Put down the fork 2: The Return!

[Catta]

OK I thought metabollism could have some effect. not much but some noticable affect. But my main point was that a skinny person can eat unhealthily and still be skinny. But cos they are skinny they will be perceived as "healthy"

No they wont.

What will happen is that they are perceived to be healthier than if they were obese. Its like looking at a skinny person and an obese person and saying the obese person probably run slower than the skinny person. We don't know either, we dont know what shape the skinny person is in. But we do know that the skinny person only has to move a quarter of the weight the obese person has to.

Just because you are skinny, you are not perceived as being in shape. Only if you juxtapose them with an obese person does this become the case because while the person might not be healthy - they are healthIER.

[Gheld]

Anyway. My point, as it is in any other food thread is that the solution isn't to put down the fork, the solution is to pick up the fork.

And what I mean by that is that this obsession with instant food, and fast food and what-not has reshaped the very way food exists as a part of our lives.

It's like gassing up your car. You put your credit card into the pump, hold down the trigger for a couple of minutes, and voila. Your car will go again. And food has become the same way. You give money, you stuff some random crap that somebody else made into your body, and you can go again.

I mean, if you were to go around and really see the hidden costs of convenience, you might not keep feeling so great about it. And that's the thing. All convenience comes at a cost.

The time you save in the kitchen by eating instant/fast food items is time that has to be made up somewhere else in the world. We have absolutely no personal or emotional connection to our food any more. It's one of those things that are now fall into the category of "out of sight, out of mind." And the production of food in the last 20 years has dramatically shifted from being something that was a part of our lives, to some global regime of environmental exploitation to make as much money as possible.

And your ground beef might cost a little bit more from the butcher, but your money is creating a job for a butcher, and his assistants. When you fork over that cash for the double shitburger from McShits incorporated, you are creating a hamburger marketing executive job that pays millions of dollars a year and a bunch of shit fast food jobs that mean nothing to you, except that the people who work them will also need government assistance to make ends meat (That comes out of your pockets). And guess what? There's 1 million "burger bitches" for every good job. And that's the price of convenience. None of the good jobs that are left out there involve anything that are fulfilling in any meaningful way. Nobody, aged 5 said, daddy, when I grow up I want to be a marketing executive for McDonalds, or a manager at a giant slaughterhouse.

So people work at a bunch of shit jobs, related to the fact that they don't want to spend an hour in the kitchen every day prepping their meals, or devote a second of their brain time to meal planning, they want to throw a frozen pizza in the oven, or stop at McDonalds, or hell, even the health food scene is starting to get instant/fast food representation now. So even people who "Eat healthy" are just going to take some profiteers word on what's going into their bodies at the cost of a lot of good jobs too.

So pick up the fork. Well, pick up a pan, or a baking sheet, or a spatula, and make your own damn food.

I've actually recently challenged myself to only buy single ingredients and make everything from scratch (except if somebody invites me over for dinner, to avoid being rude of course) and in the last 3 weeks I have been emotionally and intellectually connected to the act of feeding myself like I never have been before.

It really changes the way you think about food. Like those almost rotten tomatoes in the produce aisle that are on sale for 50% off that you snicker at on the way to the frozen food aisle to get your frozen burittos (lol, as-is produce right?), I bought those, and made a healthy and absolutely delicious tomato and carrot broth that I can add to things as I cook them. I didn't even have to pay attention to it. I just put them into a crock pot with some vinegar, water, and a little bit of salt and some shallots that I had sitting around that I couldn't decide what to do with, and a few hours later I just strained it and there you go.

TLDR :
The 'obesity epidemic' is the symptom of a greater problem, that problem being people have absolutely no connection to their food any more. They think about it the same way they think about gassing up their car. "Well if I pull the nozzle back a bit, I can squeeze about another half a litre of gas in there and won't have to come back here as soon".

[PizzaSHARK]

The time you save in the kitchen by eating instant/fast food items is time that has to be made up somewhere else in the world. We have absolutely no personal or emotional connection to our food any more. It's one of those things that are now fall into the category of "out of sight, out of mind." And the production of food in the last 20 years has dramatically shifted from being something that was a part of our lives, to some global regime of environmental exploitation to make as much money as possible.

To an extent, yeah. You can still find neighborhood butcher shops, farmer's markets, etc. But you're right that a lot of people think that they can't afford to spend the time cooking, so they get the frozen meals, fast food, or boxed pasta type of stuff instead.

TLDR :
The 'obesity epidemic' is the symptom of a greater problem, that problem being people have absolutely no connection to their food any more. They think about it the same way they think about gassing up their car. "Well if I pull the nozzle back a bit, I can squeeze about another half a litre of gas in there and won't have to come back here as soon".

Naw, I think it's more that larger portion sizes and a lack of self-discipline imposed while still young. Especially over here, if your folks don't monitor how much food you're eating when you're young, you'll probably get used to overeating; your body will feel "full" when you've already had too much food, and an appropriate portion will feel like you're starving yourself.

It doesn't help that during the 80's and 90's (and extending into today), there were huge subsidies for corn farmers, and powerful lobbyist groups to ensure that our country had a vested interest in grains and corn products, which are very high on carbohydrates but often very low on dietary fiber or anything else of nutritional value (which often results in overeating, since they're high in calories by volume and you don't feel "full" after eating them.)

[Gheld]

To an extent, yeah. You can still find neighborhood butcher shops, farmer's markets, etc. But you're right that a lot of people think that they can't afford to spend the time cooking, so they get the frozen meals, fast food, or boxed pasta type of stuff instead.



Naw, I think it's more that larger portion sizes and a lack of self-discipline imposed while still young. Especially over here, if your folks don't monitor how much food you're eating when you're young, you'll probably get used to overeating; your body will feel "full" when you've already had too much food, and an appropriate portion will feel like you're starving yourself.

It doesn't help that during the 80's and 90's (and extending into today), there were huge subsidies for corn farmers, and powerful lobbyist groups to ensure that our country had a vested interest in grains and corn products, which are very high on carbohydrates but often very low on dietary fiber or anything else of nutritional value (which often results in overeating, since they're high in calories by volume and you don't feel "full" after eating them.)

Yeah, I'm not going to lie, the American corn culture is definitely a big factor. I watched "Food Inc." on netflix the other night and it's just crazy how much corn you guys are producing. And trust me, that corn everything has spilled north of the border into Canada. I mean in the products. In terms of farming, because we didn't subsidize specific products (although for the longest time there was a centralized agricultural purchasing system that was sort of like a subsidy) there's still a pretty broad spread of agriculture in Canada. There are some corn farmers, but they are all in the "buy local" scene because we don't need giant commercial grade corn farms, because 'murica.

In my province it's a lot of sunflowers, durum wheat and canola; which make decently useful products. Sunflower oil is about 9 bucks a gallon here, and I use it as my main cooking medium since it's trans fat free, and has a high enough smoke point to crisp stuff.

EDIT: Also teaching proper portioning is all part and parcel of learning to cook. And there's pretty much an entire generation out there now (i.e. millenials) that are helpless in the kitchen. Their parents didn't teach them to cook, and they sure as hell have nothing to pass on to their kids. So society is pretty much fucked.

But yeah, really, just cooking my own food (I already knew how to cook though, I was just being lazy through my 20s), I can make food that is more flavourful than any of that instant crap, and yet is more nutritionally complete and more filling than anything you can buy in a can, or a frozen cardboard box, or get from a drive through. And in a lot of cases, I'll spend the later half of an off day in the kitchen preparing batches of food that I can just freeze, and reheat. My own TV dinners so to speak.

Some of my fondest memories growing up were when my parents were in the kitchen preparing a home cooked meal, and the whole family was hanging out there, helping out in some way and talking. It's sad that so many people have no such memories.

EDIT the second: Also, I tried hanging out on a cooking forum once, and thanks to all those Hell's Kitchen/Masterchef/etc shows, it seems that the "home cooking community" is dominated primarily by passive-aggressive cooking snobs who are just looking for a way to make themselves feel better about their crippling needle dick than to actually help young people into the world of home cooking.

[PizzaSHARK]

And in a lot of cases, I'll spend the later half of an off day in the kitchen preparing batches of food that I can just freeze, and reheat. My own TV dinners so to speak.

That's what I usually do. I make a lot of "pot meals", basically a giant pot of something or other. It might be a pot of chicken or pork shoulder that sat in the crockpot on low heat for 16 hours that I shred up and use on salads and sandwiches, or it might be a giant pot of chili or chicken soup. I've got a gallon-sized steel pot and have considered getting a larger, commercial-sized pot, but I'm not sure if the burners on my stove would be big enough to heat something that large effectively.

EDIT the second: Also, I tried hanging out on a cooking forum once, and thanks to all those Hell's Kitchen/Masterchef/etc shows, it seems that the "home cooking community" is dominated primarily by passive-aggressive cooking snobs who are just looking for a way to make themselves feel better about their crippling needle dick than to actually help young people into the world of home cooking.

Oh yeah. Especially people that watch garbage shows like Paula Deen, Rachel Ray, and apparently even Trisha fucking Yearwood has her own cooking show now. None of these shows show a single goddamned thing about actual cooking, they're basically just really fucking lengthy youtube videos and an excuse to stare at Trisha Yearwood's admittedly lovely tits.

Hell, you can find tons of articles of actual chefs bagging on people like Rachel Ray for not knowing shit about kitchens; cross-contaminating is something she'll do in virtually every single show that involves raw meat somewhere.

But people watch those shows, or the shitty American version of Gordon Ramsay's show, and suddenly believe they know everything about kitchens.

[Tulune]

But people watch those shows, or the shitty American version of Gordon Ramsay's show, and suddenly believe they know everything about kitchens.

All I could think of after reading this bit,