I had a small window in which to find something to eat a few mornings ago. I had fasted for some bloodwork, forgot to pack some nuts to tide me over, and had another appointment coming up. Rather than go for physical therapy (and a fair amount of exercise) on an empty stomach and nothing but water since the night before, I thought it prudent to stop at the nearby Jack-in-the-Box for something to take the edge off of my hunger. That's when I read their breakfast menu and realized that it was packed with prompts to overeat. Words like "loaded," "extreme," "ultimate," "jumbo," and "supreme" prefixed almost all of the items on the menu.
I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I hadn't been to Jack-in-the-Box for several months, and my eating habits have changed substantially. I am now more aware of carbs and proteins, looking for vital nutrients wherever I can find them. As I try to confront my past eating habits and make new ones, I have become somewhat sensitized to the degree to which we are bombarded with messages that push us toward (unhealthy) food in excessive amounts. It's no surprise that those messages are generally not promoting green things.
I decided to check the other fast food menus in the area. Burger King tended to have adjectives related to its name: Bacon King, Big Fish, Royal Crispy Chicken. Sonic also played on its name with SuperSonic, but generally just named the item and indicated whether something was its "regular" size or larger. Whataburger was even plainer in its naming practices, just naming the item and then allowing for extra ingredients. That includes "double meat" and "triple meat" options, so we are still looking at oversized meals. Regardless of the names, extra large portions were readily available.
The pressure to eat more and more is not just our moms telling us to clean our plates (although that might be a good place to do some rethinking). We are influenced by advertising on television as well as other media. Billboards invite us to stop and eat. Even at the grocery store, we are nudged in the direction of buying more with "jumbo" and "giant" size packaging and special deals that have us buy items in multiples and "save."
Even our concern for the environment can take some of the blame. While those "giant" packages give us more to consume, they also take less packaging, giving us a real saving on the use of non-renewable materials for packaging. Americans literally waste a third of the food we grow. Knowing that, I find myself sometimes eating a bit more than I need to just to keep from wasting the food. (Faulty logic, I know.)
Certainly obesity is a national crisis, ending lives prematurely and undermining quality of life in the years leading up to death.
What to do?
Perhaps we could start with a conversation about food. How do we center it in our personal lives and in our Ethical Societies? This is not a conversation about veganism, although that conversation might at some point be appropriate. It is a conversation about how we value food as a means to build community, about how we center food as a focus of celebration and occasion, how we are affected by the availability of foods, how advertising shapes our relationship with food. From this conversation, we might see some changes that we can make in our foodways--at home and at our meetings. We might also see some changes that we'd like to see in our community--whether it is finding better sources of food or improving health education in our public schools or looking more closely at the food pyramid above and figuring out where to go from there.
Food Pyramid: Copyright © 2008. For more information about The Healthy Eating Pyramid, please see The Nutrition Source, Department of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, www.thenutritionsource.org, and Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy, by Walter C. Willett, M.D., and Patrick J. Skerrett (2005), Free Press/Simon & Schuster Inc.”
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