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It’s almost mind-boggling to consider, but one drink at Sonic or one dish at the Cheesecake Factory can each account for more than 2,000 calories! Combined, these two “foods” are 4,460 calories.
Depending on your age and gender, the recommended daily intake is about 2,000 calories, give-or-take. Is it any wonder that we have a waistline epidemic?
As the December 2014 New York Times story details, cooking at home can easily provide you with a far greater array of foods for three meals while staying within your calorie limits.
Author Michael Pollan in 2013:
“Cooking is probably the most important thing you can do to improve your diet. What matters most is not any particular nutrient, or even any particular food: it’s the act of cooking itself. People who cook eat a healthier diet without giving it a thought. It’s the collapse of home cooking that led directly to the obesity epidemic.”
There’s an implication in Pollan’s claim of causality that if only women stayed home, home cooking would not have “collapsed.” My childhood is a counterclaim:
My mother worked as a bookkeeper for an international agricultural equipment company, a classic 8-5 job. My dad worked 8-5 as well. I was the only child.
Yet we ate together for every evening meal, cooked at home. On Thursday nights, my dad grilled. Going out to eat was a treat and reserved for the weekends.
Weekdays, beakfast was usually unsweetened cereal but eggs were there if I wanted to cook them. Being a night owl even then, I usually opted for the cold cereal!
Lunch, of course, was at school for me. Sandwiches for my parents.
I weighed less than 100 pounds when I graduated from high school. My mom didn’t put on weight until post-menopause; my dad, until he retired and stopped walking as much.
What’s happened, then, to cause a collapse in home-cooking if not women working outside of the home? Here’s a possible list of things that have encroached on cooking time and ease:
These factors led to an increased reliance on highly processed foods, which are often “high in added sugar, sodium, saturated fats or trans fats and contain little dietary fiber“.
Until the growth of the urban food movement, consumers were usually further removed from the food chain than I was growing up. The market power rests with a handful of food processors and a handful of grocery store conglomerates:
The U.S. food system has been compared to an hourglass:38 at the top are many producers, at the bottom millions of consumers. The narrow part of the hourglass represents the small number of companies that largely control how food is passed between producers and consumers. The industries at this bottleneck, including food processors and retailers, can have considerable influence over who produces food, how it is produced and what is eaten.
How, then, can we eat healthy?
One of the first way is to learn to recognize what 2,000 calories looks like — as well as 100, 200, 500.
Another: use smaller plates, not large dinner dishes, when you eat at home.
Eat while sitting when at all possible, rather than while on your feet, behind the wheel, or traveling by bus.
All processed foods are not bad for you. Neither are all restaurant foods. But having calorie labels on menus would help, as would ingredient labels in English and in something significantly larger than 6 point type.
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