As a child I was not moved by the food pyramid. As many (if not most) elementary school aged children I didn’t care about how many servings of vegetables someone was supposed eat. I just hoped my mom would pick up a pizza on the way home from work, which, to my surprise, can be considered a vegetable by today’s standards anyway. There were some moments in this period of my life when I would begin to consider what it meant to eat healthy, usually following some type of school-sponsored event or assembly aimed at teaching healthy habits, but then I would go home, turn on the television, watch all of the commercials targeted at children for sugar-based cereals, “fruit” snacks, and candy bars and essentially lose all motivation to change my eating habits. It wasn’t until a little later on in life that I began to really contemplate the foods that I was eating and where they came from.
My father was raised on a farm in Iowa, where I would spend a few weeks every summer until I entered high school. My grandfather grew (roundup-ready) corn and soybeans. He had huge sheds filled with tractors and machinery and a grain-silo that I used to climb to the top of to look out over a sea of green with not a tree in sight. At the time I believed that all of that food could feed the world, and I felt like I was being lied to when I was told that there were hungry people all over the country. Of course, I now realize that what I was looking at was not food for the people as I had assumed, but more likely food for the livestock that might feed some of the people and the first step in the process of making high fructose corn syrup (among other things, I’m sure).
The realization that I didn’t really know where my food was coming from started to sink in when I was a teenager. I started a gardening club at my high school which later evolved into an elective class. It was in that class that I first saw the Food Inc. documentary, learned how chemical companies control the food supply, and discovered the importance of fresh whole foods. Essentially from that point on I have tried to be more connected to my food sources, or at least avoid processed foods whenever possible.
Lindsey, I thought your mentioning of food ads targeting towards children was a really interesting point! These ads (for all of us TV-watching kids) served as a contrast to the minimal health/nutrition education we received, and their constant presence made the foods they championed more familiar to us that the "healthy" food we were supposed to be eating. Even though I feel it is a topic for another week, I would like to learn more about efforts to reduce the advertisement of unhealthy food to children, including TV ads, vending machines in schools, etc and to increase the "advertisement" of healthy foods. While as a child, I too would occasionally be moved to eat healthy after some event or lecture, but the constant barrage of unhealthy food and their cheap, reliable presence made that seem like the norm.
ReplyDeleteYes, I think that is a really interesting topic. I recently saw a documentary that you might want to check out called "Fed Up" (it's on Netflix if you have access to that) which is about the issues surrounding childhood obesity, including advertising unhealthy foods to children, as well as the problem of soda machines and fast food in schools.
DeleteThat's so cool that you used your experience at your grandfather's farm as a launching point for the gardening club, which then became a class.
ReplyDeletePizza is probably still my favorite food (good to know it's a vegetable!), although I try to make it from scratch now and then so I'm not going overboard with the junk food. However, I've come a long way from the KFC and frozen dinners we usually ate growing up. I'd love to check out that documentary sometime!
Marketing techniques are definitely geared more so towards unhealthy foods than healthy, nutritional foods that people need to live well. Pizza can be healthy for you if you make it that way, but Pizza Hut and Dominoes would probably not depict it as such, and definitely not as a vegetable. But I do enjoy pizza myself, and this post inspires me to ask how companies are able to better market healthier foods to be more competitive with unhealthy foods?
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