Foodie Obsessed

Ruhlman, Fat, Salt and America’s Obsession

by Tracey Thompson on April 15th, 2008

image:  www.freeimage.co.uk 

Americans are obese.  Plain, simple.  But, why?  Is it the evil butter we place in our skillet while we cook our veggies or maybe that salt we sprinkle on our eggs in the morning? 

Michael Ruhlman rants about America’s obsession and the sad reality that our focus is wrong.  Processed foods are the enemy and sadly fresh is more expensive making it hard for Americans on a budget to purchase anything but.  The current food budget continues to expand in stark contrast with the money in our wallets.  We have dietitians and nutritionists on TV working hard to tell you the evils of buttering your toast and determined to take any taste that exists in your food out:

Americans have a hopelessly neurotic relationship with what they consume, of this there’s little disagreement, a neurosis that’s built into our culture from the broadest levels of agriculture and government, which demand that we subsidize farmers to grow crops you can’t eat without industrial processing, all the way down to our grocery store shelves, which are packed with confusing, marketing-spun messages about what’s good for us and what’s not.

Snackwells, for instance.   Who’s the clever executive who came up with that name?  Want a healthy snack?  Try buying … Snackwells!   Are Americans stupid enough to buy that?  You bet!  (More here from Trib article on the Snackwell story.)

Just about every box and bag on the grocery store shelves has some kind of  “low fat” version, sometimes even if the real version doesn’t require fat in the first place.  On a recent flight, I  was handed a Quaker Oats Granola Bar—granola, it’s good for you, and it’s low fat.  Granola doesn’t need much fat, if any, in the first place; but it does need sugar and you can bet that’s the reason my Quaker Oats “low fat” granola bar was every bit as sweet and chewy as a Milky Way bar.  And on the previous flight, the first ingredient in the blueberry muffin I’d been given was sugar, not flour.

The sad fact is that fresh food that is good for you is significantly more expensive than the processed crap that truly is bad for our diet, not to mention our food production system.  And the people who most need food to be healthy are the ones who can least afford it.  The millions of Americans on a restricted food budget will see little choice other than to buy the cheap calories provided by agribusiness corn.

What drives me crazy though is the American cook and the American consumer, who truly do care about food and cooking, but are continually mislead, largely by an uninformed media and unchecked marketing, notably with two of the most fundamental components of cooking—salt and fat.

I say unto you: Fat is good!  Fat is necessary.  Ask any chef.  Fat does not make you fat, eating too much makes you fat!  We aren’t filling our bodies with sodium because of the box of kosher salt we use to season our food, we’re doing it with all the processed food that’s loaded with hidden salt.  And American cooks and American diners need to understand the differences.

Bravo!  Here!  Here!  Read more.  Also check the Chicago Tribune article, The Oreo, Obesity and Us.

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POSTED IN: Health