This is just another example where the liberal/progressive movement, which has good intentions, fails to see the big picture. Simply presenting impoverished people with better quality food and access to it, has little effect on their eating habits. Its like putting a Band-Aid on an infection. You are simply treating the symptom without addressing the root cause. Poor diet and nutrition are learned early on. If a child has grown up eating Eggo Waffles, fried chicken and Doritos, simply presenting them with beautiful vegetables and good quality protein is going to have little effect on that child. While its less pervasive, even in wealthier areas, children are still not familiar with fresh, high quality food. I had a child over for a play date the other day who had never seen an artichoke. He didnt even know what it was. This is a pervasive problem that really started with the onset of grocery stores. As Joel Salatin eloquently says, “The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.” Before then, if you didnt grow it yourself, you went to the butcher for meat or had your milk delivered to you by someone you knew and had a relationship with. Most people back then knew where their food came from and who grew it. In my opinion, the biggest contributing factor to the decline in health in the last 50 years has been our disassociation with our food. Today, most people are completely blind to where their food comes from, who grew it, and the conditions in which it was grown. According to a study done in 2012, one third of kids 16-23 did not know that bacon comes from a pig. How do you combat this problem? I really believe we need to get kids familiar with growing food at an early age. Parents/caregivers need to teach kids where their food comes from, how it is grown and harvested. We need more urban gardens; we need to incorporate this into our local schools as part of the curriculum. People are more invested in something when they know the story behind it. We have lost the story behind our food and consequently we are apathetic towards it. We also need to teach kids how to cook and become involved in what they eat. If we truly want to reverse the declining health in this country, we need to start with the food we eat. This can not be done through government intervention since that is what gave us the Food Pyramid in the 70s, which has been a complete disaster (if you are interested in this topic, I HIGHLY recommend the book Death By Food Pyramid by Denise Minger). This needs to be done at a grass-roots or community level which will be slower but far more effective. It took decades for us to get to this point, and it might take decades to remedy it. slate/articles/life/food/2014/02/food_deserts_and_fresh_food_access_aren_t_the_problem_poverty_not_obesity.html
Posted on: Mon, 10 Feb 2014 17:43:44 +0000
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