A Fat Society Starved Of Able Cooks
With alot of emphasis on dieting in the media this article about learning how to cook is very true - throw away the microwave which encourages you to heat up fast food that can be high in fat and tasteless and learn how to prepare fast, fresh, nutritious meals - this way you will enjoy your food more and consume the right type of calories - not the ones that make you fat !
I dont use a microwave and cook most things at home with the George Foreman Grill - its excellent !
Enjoy the article below
Dean Piazza
www.getfit.com.au
Your Online Personal Trainer
AS AUSTRALIANS have been eating themselves towards full-fat, inglorious deaths in the past decade or two, an essential skill has been fading away, now a skeletal shadow in the corner.
We have forgotten how to cook.
The revelation is shocking and sad in equal parts: the more we gorge ourselves, the less we are in love with the wonder that is food. This can be the only explanation for the loss of such an essential skill.
Isn't preparing food - the modern-day equivalent of hunting, gathering and providing nutrition to self and family - essential to a healthy life, like washing and cleaning?
The disclosure of this developmental regression came from media personality and television chef Jamie Oliver at the launch this week of his latest venture, a TV series in Britain and a cookbook for the world.
His project is aimed at educating a society ignorant about the basics of how to prepare nutritious and easy meals from real foodstuffs.
In the first episode aired in Britain this week, Oliver spoke to a woman who did not know that water bubbled when it boiled and another who had never cooked a meal for her children, despite them being aged two and five.
Oliver believes Britain is facing a new form of poverty caused by a generation that lacks the basic life skills to feed their families.
He is right and Australia is in the same uneducated and unskilled boat. It's an issue that has been bubbling away at the centre of the health/obesity/lifestyle disorder problems, but has rarely been so explicitly outlined.
To clarify, we are not talking cooking osso bucco for a dinner party of 10 or presenting a perfectly garnished roast lamb with all the trimmings. We are talking about the increasing number of people who don't know how to cook at all - and many are loud and proud of it.
I have friends and acquaintances who openly profess to not know a saucepan from a wok. They claim to despise the craft and creativity of cooking but say they delight in consuming food.
I fail to see how one can exist without the other, but apparently this is possible because of instant meals or kitchen-loving spouses and housemates.
How did cooking get thrown out with hand-washing and ironing clothes? How did so many people become so busy that getting a meal became an extra they did not opt into? Food and its consumption are the cause and the symptoms of many of society's ills: obesity, ill-health and the rush-rush, no-time life.
It is ironic that the key to beat the obesity epidemic is eating, and eating well.
Eating is as essential as air and we need it as whole, clean and pure as possible. Fresh, real food has never been more needed.
But we shovel in gobsful of non-food morsels and pretend we are deriving nutrients. We fill up on rubbish and pretend we are satisfied. Chips are a pantry staple and soft drink is Australia's largest supermarket chains' biggest-selling item.
Regardless of the economic tough times, takeaway food shops are still doing very good business. We claim to be time poor, but spend hours of our leisure time in shopping centres and sitting in food courts.
The Dietitians Association of Australia says the average Australian family spends 15 per cent of its food budget on takeaway food.
Goodness knows how much more is spent in the frozen food, meal-in-a-box or banquet-in-a-bottle aisles of the supermarket.
It's appalling.
Whether or not Oliver's latest cookbook, released in Britain today and Australia next week, will be a big seller or whether the TV series will be a British TV success remains to be seen.
I suspect it may not be the super-seller his other books were.
Why? Because those who buy cookbooks have an interest in cooking. The target of this book are people who are not, but should be.
At least he is offering help to those who need nutritional and life skills. We need more, though.
Governments could help us help ourselves by adding a tax on foods low in nutritional value and high in sugar or fat, and use that to subsidise the cost of healthy, whole food, like fresh fruit and vegetables, plain milk and whole-grain bread.
Ultimately, we have to take responsibility for our poor personal and collective state and decide to change our dysfunctional and unhealthy ways.
It's a matter of loving life and the essentials in it enough, and learning the skills to make our lot better
Jane Fynes Clinton smh.com.au