FOOD ABUSE
The US government is treating obesity like an epidemic because that’s exactly what it is. It’s time Australia took the same approach. The obesity crisis is not looming. The crisis is already here. ~Professor Kerin O’Dea, Director Sansom Institute for Health Research, University of South Australia
FILL ‘EM & KILL ‘EM
Not to put too fine a point on the subject – even though I just wrote about this yesterday, and too fine a point can’t be applied, really – the Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday a startling (although increasingly less so) outcome to the world food situation:
“Obesity is set to overtake smoking as the leading cause of premature death and illness in Australia, and experts are calling on government authorities to take the same tough stand on the weight crisis as it did on tobacco.â€
I hear rumblings of junk food warning labels.
So much for a culture we think of fondly as tossing some shrimp on the barbie. Maybe most are dipping those shrimp into bread crumbs and plunging them into the deep fryer, topped with cheese sauce and washed down with liters of sugared soda. I don’t mean to poke fun at Australians; unlike Americans who are often portrayed as fat, among other unsavory characteristics, we don’t see Australians resembling those in this article. It seems the average Aussie is less like Crocodile Dundee and more like John Candy. Perhaps even more sedentary than their American counterparts, the air travel stigma of having to buy two seats and all.
It seems official: the world is eating its way to extinction by cardiovascular disease. Long-declining since the 1960s, the rate of cardiovascular disease has reversed itself and, mirroring the increasing weight of Australians, is again rising. The article goes on to say:
“The number of smokers has decreased by more than a quarter over the past 15 years, but the number of overweight or obese people has increased by more than 50% in the same period.â€
And local governments down under are just now banning trans fats, and only in fast food chains? Most shocking, however, is the number 60. That’s the percentage of adult Australians who are overweight. Presumably, children are right behind them. And that is even worse than the problem we have here, often described as an epidemic. I guess the only thing worse than an epidemic is a catastrophe. What’s a world to do?
STARVATION OF ABUNDANCE
In a perfect storm of a health-indifferent food industry flooding the market with artificial food products and a public whipped into a feeding frenzy of fast food that is cheap to buy and filling to eat, we’re slowly waking to the fact that the world is marching in adamant defiance towards a mutant kind of starvation of abundance. This doesn’t look like starvation. There are no emaciated bodies topped by enlarged heads and hollowed eyes, what we visually recognize as starvation. This is a starvation that we don’t recognize, maybe a starvation that we don’t want to acknowledge.
In a 21st Century world where artificial food is cheap and plentiful enough to supply a continual buffet to us as we navigate through the day, sucking down coffee drinks and soda that provide so much energy that it masks the fact that there is no nutrition going in to feed the biosystem that is our very body.
The modern temple is being stuffed with all manner of things we have come to associate with so much comfort and sweet and warm and delicious that we fail to notice that we are starving. The ultimate in hedonism may very well be the “I’m having dessert for dinner and I can because I am an adult and I can do what I want. Hell, I’m having dessert all day long, if I want to.â€
But why do we want to? What has driven us to such extremes of food abuse?
I was at a networking meeting last night, and wanted to eat a little something, not only because it was dinner time, but because I was hungry. I passed on the chicken wings because they were fried and I knew that I wouldn’t enjoy them.
I opted for the chili nachos, forgetting to ask them to hold the cheese. People seated near me mmmmmmed their chorus of approval as the plate was set in front of me. I knew at once my mistake. While the chili was not bad – a ground beef/kidney bean/tomato concoction identifiable as such and not, mercifully, overcooked – I could detach the chips along the outside of the plate and dip them into the salsa that was served on the side.
The majority of the chips were drenched with melted cheesewhiz that acted as a glue melding most of the chips into one large, molten mass of unidentifiable food product that so transformed the actual food as to render it visually inedible. I pondered what would inspire someone to eat such a thing. As food, it was hideous. The desire to like such a thing was not in me.
Had I been quicker thinking, I would have asked for a cup of chili surrounded by corn chips and salsa; a little sour cream on the side. That would have been real food. What was served to me was an abuse of food. And it is served because people eat it. People eat it because they want to like it. And because they come to like it, it continues to be served. It is time to stop the madness, for madness is what it is. It is a sweet insanity that is killing us, with no respect of national borders.
I came home to a bowl full of New Jersey peaches, ripening to the height of sweetness and picked out the two ripest ones. Biting into them was my dessert, my sweet end to a day where I ate food prepared for me. Peaches were a sort of antidote  I took a couple of psyllium capsules to insure that the cheesy goo that I had eaten wouldn’t bind things up. And then I went back for another peach. The food industry has not been able to take away my love of fresh fruit by tempting me with sugar-induced artifice. I’ve not allowed it.
SUMMERY SPINACH SALAD
You’re the boss making today’s preparation: a lovely spinach and quinoa toss called Lebanese Spinach. Make use of the fresh spinach from summer’s garden, cooking it for just a minute (literally) and toss with sautéed onion and garlic and any whole grain – rice (basamati, brown, forbidden), quinoa or bulgur – and add a squirt of lemon and/or a dash of balsamic vinegar. Eat as a hot or cold snack, or a light addition to any meal, including lunch. Wasn’t that easy?
