I would like to know who that first human being was who saw a washed up calamari on a beach and decided to eat it. Was she shipwrecked and starved or simply torn between the squid and the horseshoe crab? Or which bipedal primate thought to himself “Hmmm, perhaps I’ll throw down some grubs for dinner this evening.” Exactly how many people had to die before rational man figured out that too much Hemlock or Hyacinth is not a good thing? Just how long did it take for hungry people everywhere to refrain from heedlessly munching on Daffodil bulbs or ingesting pretty plants with innocuous monikers like Holly and Ivy? Well, we may never know.
What we do know for certain is that eating too much and exercising too little is not good for us. Yet, as a society, we have ignored the dangers. In the last several decades, overweight and obesity rates have tripled in the United States; one in three children between the ages of 2 and 19 struggle with weight problems. Experts are now predicting that the current generation of children may be the first to die before their parents. The statistics are worse when it comes to communities of color and vulnerable populations. Latino boys, for instance, have higher rates of childhood obesity than their non-Latino male counterparts and statistics show that young Latinas and African American girls are the least likely of all to engage in physical activity.
Watch this video from Salud America! about childhood obesity among Latino children:
There are many factors that are contributing to this health crisis. For example, U.S. agricultural policy and plenty of politics, no doubt, have led to a surplus of corn which, in turn, has flooded the market with high-fructose corn syrup. Here is what Michael Pollan said on the subject in 2003:
Cheap corn…is truly the building block of the “fast-food nation.” Cheap corn, transformed into high-fructose corn syrup, is what allowed Coca-Cola to move from the svelte 8-ounce bottle of soda ubiquitous in the 70’s to the chubby 20-ounce bottle of today. Cheap corn, transformed into cheap beef, is what allowed McDonald’s to supersize its burgers and still sell many of them for no more than a dollar. Cheap corn gave us a whole raft of new highly processed foods, including the world-beating chicken nugget, which, if you study its ingredients, you discover is really a most ingenious transubstantiation of corn, from the cornfed chicken it contains to the bulking and binding agents that hold it together. Read the entire article here.
Obesity is also correlated with hunger and food insecurity. A family experiences the latter when “there is limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways.”
See the Urban Institute’s report: Emergency Food Assistance Helps Many Low-Income Hispanic Children (p. 3).
In other words, families living in poverty use scarce dollars to buy what’s cheap and filling, particularly when they live in neighborhoods where the absence of grocery stores is obscured by the ubiquity of fast food joints.
There is also the prolific marketing of junk foods to kids on television, on the Internet, in grocery store aisles and in product promotion. This is coupled with recent data that show adolescents spend more than seven hours a day engaged in sedentary behavior (e.g. watching T.V., playing video games, etc.).
See the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity Report to the President.
So, what does all of this have to do with writing a cookbook? Simply this: if it takes a village to raise a kid then it will take a movement to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic in this country. Maybe, just maybe, like our calamari-eating heroine who paved the way for future human consumption of the cephalopod mollusk, we Gildas can start to change the world one bite at a time.
Connect with us!