Hello again. This is part 2 on American weight. Several people rightly pointed out that there needs to be some mention of food in this country and how its economics lend themselves to weight gain, and they’re right. This is that commentary. I felt the topic of our food and eating habits so important that it deserves its own commentary separate and distinct from weight itself. So we’re going to deal with three points: fast food, the economics of healthier food choices, and finally, the processing of meat in America.
Fast food is an American icon. Go to Germany, Russia, China or Japan and you will find McDonalds’s. The content might be a bit different. For instance, a McDonald’s in Tokyo might sell sushi. A McDonald’s in Munich might sell you beer, and a McDonald’s in Abu Dabi will probably lean more towards chicken and fish, unless they happen to have halal beef on-hand. But the fast food concept, instant food delivered to you in your car, has exploded since the first McDonalds’s appeared over five decades ago. And who among us doesn’t like a Big Mac? Or a classic chicken sandwich? I prefer the double quarter pounder or the fish sandwiches myself. And there will be fights if we start talking about fries. Personally, McDonald’s fries are ok, but Rally Burgers in Memphis has the best fries anywhere. But this fast-food love affair! oh but what do we love? Let’s make a short, a very short list: McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, Hardies’, Arby’s, White Castle, chick Filet, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Poppy’s Chicken, Church’s Chicken, even subway, quizno’s and Jersey Mike’s, yeah that’s a long enough list. Not too short as it happened, and by no means exhaustive. As a side note, I add that I’m now hungry again, but let’s move on.
There is a dark side to the proliferation of fast food, fast weight gain. This food is, by and large, unhealthy. Let me qualify. Is it possible to get something healthy from McDonald’s? Sure it is. The chicken is better for you than the beef, and the fish, I think, better still. Or you can order a salad, a plain salad, and put low-fat dressing on it, not that anyone really does. And yes, subway’s food is generally healthier than any of the burger chains. Just about the unhealthiest sub from subway is better for you than that double quarter pounder I mentioned above. But still, if you get the philli-cheeze steak with extra meat, chipotle sauce and mayo every day, you will be hard pressed to argue that you’re eating healthier than your neighbor who comes back to the office or to the house every day with a big Mac. So, subpoint number one, it’s unhealthy. This isn’t a point anyone’s going to contend, I’m sure. By the way, speaking of semi-healthy … McDonald’s new oatmeal? Don’t. … Moving on. Second subpoint, it’s cheap. Don’t worry, I’ll have more to say about money in a moment. The fact that I can eat so good for five bucks is undoubtedly a motivator. That being said, McDonald’s is a lot more expensive than it used to be. Soon we’ll be drooling over the five dollar menu, not just the dollar menu. So, we’re getting fat on tasty food that’s horribly unhealthy, but man is it affordable! Ok, let’s talk about money.
Just how hard is it to buy healthier stuff from the grocery store? Well let’s see. First, you really have to know what you’re looking for. The food giants in this country have made it challenging to find healthy selections. You have to know what fructose is or what saturated fats are or what a serving size is or what net carbs are, and are not. In short, you have to be well-informed, more so than ought to probably be the case. However, if you are resolved to buy healthy, you’re going to have to read product labeling and know when a label is being less than upfront about fats, added sodium, preservatives, etc et al. So, Google it. This is the information age, get informed. Yes, I’m taking the food giants to task in this blog, but by no means am I absolving you, ore me, of our personal responsibility to inform ourselves as to what we’re buying.
Having said all that, there’s still a major problem looming. Once you know what you’re doing, there’s the matter of paying for it. Maybe, you say, “I’m on a fixed income or I’m a student with only so much for food each month, and I can get so much more for my dollar than I would if I bought healthy.” This, unfortunately, tends to be true. Let me give several examples that will highlight both the uninformedness of Americans, as well as the cynicism of the major foods distributers in the US. If someone knows a bit more on this topic, let me know where I’ve gone wrong. Still, I think my reasoning is sound.
Let’s consider beef and chicken. If you go to Kroeger’s or Jewel or Wal-Mart, the ground beef you’re likeliest to buy comes in the larger economy-sized or family packs. ‘Economy-sized’ and ‘family’ are two euphemistic terms that mean ‘freakin huge quantity’)! It’ll be priced at a lower dollar rate per pound. Also, it’s likely to have a fat ratio of 70/30, meaning that it’s 70% meat and 30% fat content. This is not good. I’m not sure if you can find 100% lean ground beef, but the healthiest I know of is 93/7, that is, 93% lean meat with a 7% fat content. This is some of the healthiest ground beef you can buy, and it has just enough fat in it to give it good flavoring. You can’t go wrong with it. Unfortunately, as you might guess, its price is normally sky high. I recently bought a pound of 93/7 lean ground beef and paid almost $6 for it. The econopack, containing 3 pounds of 75/25 ground beef (the normal pack remember) ran, by contrast, at a sale price of $5. Now if we run it strictly as a matter of costs, outlays versus products, the econopack wins every single time. More for less is what you get. What’s sacrificed, of course, are any considerations of the health value of the food for the consumers who buy the products. Incidentally, the alternatives to ground beef, including ground turkey, ground lam, and, though I am loathed to mention it, ground soy, are comparably as high as the 93/7 lean beef I talked about earlier. So, if you have a family and genuinely desire to have healthy ground beef in the house, you may pay upwards of 15 to 20 dollars for the equivalent amount of lean beef.
Now let’s talk chicken. Again, most families will opt for the larger packs of legs and thighs or gizzards and livers etc. I like livers myself. But anyway, the large family pack of chicken is bone-in chicken with the skin still on. Most people don’t know that you ought to skin the pieces before cooking them, or maybe it’s that they can’t be bothered to take the time to do so. That too. In any case, the healthiest chicken you can buy that I know of are the boneless, skinless chicken breasts. If you’re lucky, you’ll find boneless skinless filets in a large bag for about $10. If you’re very unlucky, you might find packs of chicken breasts, containing 2, maybe 3 breasts, for $6-$8. So you could, theoretically, find yourself spending $20 to $30 on chicken if you’ve got a couple of kids, you all like chicken, and you insist that your family eat it healthfully.
Those are just two examples of both the need to be a well-informed consumer, and too, the cynicism of food distributers in America. Why cynical? Well let’s see, what sort of attitude lies behind the mentality that says, “sell ‘em more of the unhealthier crap. Just cram it into a bigger package and slash the price. They’ll buy it.” Well of course they’ll buy it! When it’s that expensive to buy good, most folks won’t think they’ve got a damned choice! Very cynical. Or if not cynical, cold and calculating in the extreme. Tyson and American Beef or whoever don’t really care about your health. Never think they do. What they care about is the same thing all corporations, no matter their products, services or mission statements, care about, the bottom line, the dollar. Namely, your dollar and mine. That, my friends, is essentially why it’s harder to buy healthy ground beef. They could make all ground beef marketed in the USA be 85/15 or 90/10, provided the distributers and processors wanted it to be so. But they do not. Producing the less healthy meats for bulk distribution saves them money. Ergo, there’s no profit motive either in selling only healthy food or in retooling the meat processing procedures, such that the product is produced in a new way and is universally healthier. Am I wrong? I don’t know much about the meat processing in this country, but does what I said stand the test of reason? You tell me.
Now we come to the chemicals in food. Those of you who grew up on farms or have had a high level of access to fresh produce, homegrown vegetables or local, farm-raised meats are going to have a lot more to say about this, but let me say what I can. First, a story.
I spent Spring Break of 2009 in Germany. Now most Europeans shop differently from us. There, it’s customary to shop for just the day, or at most, the week. Milk, for instance, is sold more often by the quart. I think the largest container of milk I saw was two quarts, or one half gallon in our measurements. So, it’s not uncommon to run to the market three or four times a week, or even daily. Now the first time I walked into this food market in the Rheinland of northern Germany, the first thing that struck me was the smell. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the place smelled differently. My German friends couldn’t explain it. The one person who’d been to America had not been in so many years, that she couldn’t figure out what I meant. Now, I think I know. Part of the smell was the cleaning solutions. They were different. But a huge part of the smell of the store had to do with the food. Quite simply, it was fresh. When you go into a large chain grocery store, see if you can’t detect a faint, metallic chemical smell in the air. This is what I mean. A lot of it is given off by the gallons of preservatives pumped into the massive quantities of foods put on the freezer shelves of our grocery stores. Europeans, generally, do not do this.
The preservatives in our meats, our dairy, and in our canned goods are there to, well, you guessed it, preserve. They extend the shelf-life of our foods for months, sometimes years. Let’s also mention hormones. Much of our beef and chicken is induced with hormones. Why? Because so many of us want meat! We have 309 million people here, and everybody loves lots and lots and lots of meat! The meat processing industry responds to this. Poultry and chattel are frequently injected with growth hormones. Hormones are put into their food, and so on so that the specimens grow faster and bulk up in muscle and fat which translates into more meat product per animal and, to forge the next link in the chain, more meat to sell to you and me, which results in higher profits for them, the distributers and processors. I’m not taking the stores too much to task, because by and large, your grocery store sells you what they’re told to sell at the prices they’re told to sell it. They’re almost, not quite, but almost, as powerless in the scheme of food production as you.
Well my friends, I have some bad news. Those hormones and preservatives and additives etc? They don’t go away just because you cooked the stuff. You bought the hormones when you bought the beef, cooked the hormones when you cooked the beef, and consumed and metabolized the hormones when you ate dinner. So the hormones get to affect not only your food, but you too.
So what can we do about it? Sadly, I don’t have an answer for you. I’m not going to go vegetarian out of protest, because I happen to like meat please and thank you. I’m also not going to go Socialist or Communist on you and insist on revolution. Russia has amply demonstrated the viability of that one. Nor, as a side note, am I convinced that total government regulation would solve the problem. I’m not gonna tell you to do anything, because until the USDA comes down on the processors and distributers of our meats, or until consumers organize on a mass scale, the likes of which we have never seen, nothing will change. Side note: The National Corn Board, in response to the public outcry against corn fructose (more commonly known as corn syrup) has decided to do something to address the health concerns brought to its attention. After all, it’s gotten out that corn fructose is much much worse for you than cane sugar. So, to address your needs, they’ve decided to … I wish I was kidding, … change the name from corn fructose to corn sugar. Again, not joking. Now, is that, or is that not cynical? So now, hopefully, you’re a little better informed than you were before. And if you suffer from a limited income, as I do, you have my sympathies. That doesn’t give you, or me, license to just blithely buy what we like, citing higher prices as an excuse. We’re still obligated to make better choices. And if that means you buy a little less of something or due without something else so you can eat healthier, well, that may well be the price to be paid for avoiding being 400 plus pounds in America.
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