Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
There are people that do not know what broccoli or tilapia are. Will you educate them?
... and I KNOW people living in a beautiful homes with a great kitchen, with all those state-of-the-art gadgets, but never cooked there in their life.
They don't know how to peel veggies, prepare a meal, make eggs for breakfast or just turn the coffee maker on. Now, how sad is that?!
The one thing about this mom on the Our America episode was that she WAS able to put together recipes and cook. She wasn't opening prepared foods and serving them out of the package. She was performaing all kinds of kitchen food prep tasks: cutting chopping, mixing, boiling, grilling, deep frying, pan frying, etc.
Yes, I know how TV commercials can be dazzling, and some of us might have genetic predispositions to prefer some foods over others, but that still doesn't take away personal responsibility. I would swear I have a genetic predisposition to liking gooey fudge brownies, and I see lots of commercials that stimulate my brownie craving. But if I pick up a brownie and eat it, it's all on me. My choice.
There are people that do not know what broccoli or tilapia are. Will you educate them?
Just let them have a mushy, tasteless piece of tilapia. I like fish, and even I think it's nasty. The intended target of such "education" will assume that all so-called healthy food tastes terrible.
The reason deep-fried food became a staple in the South is that it takes a small amount of something, adds cheap ingredients (the batter), then when it's cooked it looks like more food and it's more filling than it would be if you just cooked that small amount of food plain and served it.
So someone who came from several generations of poverty in the deep south might be only used to cooking that kind of food. Just the way that where I live, poor people fill up on rice and beans and tortillas because that's cheap, filling, and traditional. The reason that we're seeing so much more obesity with the traditional unhealthy foods is that people don't do as much physical work or even just go outside and move around like they used to.
Believe me, home cooked food can be just as fatty and unhealthy as fast food or convenience foods. It just tastes better. And the unhealthy stuff is cheaper...it costs me several dollars to make a salad to serve with dinner but I can make my own loaf of bread for 40 cents.
OK, so maybe cooking and eating fatty/sweet/fried food is a habit? The only thing they know. The only thing they saw and learned to cook.
Food that they ate at home, when mom/dad cooked, a familiar food.
Many, MANY people stick to food they know. They are not willing to try something new.
I read in our Travel Forums about people planning travel to other countries, and their first question was: is there McDonald, Pizza Hut, or American style/chain restaurants? Because they were not going to try anything else, unknown food, regional cuisine...
Or they tried and saw only negatives in it: portions too small, weird ingredients, weird food preparation techniques.
Weird, and not good, because "strange" for them.
The prevailing theory (and I believe some merit to it) is that healthy food is expensive and many cant afford it. I can buy a box of Little Debbie snacks for $1.50 and a carton of strawberries right now is damn near $4. I make spaghetti for $3. That buys like one chicken breast.
For those of us that can afford to eat we have no excuse, but I am not sure how everyone affords it.
... I SOMEHOW agree with it, till I go to Frugal Living Forums and read about people cooking HEALTHY food for their whole family for less than $5. It surely beats a family meal at McD.
I think it's a little bit of what everyone has said: What we decide to eat is based on experience, habits, education, time, finances and also choice.
I bought lettuce and other salad makings at a Farmers Market on Saturday and was thinking about all this as I was making a salad with it on Sunday. First, I had to make a special trip in my car to get it and take it home. Then I had to wash the heck out of it because it had just been picked from the field. It took me a lot of time and effort to prepare that salad and when I was done it had negligible calories. I was thinking about how much quicker and easier it would have been to go to a fast food restaurant and how many calories I could have bought for $6.00, which is about what I spent on the salad. If I were hungry, getting off work from my low-paying job and knew I had some hungry kids at home, I definitely would have opted for fast food.
Obesity--this crazy overabundance of calories--is such an odd problem to have given the history of the world. It's hard to know where we're going to end up.
I know! there are tons of ways to cook very cheaply and very healthy. We have group homes for disabled adults, and back when I supervised sites directly, I learned that my staff were either taking the clients shopping mostly for prepared foods, or if they were doing any actual cooking, it involved grease or oil. They claimed that they could not stay within the clients' food budgets AND buy healthy food.
Without any prior preparation, I rode along on their shopping trip that day and helped them buy a lot of food, for less money, and a lot of it was stuff that would not go bad and would keep for a long time.
People make fun of rice and beans, but dried beans are very nutritious and versatile, and rice is probably better than lots of breads and pastas. I have a big stock of rice and beans, and the shelf life is several years. They are very healthful staples, as long as you don't glop them up with unhealthy stuff.
The clients were shocked when I showed them how a huge bag of potatoes was cheaper than the boxes of au gratin and "scalloped" potatoes they'd been buying (actually that day, the huge bag of potatoes was cheaper than the smaller bag of potatoes). We then went to the local farmers market and voila! there were lots of very inexpensive veggies and fruits, Even the mentally ill guys were like "hey this is $2 cheaper than it was in the grocery store!" They started using olive oil for cooking instead of butter or corn oil, and it wasn't any more expensive.
I live alone and I don't like to prepare complicated meals, but I can get lots of groceries pretty cheaply and eat relatively healthfully (with the few exceptions like my cheese addiction). Prepared foods have so many additives which I don't really like, and if there are leftovers, they go to waste.
So I don't buy the excuse that eating healthy is too expensive.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
