Food, glorious food

[darkemeralds]

In an unanticipated bonus of Project Empty, I've made a brilliant discovery: I now know why I've gotten so fat! I already knew how: eating too much. But today I figured out why. It has nothing to do with my mother, my sexuality, my deep-seated fear of intimacy, or cigars.



A couple of months ago, with the new clarity of mind that Project Empty was providing, I decided to refinance my house, resulting in a shorter term but a higher payment. This forced me to make some spending cuts.

One of the obvious candidates for the chopping block was restaurant eating. I started taking my breakfast and lunch to work, and for the past six weeks, I've been eating almost exclusively food I make in my own kitchen out of ingredients from the perimeter of the grocery store--fresh stuff.

Not surprisingly, I feel better. Slightly more suprisingly, given how heartily I've been eating, I'm losing weight. But it wasn't until roseambr and I went out to lunch today that I fully understood why--why I'm losing weight eating delicious food every day, and why it was impossible to lose weight before.

We went to a local bar and grill where, we both knew perfectly well, most things on the menu were going to be of the "cooked freight" variety--packaged, processed, frozen or canned items that are delivered to every restaurant in suburbia from a big truck backed up to the loading dock, and which are then heated, sauced from a packet, and served in over-large portions on plates the size of tea-trays.

Though the "food" at this place was particularly egregious--not just cooked freight, but badly cooked freight--I don't think it differed significantly in content from what's served at your average Applebee's or sold in the center aisles of the supermarket. It is standard fare in America.

I was pretty hungry, so I ate about half of the "chicken Dijon roulade" that was put in front of me. In terms of calories, I almost certainly soldiered through a light lunch's worth--maybe 400 or so, presumably enough to fuel the rest of a lazy Saturday afternoon.

My head started aching. My fingertips became slightly numb. My tongue got tingly. My sinuses flared up. roseambr reported the same. So, MSG for sure. Hydrogenated fat of some kind, definitely. My reaction to that stuff never used to be so obvious; apparently six weeks of relative purity has made me more sensitive.

But here's the clincher: before we even got back to roseambr's house ten minutes away, we were both hungry again. Hungrier than we'd been before lunch.

It was evidence of what I've believed for a long time: that America and I have gotten fat not because we're greedy piggy-wiggies with no moral fiber, but because the generally-available diet is laced with stuff that turns off our enough-o-meters and makes our bodies think we haven't just choked down a full lunch's worth of "food". Stuff that fools us into thinking that another 400 calories or so of the same sounds real good. And maybe another 400 after that.

That's not food, that's addiction.

It was all I could do to get through the afternoon without eating again. I drank loads of water instead, the headache passed, and I think I'm just about done sneezing now, though the post-nasal drip persists after (I now realize) about six weeks of freedom from that annoyance.



It's a damned good thing I like to cook. I've believed for some time that the only possible way to overcome the fatness epidemic in America is from the farm to the kitchen, one delicious, home-made, real-food meal at a time. Now I know it for sure.

Comments

[str8ontilmornin.livejournal.com]

You've nailed it. So much of that processed food, especially "meats", are saturated with so much extra water, saltwater to be exact, to bulk it up and to be able to reheat or cook it quicker for service.

It's almost like a slow shift to serving empty calories disguised as what we would think food should look like.

And about the cigars. We'll have to get together sometime. Do you go to Rich's? It's been a few years, and I may never smoke one again, but I crave them once in awhile.

[emeraldsedai.livejournal.com]

In my quest for greater food reality, I've become as much of a snob about salt as I am about wine and chocolate. So even if the only thing they're puffing up those S.E. Rykoff chicken breasts with is salt water, I'm sure it's terrible nasty salt. But even bad salt doesn't play havoc with my sinuses like this: that's MSG in some form or other.

As to cigars, that was a lame reference to Freud and the uselessness of Freudian-style analysis when it comes to resolving disordered eating. I've never actually smoked one. My only link to Rich's is that I used to go there all the time to buy empty cigar boxes. Which got filled with "treasures" that have recently needed getting rid of.

But I love the smell. :)

[str8ontilmornin.livejournal.com]

Well, I've learned something new today. And I could definitely do with spending ten minutes a day just standing inside a humidor and enjoying the aroma.

[vchrusch.livejournal.com]

Real food makes a hell of a difference. I'm happy that you discovered that fact.

[emeraldsedai.livejournal.com]

Me too. I feel like I've known about real food for a long time (you can't live in France and not figure it out at least partially), but today I feel like I finally really understood the truth about fake food.

[vchrusch.livejournal.com]

It's just a shame that most people are addicted to the fake stuff and don't realize it.

I didn't realize that you spent time in France. That must have been quite the experience.

[emeraldsedai.livejournal.com]

taught middle school English in a small country town back in the 80s for a year. It was a great experience, culturally, linguistically, and culinarily. I've been back once, about five years ago, and re-experienced the fantastic food and wine. It's a great country.

Food, glorious food

[avventura1234.livejournal.com]

MSG (used to make lab rats obese), Nutra Sweet (also Sweet n Low, AND Splenda) and Hydrogenated oils - three of the worst fat-making ingredients in the collective American diet. We are what we eat!

Re: Food, glorious food

[emeraldsedai.livejournal.com]

Don't forget high fructose corn syrup and other corn products--all the calories of sugar, without the same sweetening power--so eat more!

The Big Four in my mind are MSG, artificial sweeteners, HFCS and hydrogenated fat. Behind the Big Four are preservatives, dyes and artificial flavorings. Somewhere in there are hormones, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers. Oh, and let's not forget waxes and other petroleum products.

People have to start somewhere, though, and if I had to pick just one, it would be a battle between MSG and artificial sweeteners, both having neurotoxic properties.

[roseambr.livejournal.com]

Since I was there, I experienced the same "light bulb" moment that emeraldsedai did. But for me it was the moment of realizing I had eaten a relatively small lunch (the senior portion to be exact) and left a good share of it behind. I had ordered small because I wasn't all that hungry to begin with. As we were traveling home, a mear 10 minutes later, I realized I was feeling REALLY hungry! It was like the stomach was so activated it just HAD to have food put into it. If we had still been hanging around the restaurant, say over a cup of coffee or glass of Iced tea, it would have been dessert time for me. I would have eaten just about anything to fill that void.

Fortunately, we had a good discussion going about the bad food in general and how eating out was not a good plan. I was able to consciously recognize what had happened. So, yes, MSG, fake sugars in the form of chemicals and corn syrup are the death of the American food supply. And at the rate of the consumption it may also be the death of the American public. Isn't it interesting that as the food industry is making tons of money producing this stuff the health system is being over-burdened by diseases and afflictions and the pharmaceuticals are making a fortune drugging us up! Well, not me and not a number of my friends who have seen past this trend, but a lot of poor and middle class innocent people.

[emeraldsedai.livejournal.com]

You've hit the nail on the head in pointing out that "poor and middle-class innocent people" are victims of the fake food trend of the last 50 years. We have to make MASSIVE changes in our way of life to shift to better food. It appears to cost more, and you really have to move resources and priorities around before you feel you can afford good food.

Many people, living in less progressive areas, can't get good food at all, even if they can find the budget. It really is a political issue.

I feel a revolution coming.

[serenity-valley.livejournal.com]

I may have mentioned it before, but I highly recommend the documentary The Future of Food. It's right in line with what you discuss here.

str8ontilmornin has been preaching this for years, but I admit I didn't fully understand or get it until I'd seen that movie and then really started taking him seriously about it. Seems weird to say that now, considering how knowledgeable he is on this subject and that I'd had this tremendous resource in my house all that time, but it's true. But it finally clicked for me and we made the switch a few years ago.

What's funny about that is that we caught a surprising amount of flak from people about it. Teasing mostly, but underneath it was a kind of defensiveness that the change we'd made was somehow an indictment of them and their own food choices. Human nature, I guess. But then last year, with all those scares about contaminated food from China and other places, suddenly there was a lot more interest from those people in what we were doing and why.

(And actually, we caught the most flak about switching the cats to an organic diet, about being those kind of cat owners. But of course that all changed after the pet food scare last year, as well.)

I think the tide is slowly turning on this. We see it here a lot in food-loving PDX, but it's slowly trickling outward to the non-foodie community, too, I think. S just read an article yesterday that the Portland Farmers' Markets have seen something like a 250% increase in activity since 2001 and that CSAs have waiting lists of 2 years or more. And Organics2U (which is what we have) is doing a booming business these days. Gives me hope that people are starting to choose natural, wholesome food and getting back to their roots (HA). Plus, I think the higher energy costs are going to start pushing toward what's in their own backyards -- literally and figuratively -- for financial reasons, as well. I mean, obviously the energy costs are hitting local farmers, as well, but we're reaching (or I hope we're reaching) a point when the cost of a salad made from local ingredients is cheaper than a salad that essentially traveled 4000 miles to get to my plate.

[emeraldsedai.livejournal.com]

High energy costs in Europe have always favored local produce--there's an unbroken tradition of farmers' markets in almost every French town and village, and always has been.

avventura1234 and I were just talking about our refrigerators and how one might manange with way less refrigeration. It wasn't at all uncommon when I lived in Europe in the 70s to have no refrigerator in an apartment, and even in the 80s the fridge was tiny. When you can stop at the greengrocer and the boulangerie and the charcuterie on your way home from work, and bring a lovely dinner home in your string bag, you don't need a constantly-running, energy-sucking refrigerator/freezer nearly as much as we do here.

It's more than $6-a-gallon gas, though, that promotes local eating in Europe, because even the big national-chain supermarkets in the UK and France carried much better quality local food than we were used to in the US in those decades. There's a strong cultural belief in both countries that good food is important.

I'm watching a video interview with the "Future of Food" filmmaker on Google video right now and am putting the film itself in my Netflix queue.

Meanwhile, you and S. might also be interested in this interview on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/80868/) with the author of In Defense of Food. "Much of what lines supermarket aisles is not food. It's merely foodlike, and it's making us sick."

No kidding.

[emeraldsedai.livejournal.com]

I meant to add a thought about the flak one gets for insisting on healthy eating. How sad that good food has become something with which the wingnuts can rebuke the latte-drinking liberals!

This 2-star review of "The Future of Food" on Netflix sums it up: This "documentary" only presents one side of the story. It feels like an advertisement for organic foods. I wouldn't be surprised to know that the organization that created this movie, Future of Food Organization, is also supported by another big corporation, Whole Foods Corporation. It is also repetitive and boring.

In other words, you yuppie liberals, do you think you're better and smarter than the rest of us because we like Twinkies?

Well...yeah. Kind of.