2/24/2013

Thoughts on the Obesity Crisis from a Working Mom

 FYI: This is not real food

A recent NYT article spoke to the seriousness of the "obesity crisis" by showing the CEOs of all the major pre-prepared, packaged/snack food companies in America meeting to discuss the issue, and in a public show at least, demonstrate they are willing to work together to develop solutions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?pagewanted=1&ref=general&src=me

This conclave of food scientists is examining the issue from the perspective of re-engineering the foods they sell - originally designed to make people eat as much as possible, by enhancing fat to salt ratios, "mouth feel" and other aspects of snack foods - to manipulate eaters into eating enough (to buy the product and keep sales steady) but not so much as to make themselves sick. This is tackling the problem from the wrong direction.



The problem is multi-fold, and won't be solved until several key aspects of the way Americans now live are addressed. It is not as simple as telling people to eat less, exercise more, or mandating schools to stop selling junk food and replace soda with milk.

When I was a kid, my stay-at-home mom cooked from scratch- every day. We never ate out. My mom hated to cook and she cooked only a few dishes over and over- but everything that we ate was made from simple, identifiable ingredients. Chicken and beef, vegetables, bread, milk, eggs. My mom loved sweets and we always had a home made cake or pie for dessert. But we also were expected - in fact, forced, for my mother wanted a quiet peaceful home - to play outside. Two hours or more after school, every day. All day long during summers and weekends-sun up to sun down. We rode bikes, walked over to a friend's house and jumped on their trampoline or swam in their pool. We played "kick-the-can" with other kids in the neighborhood. Jumped rope, played hopscotch, roller skated. Even when my childhood friends and I were only 2-3 years old, we rode tricycles round and round the driveway.  There were no buses or moms driving us to school - we walked or rode our bikes.(I walked 2 blocks each way as a 6 year old, 4 blocks each way as a 12 year old, and 10 blocks each way as a 16 year old.) There were sidewalks everywhere and as a kid, you could safely get around town or play on them. In elementary school, we had two recesses with outdoor playground time a day , for 30 minutes each. (The teachers took turns supervising, and used this time as their conference/paper grading time.) We pushed ourselves on a merry-go-round, rode swings, climbed on monkey bars. In jr high and high school, P.E. was mandatory, and focused on learning different sports and leisure activities. You could choose to sign up for dancing ( aerobic, classical/jazz, country), tennis, softball, gymnastics, basketball, volleyball, golf, archery, etc. The school cafeterias of  my childhood sold actual food: Monday was spaghetti, Tuesday was tacos, Wednesday was chicken fried steak, Thursday was fried chicken, Friday was fish sticks. Every meal came with salad, 2 veggies, and unsugared ice tea. The cafeteria ladies wouldn't let you buy an ice cream unless you cleaned your plate. My high school also had a 20 minute break after first block, and sold breakfast . I'm not saying it was perfect- they also sold cigarettes in the vending machines, the breakfast break was also a smoker's break. It was the 60's, man.



Contrast this with how many Americans live today. Both parents work long work days out of financial necessity. Moms or dads come home late in the evening, tired and frazzled, and grab what they can to feed their families. Sometimes it is fast food from a drive-through, sometimes it is convenience food already prepared from the grocery store or restaurant. Always high in salt, sugar, fat, and preservatives- rarely fresh, simple ingredients. No veggies, nothing fresh. Middle class families often chauffeur their kids to activities after school- dance class, scouts, sports, etc - and grab something to eat on the go. In theory, this sounds like an even exchange ( in terms of calories in , calories out - the kids are in sports, right?) until you realize that this 45 minute activity once or twice a week is the only physical activity the child does at all, in their whole life. The schools my children attended have cut recess down to only once a day for elementary grades, and many days not even that. (All that mandated testing takes up time, and the school days are now longer as a result. ) Kids routinely ride the bus to and from school instead of walking bc mom and dad are working. Little children are placed in "after care" activities until a parent can get off work to pick them up, and they spend those 2 hours every day watching tv, doing crafts, or playing indoors. High school students are only required to take 1 year of P.E., and the P.E. classes at the school where I work consist of students being told to walk circles around the gym while the coach plays on his cellphone or laptop. You can walk by any time of the day and see half the students sitting down, talking, and the coach ignores them.  That's their P.E. exposure. The food sold at the cafeteria is the same meal, 5 days a week: pizza or chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes, french fries, and a roll. Everything is covered in "gravy". It is all carbs, grease, salt, and beige. The cafeteria ladies don't even cook it - it comes pre-assembled in boxes and they just heat it up. I am not sure how this meal meets RDA requirements, or why it is deemed better than a sandwich and a piece of fruit. (Sidebar: I tried to convince my school to build a community garden- make it a class, let AG run it - to add to the cafeteria meals. No go.) Laws intending to cut out candy and junk food sold at the school are easily circumvented- my school has a "school store" (closed when the inspector comes around) that is located away from the cafeteria, open before and after school, that sells soda, candy, chips and other crap . It is located right where the students come off the bus and enter the building, and every morning the line is long as students load up on the snacks they want to eat all day - often using up all their lunch money here. After eating sugar and salt all day, they will come to class all hyped up, or else cranky and hungry, and ask if I have anything for them to eat. I routinely keep peanut butter and crackers to feed them. Even the "home ec" class taught at my school - now renamed "food science" , spends 90% of its time having students doing book work on nutrition and only 10% or less teaching them how to cook and plan healthy meals.



In my community, many poor families go hungry. Interestingly, their daily meals are healthier than wealthier folks' bc they can't afford to buy junk food, so they eat staples : beans, rice, vegetables, with a little bit of meat. Junk food is a treat not a daily item. It is a common phenomenon in  my town to see tremendously overweight white people and normal weight Hispanics.

The solution to our obesity crisis ( for both kids and adults) is to conscientiously and drastically change many aspects of our lives and how we live them. I am not saying moms need to give up careers and be stay -at -home moms cooking from scratch and supervising kids playing in the back yard...I am a working mother myself, out of necessity, and I fall victim to all these same scenarios. I do know that if someone in my neighborhood offered simple, made-from scratch meals - even the wretched 1960's style casseroles my mother cooked- at a reasonable price, and all I had to do was drive through, pick it up, go home and stick it in the oven  and serve with a bag of salad- I would do it, and pay a pretty price, too. Sure there are purveyors of frozen lasagnas and the like, but these are high in salt and other things that are not good to eat in excess. A great business opportunity awaits someone who can figure out how to do that; even better if organic. McD's and other fast food restaurants have paid attention to this trend and developed alternatives, but feeding your child packaged ( bathed in preservatives) apple slices with his chicken nuggets isn't enough. Schools need to bring back P.E., real food, and design after-care programs that let kids physically play outdoors. Cities need to build sidewalks, parks, rec centers, playgrounds.

Fascinating TEDx talk on the important connection between excercise and learning:
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBSVZdTQmDs

It feels as if every year we Americans work longer and longer hours at our jobs, at computers, sitting down. We have long commutes - in cars, sitting down - to and from work. We come home late, tired, and watch tv or surf the internet- sitting down. It is no wonder we are starting to develop the pear shaped bodies seen in the movie "Wall-E". (People often say to me, "You are a teacher, you have a short work day and summers off !." No I do not. I work 8-5 every day, and longer on several days a week. I work through lunch ("other duties as assigned"),  rarely have time to go the the restroom, routinely lose all my conference time to meetings, frequently have more meetings that run early or late before/after the school day, and am expected to give up several weeks each summer for "training". I bring home grading, read/write/work hours a week for lesson planning/development,  and recently am expected to complete several days-20+ hours- of online training, each school year, on my own time : nights and weekends.) As a society, we need to spend less time in front of computers (then shopping or eating junk food to alleviate our stress from working) and more time doing things/interacting with our co-workers, families, friends, and our bodies. We need to have movement breaks throughout the day so we can get up, walk around, use our muscles. As humans, we are hard-wired to eat as much as possible in case there is a famine, but we can also find substitutions to what we are currently eating that give us pleasure and are still good for us.


Another NYT article on healthy eating, living, and longevity
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island-where-people-forget-to-die.html?pagewanted=all



2/10/2013

My Favorite Time of Year


Once the hoopla of the Super Bowl is over, I breathe a collected sigh of relief  and just b-r-e-a-t-h-e . For the previous six months, hubster has monopolized every tv in the house, watching football games in every room, and not content with that, roaming around yelling at all the different games on the various tv's. There is just no escape. The madness starts in August and goes non stop until February. Football games are on  Thurs, Fri, Sat, Sun, Mon and now on Wed nights as well , plus all day on Sat and Sun. Football mania is all fine and good but in this house it's just too much. The dogs cower and hide under the bed. I just leave - go out to lunch, get a massage, go to a movie. Yet it feels forced, and the house is a stressful place to be.The stress seems to follow, like a cloud.

 
But this time of year - Feb through May, what we call "spring" - is the best season of the year. Post Super Bowl (the real end of the holidays ), post Hanukkah, Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's. Deep winter and early spring are a peaceful time, quiet, calm, reflective. In Texas, it is also sunny and mild. The arts calendars are in full swing - there's opera, gallery exhibits, symphony concerts, author talks, foreign films, jazz festivals - something for everyone.
The farmer's market goes year round, pulling produce from south Texas. MMMM! I think I'll cook something.


Hip New Thing

The hot new thing to do is eat from a food truck. Long the purveyor of hearty lunch time junk food to construction workers, (here in Texas, it was mostly Mexican food , hot dogs, burgers, and fries), re purposed exotic gourmet food trucks have suddenly sprung up as a roving foodie adventure. One of my faves sells only banh mi - a  sort of Vietnamese hoagie. To stay current, you have to follow your fave food truck on Twitter - they will Tweet you where they will be parked each day. It's a like a double dose of cool - you gotta be in the know to know. Recently we had a food truck night-time event in town, where many different types of food trucks gathered down by the train station. Town officials expected a couple hundred locals to show up - but due to Twitter and word of mouth, over 20,000 people showed up. It was a traffic nightmare, but fun none the less.

Come to Texas !




Attention: all international, foreign, and otherwise Yankee readers of this blog ! Are you sick and tired of cold, gray, snowy weather? Fed up with high taxes, cost of living, inhabiting tiny apartments that cost a fortune, the soul sucking misery of urban blight, long winters, no fresh fruit? Do you have money to burn ? Need a job ? Want a vacation home in a warm climate? Come to Texas!
 A recent vacay in Florida drew my attention to the fact that many Florida homes and condos are owned not by "snow birds" from New York or locals, but by: (in descending order of ownership) Canadians, Europeans (chiefly Germans, although also includes Eastern Europeans, Brits, and Russians), and South Americans. (Data from a Florida Realtors website.) I started thinking to myself : What if all those people looking for a second home in a nice sunny climate, searching for an undiscovered place with plenty of cheap housing, decided to move to Texas ? All this could be yours ! 



Did you know : You can buy a small three bedroom single family home, complete with yard and a free membership in the community pool for under USD $130,000?  We have plenty of condos, beach homes, and other properties as well. Texas has 367 miles of shoreline. Mountains, canyons, prairies. A terrain and clime similar to southern France or Italy. Only one non-stop flight away from central Europe or South America. No, I am not an employee of any Texas marketing, realtor, business, or booster club. This is all part of my secret plan to oust the red neck conservative uneducated moronic hillbilly Republican Christian coalition tea-party hooligans from this state - or at least entice enough folks of different beliefs cultures, and political persauasions to move here, in order to tip the balance, so those other folk are out of power. Bwaa-haaa-haaa! Are you a gun-toting, government hating fundamentalist extremist ? Stay away.



Tired of the Snow ? I'm Just Sayin'.....

North Central Texas

Average January temperatures
High °F Low °F Place High °C Low °C
61 41 College Station 16   5
57 37 Dallas 14   3
56 33 Denton 13   1
57 35 Fort Worth 14   2
59 35 Killeen 15   2
52 30 McKinney 11  -1
58 36 Waco 15   2
54 30 Wichita Falls 12  -1

2/09/2013

Come to Texas ! Please !



Attention: all international, foreign, and otherwise Yankee readers of this blog ! Are you sick and tired of cold, gray, snowy weather? Fed up with high taxes, high cost of living, inhabiting tiny apartments that cost a fortune, the soul sucking misery of urban blight ? Do you have money to burn ? Need a job ? Want a vacation home in a warm climate? Come to Texas!

A recent vacay in Florida drew my attention to the fact that many Florida homes and condos are owned not by "snow birds" from New York or locals, but by (in descending order of ownership) Canadians, Europeans (chiefly Germans, although also includes Eastern Europeans, Brits, and Russians), and South Americans. (Data from a Florida Realtors website.) I started thinking to myself : What if all those people looking for a second home in a nice sunny climate, searching for an undiscovered place with plenty of cheap housing, decided to move here ? All this could be yours !




Did you know : You can buy a small three bedroom, single family home, complete with yard and a free membership in the community pool for under USD $130,000?  We have plenty of condos, beach homes, and other properties as well. Texas has 367 miles of shoreline. Mountains, canyons, prairies. A terrain and clime similar to southern France or Italy. Only one non-stop flight away from central Europe or South America. No, I am not an employee of any Texas marketing, realtor, business, or booster club. This is all part of my secret plan to oust the red neck conservative uneducated moronic hillbilly Republican Christian coalition tea-party hooligans from this state - or at least entice enough folks of different beliefs to move here, in order to tip the balance so those folk are out of power. Bwaa-haaa-haaa. Are you a gun-toting, government hating fundamentalist extremist ? Stay away.


Southern Style


When I was a little kid, we would go to a local amusement park named Six Flags, theoretically titled for the Six Flags ( i.e. nations, historical periods, or cultures) that influenced the history of the Lone Star State. There was Little Mexico with the giant sombrero ride and taco stands, (hey, we never claimed to be P.C.), a Wild Wild West Frontier Town that had a shootout every day and a steak restaurant, a bunch of others I can't remember ....somehow Space The Final Frontier seems to have been rolled in as Future-ville, also maybe something French although I can't remember what - a pirate ride named  after LaSalle?  Oddly, Germantown didn't even rate a section, although the German settlers were at one time among our state's largest, and contributed importantly to our local cuisine, which is why Texans eat Bar-B-Que and brats together. Somewhere in this mix was Southern -ville, with a faux Mississippi Riverboat ride. All that fun is now just a baby boomer's memory; Six Flags has since morphed into a national chain with cartoon character super hero based theme rides.

My point is that Texas does see itself as a part of the South; it was a member of the Confederacy, had slaves, shared an initial agrarian economy. Early settlers were from Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee. That's part of what makes Texas unique - this blend of cultures. Southern culture is just as important as the better known southwestern food, music, decor, religion, fashion, economic lifestyle in Texas, especially among older, moneyed Texans. The region of East Texas identifies closely with Louisiana and other parts south, and my own mother was a typical little old lady from East Texas who spent her life visiting flower shows, cooking southern food, shopping at Neiman's - all staple activities.

The magazine Southern Living has been  Bible of sorts for the lifestyle ever since I can remember . If you want recipes, gardening, shopping and decorating info, this is your go-to source.

http://www.southernliving.com/home-garden/

Recently (at my hairdresser's, so typical) I discovered a new fave magazine that celebrates the southern lifestyle, Garden and Gun. What I especially like about this publication /website is that : a) it is very upscale  b)it covers other aspects of the culture, such as: the arts, literature, travel, history, culture/pop culture and shopping.
http://gardenandgun.com/



The Decorologist

Do you go a little stir crazy in the winter? Have you ever had a midlife crisis and suddenly wanted to change nearly everything about your life? Do you enjoy shopping, redecorating, planning, dreaming? Well, who doesn't? Most of my friends and relatives are in the midst of their own mid-life crises - quitting their jobs, getting divorces. So cliched but true. Hubster and I still like each other, most days, so I'm putting all that pent up energy into redecorating. Above is a picture of my family room, "before". I live in a 60's ranch house, spacious, suburban, and blah. Not funky or early enough to be mid century modern. Not recent or luxurious enough to be a mini mcMansion. It is a pleasant home however and I plan to stay here until I die or get an urge to retire in some exotic location. I have been trolling the web lately looking for redecorating ideas, and have discovered my new favorite blog : The Decorologist, aka Kristie Barnett. http://thedecorologist.com/  She also posts on Houzz http://www.houzz.com/photos/family-room

Spend some time on her website (my faves: Why Men fear Painting Panelling, Redecorate with What you Already Have) and you will gather some great ideas on the use of color, light, organization, and many other topics. I am planning to redo my den...trying to convince Hubster we won't regret it if we paint it. I'll keep you posted.

Oh the Humanity !


An earth shattering event happened around here last fall and I was too wrapped up in personal stuff to report it. Big Tex, one of the most beloved and familiar icons of the Lone Star State, went up in flames. If you want to read the official news story concerning this event, see link below.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57536300/iconic-statue-big-tex-goes-up-in-flames/


Big Tex originated  in the Dallas area sometime in the 1940's or 1950's as a  rather thin Santa Clause promoting a local business. Not finding success at that job and perhaps feeling discriminated against vis-a-vis all the other Santas out there on issues of weightism,  Big Tex somehow made his way, with a change of clothes, across town to the State Fair grounds, where he has welcomed visitors ever since I was a baby in the early 1960's. He was famous not only for his sartorial flair, but also for his mechanical drawl of "Howdy Texans!" which emanated from his hinged jaw that dropped, skeletally, as he spoke. (Imagine Craig Ferguson's sidekick Geoff.) Due to his height, he was often used as a landmark for various friends and families visiting the State Fair, as in "We'll meet by Big Tex at noon". No one could miss him. (P.S. He wasn't as tall as this image would seem to suggest, i.e. taller than the world's tallest Ferris wheel. He was 52 feet tall.)

Many natives, myself included, felt shock and awe as we watched the perpetually unfolding news images of smoke and flames pouring out of our beloved icon.  We couldn't bear to look, yet we couldn't tear ourselves away. In that special way that grief sometimes combines with dark humor, I couldn't help but being reminded of images from the original "Ghostbusters" movie, when the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man went up in flames. Proof of Big Tex's humanlike persona is that State Fair officials carried his remains out in giant body bag while thousands watched and mourned. Didn't want folks to gawk at his charred carcass, didn't want to leave the burned metal skeleton and fried electrical wiring around for folks to see. Since that day, there has been a public clamor to rebuild Big Tex. Someone somewhere traced down another head, long forgotten  in storage or a junkyard , that was made at the same time for Big Tex. Plans to create another oddly proportioned body for him have begun.