Britta Riley: A garden in my apartment

Pointing Fingers

I remember last year for my anatomy class, the class was assigned a food log and questions to answer and one of the questions was concerning fast food. I can’t remember the exact words of the question, but I remember that it questioned whether fast food was to blame for people’s food habits?

My opinion is that fast food shouldn’t be blamed for people’s food habits. Fast food and junk food are always targeted when it comes to the rising obesity rates in our country, but it is not the companies’ fault. I believe that the one is fault is the consumer. Yes, the food companies present us with mouthwatering advertisement of the food they are selling, but I think that it is not the problem. I have been reading a couple of articles and even posts on the blog saying that people get fast food because it is the easiest way to get food and fulfill our hunger or cravings, which I believe should be the blame for people’s food habits. We, the consumers, have the ability to chose not to buy and eat fast food. We can decide to not to be the cliché of the food industry always buying fast food because it is so accessible. If people start finding time during the day to cook their own food, there might be a decrease in people buying fast food. Plus with cooking your own food, you have the choice of adding whatever ingredients and flavors your preference desires.

What do you guys think? Should the fast food chains be to blame or should the consumers be blamed?

The Worlds Top 10 Most Innovative Food Companies

Yeah, that's right.

Click here.

Obesity-parents the cause and solution?

I really like the Ted link that Ms. Fletcher posted called “Teach Every Child About Food”. He says that diet related disease is the biggest killer in America. The fact that it’s diet related means that we can control our diets and change it to reduce the amount of people dying from this disease. Many people believe that the parents are the main cause of the obesity epidemic. The reason for this is because they are the ones who feed them and are supposed to do what’s right for their kid. But many parents don’t know what to feed their kids or are too busy to cook or they just don’t know how to cook. What ever the reason, they give their children fast food and processed foods because it’s fast and cheaper than going to a grocery store and buying produce, which in my opinion shows that parents are the main cause for the obesity epidemic. There are many factors that caused the obesity epidemic, such as the fast food restaurants, and the government, and the way our society has evolved, but I believe that parents are the main cause and are the main solution to this problem. One solution for this would be, as Jamie Oliver said, to teach parents how to cook. He also said that kids should learn about food and what they are eating. They don't eat their vegetables because they don't know what it is. In the video, he asked elementary school kids to name the vegetables that he was holding, and they didn’t name any of them correctly.

Another cause for obesity is that if the parents are obese then most likely their kid will end up becoming obese because if their parents have poor eating habits and don’t exercise, then they will most likely raise their kids in this way. If parents are ignorant then their kids are more likely to become obese, so parents need to be taught about what to feed their children and how much to feed them. They also need to be taught how much daily exercise their kids should get.  Do you think that parents are to blame if their child is obese? If so, then what do you think parents should do to prevent/solve obesity? What do you think about this and how should we deal with this problem?

Improve School Lunches

Many of us get free lunch and the problem is that we don't care how unhealthy the food is. The fact that pizza is one of the food choices everyday just shows how messed up school lunch programs are. I mean don't get me wrong, I love pizza but honestly I never realize that they serve pizza almost everyday until I read  "No Lunch Left Behind" by Alice Waters and Katrina Heron.  What interest me the most is when they mentioned that most people don't recognize that very little of the $9 billion goes to the food they eat, most of it goes to utilities and custodial services. This is where the issue comes in because our health is important but if we put in all the money to our food then our school would not be what it is today. The floor would probably be full of trash all the time and restrooms would be much more worse than it already is. Heron and Waters also stated that the ingredients found on school lunches are the same as the ingredients on fast foods. If this is the case then what is the point of the whole program? I'm really disappointed with this school program because they fail to meet the basic nutritional standards. I mean I love fast food and I think they're the best but these program needs to start putting more money on healthy food. I think that if they choose salads and other low calorie food as their everyday food choices, a lot of students would actually be forced to eat them because they can't just go on a day without eating. I know a lot of people who come to school without eating breakfast before they leave their house. If schools started feeding students healthy food, many students would have no choice but to eat those healthy food. Starting from scratch and producing locally grown food is the best way to improve school lunches because if we just added more money to these programs and leave it like that nothing is going to change. There has to be some restriction on where the money will be spent. Eating healthy food can be expensive but if you think about it, the outcome would all be positive: long term savings, healthy and dietary habits, food safety, and environmental and energy conservation. So, who needs to take part in changing school lunch programs? According to Waters and Heron, the Agriculture Department has to create a separate program for delivering food and also to provide for healthy meal planning. The Department of Education needs to do most of the job because not only will they have to educate the students on healthy food, they will also have to educate them on  how the food will affect their health. Heron and Waters concluded that everyone deserves to eat an organic food and that the government should contribute more on this instead of the increasing epidemiology of obesity. So, what do you think needs to happen in order to improve school lunch programs?

McDonald's Pink Slime?

    So, since we're on the topic of food politics, have you guys heard about the pink slime contained in McDonald's hamburgers? I know its kind of an old topic, but I'm still surprised by it. Personally, I LOVE McDonald's, but when I saw this it didn't really affect me as much as it should have. I just swept it off and chose to ignore the fact that there was something unknown going into the processed meat I was eating, but at the time, I truly didn't care. Did it affect any of you or make an impact on whether you ate McDonald's or not?
    Now that I think of it, even if I did make a choice to stop eating it because of that, I still would have bought McDonald's a couple of times, not only because I like the McChicken Sandwiches, but because when my family is on the rush, McDonald's is the go to place while on the road. I know its not the healthiest choice, but when its fast and cheap, there's no going wrong with it, other than your health. But I never really paid too much attention to the politics behind food until we started studying this unit.
    Anyways, I recently looked into the whole Pink Slime theory and actually discovered a lot of things about it that I didn't know before. According to ABC News, the pink slime is actually boneless lean beef trimming, which is pretty much all the meat left over after all the good cuts are taken to be sold as beef. The reason it looks like pink slime is because it is treated with ammonium hydroxide to get rid of bacteria in the meat. Ammonium hydroxide may sound familiar, because it was also mentioned in Food Inc. It is what is used on crops, such as corn, to get rid of bacteria like E. Coli. So, although it may be disgusting and questionable, this "pink slime" has been used in their burgers and haven't caused any issues yet. But, McDonald's has publicly said that they will stop producing the boneless lean beef trimmings in their food, coincidentally right after the rumor of the "pink slime" in the food was brought to the public eye on the show Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution.
     No matter what the reasoning behind McDonald's stopping the use of pink slime was, it has been removed as an ingredient and is no longer produced in their meats. But what do you think about this whole issue? How is it that a huge corporation such as McDonald's could go so long without anyone every discovering what this ingredient in our food was? The fast food industry has a lot of power in this economy, yet we don't' look into it as much as I think we should.

Unhealthy School Lunches

Processed foods that are high in fat, sugar, and salt have become a great component of  school lunches in schools across America. Experts say these unhealthy school lunches are a contributing factor to the childhood obesity epidemic. A movement is  to bring change to school lunch programs across the country. What’s wrong with school lunches is what is wrong with all the food we’re eating. It’s not just in the schools one of the biggest deficits is the lack of fruits and vegetables and whole grains. While its still a big problem unhealthy  school lunches and childhood obesity situations are getting attention and there are some positive change happening.