December 17, 2002
Are You Living Large? ... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes".
The recent "Surgeon General's Call to Action To Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity" is direct: 61% of us are either overweight or obese. Do the math - that would be about 175 million Americans. Since this is a "Call to Action," I wondered what advice the Surgeon General had to offer.
Apparently, "the difference between a large gourmet chocolate chip cookie and a small chocolate chip cookie could be about 40 minutes of raking leaves." If you have to rake leaves any way, that's an interesting trade-off. But since I have the tiniest of front lawns, I'd have to rake everyone's lawns on my entire block. And if one other person read the report, I'm afraid we'd have to split the cookie.
So, I tried another suggestion: "A fast food 'meal' containing a double patty cheeseburger, extra-large fries and a 24 oz. soft drink is equal to running 21/2 hours at a 10 min/mile pace." Now, let me get this straight: I'd have to run 15 miles to work off a super-sized double cheeseburger extravaganza? If I had to run the 15 miles first, I'd never darken the doorway of a fast-food franchise again.
But in all seriousness, I think this kind of approach has a basic flaw.
--
These situations are spot instances, and they don't address the total problem: We simply don't know how to incorporate fast foods into our total diet, much less a large gourmet cookie. They didn't exist when we were kids. In fact, they've never existed before in the history of man.
I once spent a week in the south of France, cooking with the staff of a 4-star restaurant. We would cook all morning, and in the evenings, we would eat from the formal menu.
After a few days, we realized that not all the food made it to the menu, and it turned out that the morning's efforts included cooking a totally separate meal for the kitchen and dining room staff. Boy, was it terrific: small broiled half-chickens, their crinkly skins browned and divinely seasoned, all the fat cooked away; a terrine of newly-made soup; a myriad of savory vegetables, pulled that morning from the kitchen gardens; small wheels of fresh cheese.
None of the staff were stick figures, but neither were they overweight. So I watched them fill their plates. They would take béarnaise sauce, but just a tablespoon full. They would take soup, but only a ladle full. Cheese, but just a small slice for taste and texture. No American would even recognize these as portions. They ate sumptuously, without apparent restraint, clearly loving their food.
--
Eventually, I had a remarkable realization - for all intents and purposes, they were eating California cuisine!
When I asked them how they learned to restrain themselves, they looked at me in puzzlement. "What restraint? We just eat this way. What are you talking about?"
One of America's greatest strengths in this land of plenty is that our citizens come from every country and every culture. We borrow each other's foods, and we invent some of our own. What we haven't done is develop a way for making the total work.
So while we are working on a new cultural model that will let us balance pizza with burritos, and big burgers with small, we might be able to tame the fast food situation in a very simple way - perhaps they could let us order it by the calorie ...
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
