Stop making excuses!
I wrote a post essentially refuting the study done that said that healthy eating is a privilege of the rich. The main stream media pick up on this study and ran with it.
Study: Healthy eating is privilege of the rich (via Yahoo News)
Study: Healthy eating a privilege of the rich (via CBS News)
Healthy Eating Is Privilege of the Rich, Study Finds (via Fox news)
The bottom line from these stories is that every day people have a great excuse to continue to eat crap – good food is just too expensive.
The story was also an attack on the new USDA healthy eating guidelines now designated as MyPlate.
Choose my plate at the Department of Agriculture
This is replacing the food pyramid and no one ever understood and was terrible for providing guidance on what you should eat and how much.
The food pyramid replaced the old square meals recommendation of 2-2-4-4 (2 servings of meat/eggs, 2 servings of dairy, 4 servings of fruit and vegetables and 4 servings of rice/grains/breads).
I am not sure where the attack on the new recommendations came from. For me, this is a welcome change because at least this looks understandable. I can look at my plate and see if it kind of looks like I have all the right foods in the proper quantities. If you read the text of the my plate web site it also tells you to eat smaller portions, reduce your fat and sodium. This is NOT radical advice. It may be somewhat foreign to many people because we as a country have forgotten how to feed ourselves. We don’t know how to cook if it can’t be microwaved. We don’t know how much to eat and assume if it is in a package it must be one serving (read the label, it is likely 2 or 3 or more servings).
Finally, I have seen and heard several people comment that this is great if you aren’t part of the urban poor who are in food deserts and cannot even get to a grocery store. You can see exactly where these food deserts are and how many people in each area are affected. There are about 13.5 million people who live in food deserts – they have no car and do not have a grocery store within one mile. The location of the study I mentioned (King County, WA), however, wasn’t one of them.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/fooddesert/fooddesert.html
I am not suggesting that food deserts are not a serious issue. I am suggesting that for everyone else you do not really have a good excuse to eat crappy food. It is possible to eat good, healthy food on a very small budget.
I see many people trying to reframe the discussion so it is about feeding the truly poor (we have not even talked about the global poor and I would not suggest that my recipes are a great solution for famines).
What I am really addressing is the idea that as a society we have lost our way in our relationship with food. We eat way too much of the wrong kinds of food, we have forgot how to start from scratch and prepare meals for our families that are healthy and tasty and most importantly, NOT limited to the rich.
Before you tell me about the famines or the food deserts or how food stamps won’t pay for this or that, remember that I am addressing the population of the United states that falls some where between wealthy (making $250,000+/year) and poverty (family of four making $22,350/year). If you fall in between those numbers, chances are you can afford to eat healthy. So quit making excuses.