Why are we teaching our children to hate vegetables? And other silly questions...
Why I am writing this
First I want to make it clear that I don't want to come across that I'm preaching; that is not my aim. My goal is to do my part to help heighten awareness as to what has been going on behind the scenes in the food industry in particular, and how a select number of giant corporations, some posing as farmers, have us all where they want us. As a chef, I feel it is my duty to know food history, and as a consumer, I don't like being fooled as most people I know, don't like it either. I also want to state that I hate spreading propaganda, so if I cite something, I have checked it out from a few different sources preferably with scientific studies and statistics to back it up. Heaven knows there is plenty of propaganda out there when it comes to food production and sorting through it is a daunting task. I'm not going to spread something just because it feels 'warm and fuzzy', as I was accused by a friend who works for the USDA. We got that worked out. :o)
I fell and broke my leg/ankle in three places a little over a year ago. The bright side to that? While I was bed-ridden I had nothing but time on my hands to get caught up on research on this subject and muddle through a lot (and I mean a lot) of data, get current with what has been happening, and believe you me, it ain't pretty. We often hear that 'things happen for a reason' and as near as I can tell - this is part of my reason.
I am also writing in honor of my grandfather, who worked so hard on our family farm as did his father and his father before him. I remember overhearing many frustrated conversations about trying to make heads or tails of subsidies, being paid not to grow crops and 'why the hell did they want me to grow sugar beets in the first place'; etc. It is almost a relief that he isn't around to see what has now happened to the industry, but the writing was on the wall, even back then in many respects. I know he got tired of playing the games and it makes me sad to think of how many small farms, such as ours, have gone under through no fault of their own.
http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/familyfarms/
My awakening to our media culture
It occurred to me after moving back to this country, after having lived in Asia and Mexico and studied methods of cooking there, that the popular media was teaching our children to hate vegetables and love big hunks of meat, when much of the world out there just didn't eat that way and seemed to be that much healthier for it. Why would they do that? Having read that statement - try to pay attention to the aim of the majority of food commercials on television - especially the ones aimed at children; not just the obvious goal of selling their wares, but undertones that, when repeated, set the stage for cultural formation; 'Happiness comes in a box'? Are you kidding me? 'Respect the pouch'? Are you kidding me?
My daughter grew up largely (up to age 6) outside of this country and she has never hated vegetables, and has always eaten meat very much in moderation. I didn't set out to raise her this way purposely, heck I was only beginning to wake up to this new way of looking at food and our food culture; it was just the experiences she had with food during her formative years while we were traveling that shaped her preferences of diet. Luckily, I didn't have to lie to her and hide her vegetables in a juice-like substance of sugar water, or in a gloopy 'ravioli' pocket of mystery meat, coated with high fructose corn syrup with a bit of tomato, or drown them in artery-clogging dressing full of all sorts of things I can't pronounce and stale herbs. OK, OK, I admit it - I love ranch dressing too, so much so, that I came up with my own version that you would be proud of, and I can pronounce all the ingredients!
In retrospect, I am really glad that my daughter inadvertently had that exposure. Now in her mid 20s, she keeps a great organic vegetable garden in her little yard in the heart of Portland and spends far less than the average person her age on groceries, even though the vast majority (like 99%) of what she does buy is the more expensive organic; dispelling the myth that to eat well has to be expensive. She also keeps a few urban chickens for the eggs, a trend I am happy to see spreading across the country. It should be noted, however, that she also grew up learning how to cook - something else the mainstream media, in this country in particular, has made seem very difficult, boring and undesirable. It blows my mind how many people these days think that to bake a cake from scratch is to open a box of mix. Kind of sad really. I contend that it's not our fault; we have grown up to be the super-consumers they set out to create. Our 'house of cards' economy depends on it. They have worked tirelessly to convince us that eating this way is more convenient, even though many of us work that much harder to afford all of these 'conveniences'. Ironic, isn't it? How many people do you know that have spent much of their adult life working at least 2 jobs to 'make ends meet'? Where is that money going?
I feel compelled to point out that many of our tax dollars go to farm subsidies, which were initially established to help the little guy get through a tough year, but through gross oversight and corporate lobbying, now largely go toward making the disgustingly wealthy even more filthy rich, while they squash the little guy and avoid paying taxes. This is like a double-dip into our extortion, in my opinion. Some contend that if we take away the subsidies, the 'cheap' food will go away. Then where are we? At best we have some hard times ahead. Others contend that if the subsidies were distributed as they were initially meant to be, to small struggling farms, the prices for healthier food choices would come down.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/dont-end-agricultural-subsidies-fix-them/
No, I'm not a 'health nut'
After having returned from living in Taiwan back in '87, I sat down to my first steak; I hadn't had a big slab of meat like that in well over a year and I remember well how just looking at it made me nauseous. I thought I had missed it, being from a long line of farmers who also raised cattle, it was always a big part of our diet growing up and to this day, for the record, I still love my beef. I marveled at how my taste and what seemed appealing had changed so drastically in just a little over a year. I try to live as the locals do when I travel, so my diet had consisted of much rice and vegetables (purchased at an open-air farmers market) that had been picked the day before, with bits of deliciously marinated meat (usually chicken or pork) or seafood mixed in.
I don't want to come off as a health nut - I'm not, sometimes I wish I had the discipline to be so; but I believe that if a person wants to be, they should have that choice without being labeled. Which brings me to another thing I had started to notice, and that is that our culture has developed so that if you're concerned at all about what you eat, you'll probably will be labeled as a 'health-nut' in many parts of the country or even worse; 'hippie'. How has this happened? In many other cultures, eating well and being concerned about what you put into your body is the norm, and even the poorest of the poor often eat healthier than our poor citizens (and even what's left of the middle class) do. My choices these days come mainly out of principle; of who I want to vote for with my dollars, and as an homage to the daring farmer that works to give me a choice. I will stubbornly go without many things and live on half as much of my expendable income and buy half as many clothes (or, even cookbooks, god forbid), in order to be able to make this work. I call it my self-imposed plan of austerity and I'm fine with it. It's surprisingly easy once the corporate veil is lifted and you get mad enough.
We eat plenty of 'naughty' food like biscuits and gravy, pizza; etc. the difference being, I make the breakfast sausage for the gravy myself from piggies that I know had a good life, my eggs are from the back yard from chickens that I know darn well have a great life, and my milk, cream and flour comes from a farmer that is working, despite all odds, to provide me with a choice in a world where it is a risky decision to even think of farming that way. These are my decisions, and it is a constant work in progress. This sort of lifestyle doesn't come overnight and we still have a long way to go. Each year we try to improve on something. I don't have a sense of superiority through my choices and I don't fault those that really don't know where to start when it comes to making these lifestyle choices. I understand as well as anyone how difficult this is; but I also understand that there are those that have very purposely made it more difficult for us than it needs to be, only to line their own pockets; and I wonder every day where the next road block will come from.
The nature of food (and everything else) on Wall Street
I have a friend who's father was a big player on Wall Street; after he passed away, she took over handling the family trust. Being the apple of her daddy's eye, he taught her well how to manage the vast estate - her older brothers were (and still are) much more interested in racing their vintage Ferraris around the world than bothersome things such as work.
The stock market held a certain intrigue for me back then and I asked her to teach me how to play. She was awesome and pointed me in the right direction as far as what books to read and answer any questions I had concerning points I didn't understand; and I had just discovered that I could actually trade my own stocks right over my computer. This was in the early-mid '90s and before you knew it, I was plowing through investment packets, calculating price/earnings ratios, reading balance sheets; etc. I really enjoyed it for a few years until I started noticing something that disturbed me.
One of my favorite authors on the subject was Peter Lynch who made the point that you should invest in companies that you know, who's products you enjoy and appreciate. This seemed like sound advice, so I started there. It was an adventure for me to trace the products and services to their root and learn about who owned what; etc. Fortunately, there were a few companies I really liked that had their initial public offering (IPO) during this time and I jumped on board. What I noticed however, is that it didn't take long after they went public for the products to begin to suffer; and I soon realized that once stockholders were involved, the customers (consumers) didn't really matter anymore. The quality of the products suffered, the customer service suffered and the whole focus of the company suddenly seemed to be making money for the stockholder; period.
A great example of how much can be saved when the whittling begins, was when American Airlines cut 1 olive out of their first class salad in 1987 and saved $40,000! I remember hearing about that in 1990 when that was still a fair amount of money. Then, in '05 Northwest Airlines stopped serving the little bag of pretzels to their customers and estimated they would save $2 million a year!
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/10/business/worldbusiness/10iht-air.html
This all got me thinking that once the whittling begins, where will it end? It didn't seem very sustainable to me and I also saw great, small companies sadly being gobbled up by these insatiable money machines and ultimately ruined. Suddenly, it was not something I wanted to be a part of since I couldn't see how it was ultimately turn out well, so I bailed.
The most heartbreaking example for me, of what this system can do to destroy an institution came a few years later, when the culinary school I had graduated from was purchased by a publicly-held company - a very disturbing trend that has contributed to the rotting of our secondary education system. At the time that this happened, I was an instructor there and we were very proud of the outstanding reputation that our school had. Suddenly our president wasn't even from the culinary world, and classes that once had around 15 students each were packed to the brim with 40+ students and not even enough stoves for all of them to practically apply what they were being taught! What had built us into one of the most reputable culinary schools in the country was gone. Our strict standards with expected discipline and performance from the students - gone. Our value as knowledgeable chef instructors to the company - gone. We were being told we had to pass students no matter what so that the shareholders could get their money; suddenly the meat fabrication part of the education - gone. It occurred to me that at this point the students and chef instructors were now viewed as mere livestock being used to feed the insatiable appetite of the stockholders; and it was nothing short of amazing how the reputation of the school had been all but completely destroyed in a few short years.
I had to leave when I could no longer sleep at night, nor look the student in the eye and tell them they were getting their money's worth, and I got literally sick of heart and tired of seeing the looks on their faces and the tears in their eyes when they realized that the market had been flooded with so many little clones of themselves, many of whom shouldn't even have been accepted into the program in the first place as they couldn't even read or write ('No Child Left Behind' was visibly working its "magic"); and if they were fortunate enough to find an entry-level job it would be for minimum wage, and good luck making enough to cover the student loans, let alone enough to live on. So many lives ruined, and I mean ruined before they really even began.
http://www.campusprogress.org/articles/why_did_for-profit_college_stocks_rise_after_the_gainful_employment_ru/
All the system is interconnected
I wouldn't be able to make my points without touching on what might seem like a few different subjects. But to me it all comes down to the same thing which, in my opinion, is responsible for the majority of our woes that we face as a nation and even globally now. Greed. It has effected our health, our education, our family units and family farms and you can't really separate any of these problems into components anymore, because a mere handful of corporations now own us, our government, our culture, and it has been resoundingly established that they do not have our best interest at heart. To them, we are just one more commodity.
Two great documentary films on the subjects I have touched on are:
http://www.foodincmovie.com/ and http://www.kingcorn.net/
First I want to make it clear that I don't want to come across that I'm preaching; that is not my aim. My goal is to do my part to help heighten awareness as to what has been going on behind the scenes in the food industry in particular, and how a select number of giant corporations, some posing as farmers, have us all where they want us. As a chef, I feel it is my duty to know food history, and as a consumer, I don't like being fooled as most people I know, don't like it either. I also want to state that I hate spreading propaganda, so if I cite something, I have checked it out from a few different sources preferably with scientific studies and statistics to back it up. Heaven knows there is plenty of propaganda out there when it comes to food production and sorting through it is a daunting task. I'm not going to spread something just because it feels 'warm and fuzzy', as I was accused by a friend who works for the USDA. We got that worked out. :o)
I fell and broke my leg/ankle in three places a little over a year ago. The bright side to that? While I was bed-ridden I had nothing but time on my hands to get caught up on research on this subject and muddle through a lot (and I mean a lot) of data, get current with what has been happening, and believe you me, it ain't pretty. We often hear that 'things happen for a reason' and as near as I can tell - this is part of my reason.
I am also writing in honor of my grandfather, who worked so hard on our family farm as did his father and his father before him. I remember overhearing many frustrated conversations about trying to make heads or tails of subsidies, being paid not to grow crops and 'why the hell did they want me to grow sugar beets in the first place'; etc. It is almost a relief that he isn't around to see what has now happened to the industry, but the writing was on the wall, even back then in many respects. I know he got tired of playing the games and it makes me sad to think of how many small farms, such as ours, have gone under through no fault of their own.
http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/familyfarms/
 |
| My grandpa the farmer with his favorite horse and my beautiful grandma in the early '40s before the war started |
My awakening to our media culture
It occurred to me after moving back to this country, after having lived in Asia and Mexico and studied methods of cooking there, that the popular media was teaching our children to hate vegetables and love big hunks of meat, when much of the world out there just didn't eat that way and seemed to be that much healthier for it. Why would they do that? Having read that statement - try to pay attention to the aim of the majority of food commercials on television - especially the ones aimed at children; not just the obvious goal of selling their wares, but undertones that, when repeated, set the stage for cultural formation; 'Happiness comes in a box'? Are you kidding me? 'Respect the pouch'? Are you kidding me?
My daughter grew up largely (up to age 6) outside of this country and she has never hated vegetables, and has always eaten meat very much in moderation. I didn't set out to raise her this way purposely, heck I was only beginning to wake up to this new way of looking at food and our food culture; it was just the experiences she had with food during her formative years while we were traveling that shaped her preferences of diet. Luckily, I didn't have to lie to her and hide her vegetables in a juice-like substance of sugar water, or in a gloopy 'ravioli' pocket of mystery meat, coated with high fructose corn syrup with a bit of tomato, or drown them in artery-clogging dressing full of all sorts of things I can't pronounce and stale herbs. OK, OK, I admit it - I love ranch dressing too, so much so, that I came up with my own version that you would be proud of, and I can pronounce all the ingredients!
 |
| Homegrown carrots |
In retrospect, I am really glad that my daughter inadvertently had that exposure. Now in her mid 20s, she keeps a great organic vegetable garden in her little yard in the heart of Portland and spends far less than the average person her age on groceries, even though the vast majority (like 99%) of what she does buy is the more expensive organic; dispelling the myth that to eat well has to be expensive. She also keeps a few urban chickens for the eggs, a trend I am happy to see spreading across the country. It should be noted, however, that she also grew up learning how to cook - something else the mainstream media, in this country in particular, has made seem very difficult, boring and undesirable. It blows my mind how many people these days think that to bake a cake from scratch is to open a box of mix. Kind of sad really. I contend that it's not our fault; we have grown up to be the super-consumers they set out to create. Our 'house of cards' economy depends on it. They have worked tirelessly to convince us that eating this way is more convenient, even though many of us work that much harder to afford all of these 'conveniences'. Ironic, isn't it? How many people do you know that have spent much of their adult life working at least 2 jobs to 'make ends meet'? Where is that money going?
I feel compelled to point out that many of our tax dollars go to farm subsidies, which were initially established to help the little guy get through a tough year, but through gross oversight and corporate lobbying, now largely go toward making the disgustingly wealthy even more filthy rich, while they squash the little guy and avoid paying taxes. This is like a double-dip into our extortion, in my opinion. Some contend that if we take away the subsidies, the 'cheap' food will go away. Then where are we? At best we have some hard times ahead. Others contend that if the subsidies were distributed as they were initially meant to be, to small struggling farms, the prices for healthier food choices would come down.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/dont-end-agricultural-subsidies-fix-them/
No, I'm not a 'health nut'
After having returned from living in Taiwan back in '87, I sat down to my first steak; I hadn't had a big slab of meat like that in well over a year and I remember well how just looking at it made me nauseous. I thought I had missed it, being from a long line of farmers who also raised cattle, it was always a big part of our diet growing up and to this day, for the record, I still love my beef. I marveled at how my taste and what seemed appealing had changed so drastically in just a little over a year. I try to live as the locals do when I travel, so my diet had consisted of much rice and vegetables (purchased at an open-air farmers market) that had been picked the day before, with bits of deliciously marinated meat (usually chicken or pork) or seafood mixed in.
I don't want to come off as a health nut - I'm not, sometimes I wish I had the discipline to be so; but I believe that if a person wants to be, they should have that choice without being labeled. Which brings me to another thing I had started to notice, and that is that our culture has developed so that if you're concerned at all about what you eat, you'll probably will be labeled as a 'health-nut' in many parts of the country or even worse; 'hippie'. How has this happened? In many other cultures, eating well and being concerned about what you put into your body is the norm, and even the poorest of the poor often eat healthier than our poor citizens (and even what's left of the middle class) do. My choices these days come mainly out of principle; of who I want to vote for with my dollars, and as an homage to the daring farmer that works to give me a choice. I will stubbornly go without many things and live on half as much of my expendable income and buy half as many clothes (or, even cookbooks, god forbid), in order to be able to make this work. I call it my self-imposed plan of austerity and I'm fine with it. It's surprisingly easy once the corporate veil is lifted and you get mad enough.
We eat plenty of 'naughty' food like biscuits and gravy, pizza; etc. the difference being, I make the breakfast sausage for the gravy myself from piggies that I know had a good life, my eggs are from the back yard from chickens that I know darn well have a great life, and my milk, cream and flour comes from a farmer that is working, despite all odds, to provide me with a choice in a world where it is a risky decision to even think of farming that way. These are my decisions, and it is a constant work in progress. This sort of lifestyle doesn't come overnight and we still have a long way to go. Each year we try to improve on something. I don't have a sense of superiority through my choices and I don't fault those that really don't know where to start when it comes to making these lifestyle choices. I understand as well as anyone how difficult this is; but I also understand that there are those that have very purposely made it more difficult for us than it needs to be, only to line their own pockets; and I wonder every day where the next road block will come from.
 |
| Grass-fed, organically-raised rib-eye from a local farm about 4 miles from our home. We have also used their 'organic fertilizer' for our garden; to this day, I still can't eat a whole one of these, but can't give up trying! |
The nature of food (and everything else) on Wall Street
I have a friend who's father was a big player on Wall Street; after he passed away, she took over handling the family trust. Being the apple of her daddy's eye, he taught her well how to manage the vast estate - her older brothers were (and still are) much more interested in racing their vintage Ferraris around the world than bothersome things such as work.
The stock market held a certain intrigue for me back then and I asked her to teach me how to play. She was awesome and pointed me in the right direction as far as what books to read and answer any questions I had concerning points I didn't understand; and I had just discovered that I could actually trade my own stocks right over my computer. This was in the early-mid '90s and before you knew it, I was plowing through investment packets, calculating price/earnings ratios, reading balance sheets; etc. I really enjoyed it for a few years until I started noticing something that disturbed me.
One of my favorite authors on the subject was Peter Lynch who made the point that you should invest in companies that you know, who's products you enjoy and appreciate. This seemed like sound advice, so I started there. It was an adventure for me to trace the products and services to their root and learn about who owned what; etc. Fortunately, there were a few companies I really liked that had their initial public offering (IPO) during this time and I jumped on board. What I noticed however, is that it didn't take long after they went public for the products to begin to suffer; and I soon realized that once stockholders were involved, the customers (consumers) didn't really matter anymore. The quality of the products suffered, the customer service suffered and the whole focus of the company suddenly seemed to be making money for the stockholder; period.
A great example of how much can be saved when the whittling begins, was when American Airlines cut 1 olive out of their first class salad in 1987 and saved $40,000! I remember hearing about that in 1990 when that was still a fair amount of money. Then, in '05 Northwest Airlines stopped serving the little bag of pretzels to their customers and estimated they would save $2 million a year!
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/10/business/worldbusiness/10iht-air.html
This all got me thinking that once the whittling begins, where will it end? It didn't seem very sustainable to me and I also saw great, small companies sadly being gobbled up by these insatiable money machines and ultimately ruined. Suddenly, it was not something I wanted to be a part of since I couldn't see how it was ultimately turn out well, so I bailed.
The most heartbreaking example for me, of what this system can do to destroy an institution came a few years later, when the culinary school I had graduated from was purchased by a publicly-held company - a very disturbing trend that has contributed to the rotting of our secondary education system. At the time that this happened, I was an instructor there and we were very proud of the outstanding reputation that our school had. Suddenly our president wasn't even from the culinary world, and classes that once had around 15 students each were packed to the brim with 40+ students and not even enough stoves for all of them to practically apply what they were being taught! What had built us into one of the most reputable culinary schools in the country was gone. Our strict standards with expected discipline and performance from the students - gone. Our value as knowledgeable chef instructors to the company - gone. We were being told we had to pass students no matter what so that the shareholders could get their money; suddenly the meat fabrication part of the education - gone. It occurred to me that at this point the students and chef instructors were now viewed as mere livestock being used to feed the insatiable appetite of the stockholders; and it was nothing short of amazing how the reputation of the school had been all but completely destroyed in a few short years.
I had to leave when I could no longer sleep at night, nor look the student in the eye and tell them they were getting their money's worth, and I got literally sick of heart and tired of seeing the looks on their faces and the tears in their eyes when they realized that the market had been flooded with so many little clones of themselves, many of whom shouldn't even have been accepted into the program in the first place as they couldn't even read or write ('No Child Left Behind' was visibly working its "magic"); and if they were fortunate enough to find an entry-level job it would be for minimum wage, and good luck making enough to cover the student loans, let alone enough to live on. So many lives ruined, and I mean ruined before they really even began.
http://www.campusprogress.org/articles/why_did_for-profit_college_stocks_rise_after_the_gainful_employment_ru/
All the system is interconnected
I wouldn't be able to make my points without touching on what might seem like a few different subjects. But to me it all comes down to the same thing which, in my opinion, is responsible for the majority of our woes that we face as a nation and even globally now. Greed. It has effected our health, our education, our family units and family farms and you can't really separate any of these problems into components anymore, because a mere handful of corporations now own us, our government, our culture, and it has been resoundingly established that they do not have our best interest at heart. To them, we are just one more commodity.
Two great documentary films on the subjects I have touched on are:
http://www.foodincmovie.com/ and http://www.kingcorn.net/
.jpg)
Comments
Post a Comment