Do You Know What You Eat?
By: Laura B. Storhoff
…
As the world evolves it is becoming more and more fast-paced. The family life that once revolved around the kitchen and sit down meals is no more mainly because there just isn’t time. There is no longer time to pass down grandma’s recipe for homemade buns; so the legacy of her ‘Best in the County Buns’ dies off. If families do have time for a sit down meal, very few of them are homemade because finding time to get the whole family together is hard enough, finding time to whip up a meal from scratch is virtually impossible. This fast paced life has created the new world of fast food and frozen box dinners, leaving us with the problem that people don’t know where food actually comes from.
On the television show Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution he reveals that a group of elementary students can’t determine between tomatoes and potatoes. I couldn’t believe this because these foods hardly resemble each other or taste anything alike. This is a real problem facing our world when people don’t know what goes into the foods they consume every day. People aren’t cooking anymore because it is easier to throw a Hot Pocket in the microwave and have a meal or quick snack in one minute rather than getting out simple ingredients to make a version of a Hot Pocket. What is even in a Hot Pocket and is it good for you? People need to be asking themselves these types of question and they aren’t.
Ignoring what is being put into our bodies is one of the main reasons the obesity rate has risen. In his book, America's food: what you don't know about what you eat, Harvey Blatt mentions that obesity rose from 15 percent in 1980 to 32 percent in 2004. Fast and easy is what people like and reading the ingredients or taking the time to actually make something from scratch is defiantly not what people of America want. Since the recent recession the fast food industry has profited because fast and cheap is more appealing to people than how much fat and other unknown products they are consuming.
I think it is safe to assume every child and adult in the United States knows what a pizza is but I think it would be hard for half of them to name what ingredients were used in making it. I feel people of the world need to know what they are eating. To know french fries are made from potatoes and ketchup is made from tomatoes and both these things can be easily made in the comfort of your own kitchen for a much healthier price than the fast food stores. People need to stop thinking about the short term fast pace and think about how much longer they want to be on this earth because the fast way of eating will not get them very far.
References
Blatt, H. (2008). America’s food: what you don’t know about what you eat. MIT Press.
Flegal, K.M., Carroll, M.D., Ogden, C.L., Curtin, L.R. (2010). Prevalence and Trends in Obesity Amoung US Adults, 1999-2008. JAMA, 3. Retrieved from http://jama.ama-assn.org
Sur, S. (2009, March 26). Sales rise for fast-food chains. Yale Daily News. Retrieved from http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/city-news/2009/03/26/sales-rise-for-fast-food-chains/
Vileisis, A. (2008). Kitchen literacy: how we lost knowledge of where food comes from and why we need to get it back. Washington, DC: Island Press.
.jpg)
