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My first culinary experience in America did not turn out well. When I landed in Washington from a sixteen-hour flight from New Delhi, I had to wait six hours to know that my thirty-minute flight to Roanoke, Virginia, where I was to register at Virginia Tech as a freshmen international student, got cancelled. So I was forced to eat at the bar, which was the only eatery that was open, I took one look at the menu and knew that I had to order the cheapest thing on it. Fish and Chips it was. My food arrived in humongous bowls, brimming with oil, boasting a bright golden crust. It could have easily been made to fit a Viking. I was so turned off by the blunt deep fried nature of the food that I barely managed to eat half of it, all my money wasted. Adjusting to new food usually takes just a few days for my body. But when I got to Blacksburg, within the first week, I passed out for the first time in my life, from diarrhea. I had to miss an orientation day due to my weak condition.
It doesn’t end there. My first few weeks into college and I had already exhausted a quarter of my meal plan. I didn’t understand what was happening. I was always hungry. For instance, if I had soup and a bagel back home, that would have sustained me for half of the day because of my small build – five two, 42 kg (92 lbs). But that same amount would not sustain me here. Looking to compromise with the amount of food I ate, I would buy more salads; unfortunately more protein and thus more sustenance is available in two spoons of cooked vegetables and bacon than from a whole $8 bowl of raw salad. For a college student, it’s a waste of money. And I was not the only one with the same complaint. A friend of mine from China told me she had the same problem. She was always hungry, even after a three-course meal. In my third week, I had an appointment with the doctor and they checked me in as 104 lbs. I had gained five kg in three weeks? I started to panic. It did not make sense.
As I met more people and talked with them about food, they told me that a lot of the food in America is mixed with preservatives, so that they last longer, which means a lot of the food is packed. This is obviously not a new concept. In Shillong, India, the place where I’m from however, packed food was so rare it was a luxury. Our grocery supplies rely primarily on farmers across the state, which is transported to the capital, Shillong by late morning. Packaged food is just not interesting for us, and is more expensive than local food. We do have our share of junk food in terms of street food, burgers and fries and of course our Oreos and Pringles and such, but no one has gotten fat to the point of hospitalization. Our staple diet still consists of fresh foods grown by local farmers or by farmers in the neighboring states, sold affordably. If you take a walk along the streets of Shillong on a normal weekday, you would find only one out of seventy people who are actually overweight. At the same time, no one starves.
Ninety percent of the food in America contains artificial preservatives and additives. And we all know what these chemicals can do in the long run, besides abetting disorders, cancers and other health related problems like nausea and headaches – they cause us to crave more. Artificial sweeteners do nothing but confuse your body. Continuing to observe the food habits of my American friends, I realized that because they grew up with brightly packaged foods around, they developed a taste for all things rich, so that whenever they see an ice-cream sundae sprinkled with chocolate on top, they immediately display an “Oh-My-God-That-Looks-Good” craving. It’s the Twinkie Culture. Worst of all, their bodies develop a resistance to the several toxins that are present in North-American food.
The technology that is available today makes for a great deal of possibilities. Why then, with the increasing use of Genetically Modified Organisms and Pesticides to make our food healthier, we are only becoming unhealthier? According to CDC, one-third of U.S adults and 17 percent of children and adolescents are obese, while 65 percent of the U.S adult population is overweight. The journal of Economics and Human Biology published a study led by Zagorsky in 2009 stating that women who were users of food stamps (SNAP) weigh 5.8 pounds more than the average American woman. There are several other studies that link people in the lower income category with obesity. How can people stay below the obesity line if the prices for fruits and vegetables, grown with relatively little government support, have steadily increased by nearly 40% in the past 20 years?
CALPIRG published a report that stated that America pays enough taxes for each taxpayer to buy 19 Twinkies a year, which would cover only one-fourth of an apple bite in the same period of time. $16.9 billion in federal subsidies goes to producers and others in the business of corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, corn starch and soy oils, according to the report. Where do organic farms, or for that matter, local farms come into the picture? According to Environmental Working Group, only 10 percent of farmers collected 74 percent of subsidy payments while 64 percent of farmers did not. The loss of small farms not only hurt the environment but also hurt our health. If the U.S government can spend $167.3 billion in commodity subsidies, why can’t it subsidize more organic farms? Why should naturally grown food cost more than extensively grown and processed food?
Over the years, people have tended to blame obesity on things like advertising. Sure, with an expenditure of $40 billion a year, advertising of course plays a major role in the food industry. MacGuffin Films is known for drastically modifying food with artificial substances to make it look appealing on the camera. Every time I go to any of the gyms on campus, I see bright images of steaming grilled chicken on at least one, if not all, of the TV screens. Talk about subliminal advertising. But really, when we look at it as a whole, it comes down to the cost of natural, unprocessed foods. For the 2012 farm bill, the U.S government should look more into subsidizing a variety of organic farms, rather than talk about policies and all the while making people spend enormous amounts of money on health insurance and gym facilities and making them dwell in guilt about eating too much.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/science/space/13planet.html?_r=1&ref=astronomyandastrophysics
