One of the most distressing things is that despite the thousands of food TV programs on the air now, almost no one in America cooks at home anymore.
True. A lot of people don't even know how. Still, even knowing how it still time consuming which becomes a challenge when you don't have much time... which unfortunately tends to happen in high stress situations... which makes 'comfort food' seem all the more appealing. It's vicious.
Secondly, in the old days (the 1950s-early 60s), poor people used to cook for themselves because it was the only way to eat cheaply. Now they stuff themselves and their children with low-cost, easily-obtainable, non-nutritive fast food, compounding their poverty with obesity and its attendant health problems. I watched a program on HBO the other day on "The New Poor" in Portland, OR, and damned if almost every person profiled wasn't at least 50 pounds overweight (including some of the kids).
Yes. The frustrating part of this is that like a friend of my Mother's who angers me because she says things about poor people living on food stamps being fat, is that it comes with the belief that somehow such people are necessarily gluttons, when in fact there's a lot of science in support of it being more than perfectly possible to be overweight and UNDERnourished. When you're offered things with a lot of calories but very little nutrients, it's going to have a bad result. The more refined, the more processed the more it may have calories, but the less likely that it's nutrient dense. Plus, 'good' food isn't as readily available in urban deserts where there isn't a nice supermarket anywhere close, and even if it were fast food and processed food is still often cheaper. Plus, if you're someone working two jobs, you're tired. You don't have time to drive to the suburbs to reach a supermarket, or to cook from-scratch meals because you're working 16 hour days.
And then there's the way that the high sugar/transfat diets screw up the hormones. It's all a vicious cycle.
Recently I read a Salon article where some woman decided to try to make do for one month on allowance equal to an equivalent food stamp stipend, and she raved about how she bought fresh milk for her yogurt machine. Seriously, this is not the same thing as trying to live off the meager allowance the underprivileged on foodstamps must because I SERIOUSLY doubt that they have a William-Sanoma yogurt maker in the pantry!
*sigh* Don't know what an answer would be, but villifying people for being poor and living off of poor quality food isn't one of them.
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True. A lot of people don't even know how. Still, even knowing how it still time consuming which becomes a challenge when you don't have much time... which unfortunately tends to happen in high stress situations... which makes 'comfort food' seem all the more appealing. It's vicious.
Secondly, in the old days (the 1950s-early 60s), poor people used to cook for themselves because it was the only way to eat cheaply. Now they stuff themselves and their children with low-cost, easily-obtainable, non-nutritive fast food, compounding their poverty with obesity and its attendant health problems. I watched a program on HBO the other day on "The New Poor" in Portland, OR, and damned if almost every person profiled wasn't at least 50 pounds overweight (including some of the kids).
Yes. The frustrating part of this is that like a friend of my Mother's who angers me because she says things about poor people living on food stamps being fat, is that it comes with the belief that somehow such people are necessarily gluttons, when in fact there's a lot of science in support of it being more than perfectly possible to be overweight and UNDERnourished. When you're offered things with a lot of calories but very little nutrients, it's going to have a bad result. The more refined, the more processed the more it may have calories, but the less likely that it's nutrient dense. Plus, 'good' food isn't as readily available in urban deserts where there isn't a nice supermarket anywhere close, and even if it were fast food and processed food is still often cheaper. Plus, if you're someone working two jobs, you're tired. You don't have time to drive to the suburbs to reach a supermarket, or to cook from-scratch meals because you're working 16 hour days.
And then there's the way that the high sugar/transfat diets screw up the hormones. It's all a vicious cycle.
Recently I read a Salon article where some woman decided to try to make do for one month on allowance equal to an equivalent food stamp stipend, and she raved about how she bought fresh milk for her yogurt machine. Seriously, this is not the same thing as trying to live off the meager allowance the underprivileged on foodstamps must because I SERIOUSLY doubt that they have a William-Sanoma yogurt maker in the pantry!
*sigh* Don't know what an answer would be, but villifying people for being poor and living off of poor quality food isn't one of them.