This past holiday season signaled a major paradigm shift in my life.
For starters, I saw the amazing documentary Super Size Me which details the widening of America due to increased portions, increased fat intake and an increasingly lethargic population.
While I’ve always been relatively health conscious, what I saw shocked me. After the movie, I began to do a little digging around and came across some alarming trends regarding America’s health and well-being. My synopsis of what I found is this:
- We are completely clueless when it comes to nutrition.
- We eat more and move less, choosing the inactivity of our nation-wide TV obsession to exercise.
- There are healthy alternatives to what we eat and there is no excuse for our increasing reliance on fast food.
Duhhhh. These are obvious points. But my point is that if it’s so obvious and easy, why do we do nothing about? Why do we slip further into this greasy abyss?
Now for some good news. One of most refreshing discoveries in my internet wide search was Slow Food USA, a not-for-profit organization committed to promoting a return to the table in American food culture.
Their cause is the alter-ego of the eat on the go, eat in your car and do it as fat, I mean as fast as you can mentality that has led to our absolute dependence on fast food and other processed, modified and pre-packaged meals. Instead, what Slow Food envisions is as follows.
People have responded to the growing movement, because they have become tired of buying the same things, eating the same foods and living the same lives. With these interests in mind, our mission is to create a robust, active movement that protects taste, culture and the environment as universal social values. Slow Food programs are dedicated to the mingling of taste, culture and the environment.
Amen to this. In fact, it’s essential that we begin to think differently about eating. I’ve recently read research that suggests that the new trend is that parents will now be able to buy completely different prefab, preboxed dinners for each family member so that the son can have a hotdog, dad can have meatloaf, mom can get the baked chicken and sis can eat mac and cheese and French fries.
And we’ll be able to have our family dinner on the way home from the store in convenient to go containers. I say the hell with that. Give me slow food. Good food. Food grown where I live by farmers who actually tend to crops, nurturing them without hormones or chemicals. I’m a member of Slow Food. And while they may not be the only answer to some of our nation’s problems with diet and nutrition, they are a powerful and growing force dedicated to finding a solution.