that is so fatty and sugary and salty that whoops, you just addicted 80% of America to completely fake, weirdly delicious food with nearly no nutritional value and it becomes a literal part of your culture - when no other restaurants occupy your strip-mall suburban hell, then yes TGI Fridays seems like a culinary mecca and how DARE anyone insinuate the Jack Daniels Burger is less than a WORK. OF. ART.
And then the communication problem comes back and people - even those who read the NYT (sorry I read the comments on a news site again) - just don't realize that oatmeal maybe shouldn't have more sugar than a literal candy bar and they defend it against the argula-eating LIBERAL ELITES and it plugs back into this stupid fucking culture war we've been waging ever since the government got its dick chopped off in Vietnam.
Oatmeal is *never* good for you. Icky carbs! Bacon, ftw.
ReplyDelete