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New York, 9:25 AM
Mon Nov 23
18 posts in the last 24 hours
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09/17/09
"I am evangelically of the opinion that in order to eat right, we need to take the morality out of food. It's not sinful, it's not wicked, and it's not bad. Food is a pleasure and we need to treat it as such - not as an enemy."
While in context it's a condemnation of 'fat shaming' and obsessive calorie counting, I am evangelically opposed to taking the morality out of food.
Agriculture weighs heavily on the planet. A large chunk (I'll try to find some numbers later) of carbon emissions come from the food industry. Beyond climate change, a host of ethical and environmental quandaries arise from the food industry. Should we rear cattle on feedlots? Why are some nations starving when grain rots in silos? What to eat is a consumer choice we make every day. Morality, or at least ethics, should absolutely enter into it.
09/16/09
09/16/09
In the last five years, I've noticed that the people around me are so fixated on calories and food as a guilty pleasure. So many people I know, including my own sister, are frequently dieting or trying to diet.
I won't diet or worry about the things that I eat. I've found that stress and worry are bigger factors in my weight fluctuations than what I actually put in my mouth.
09/16/09
College dining halls are just as guilty of using too much crap cheap ingredients and bulking up a meal that couldbe heatlhy until it's a 40 grams of fat, 900 grams of sodium, 1000 calorie nightmare. The calorie counts are for visibility. If you don't like feeling guilty about it, develop a coping skill like everyone else in the world has to with their issues. No one gets over their mental problem by coddling it. (I have a mental disorder. Several.)
09/16/09
However, in response to Sadie's suggestion, you may pry the Coke from my cold, dead hands.
09/16/09
Take, for example, their glazed carrots. Not the healthiest, but it's a vegetable, right? Surely some OJ poured on top can't be all that bad, I thought while standing in line before I glanced at the little menu with calorie counts printed in tiny font below. For a HALF CUP serving of carrots, it boasted FIVE HUNDRED calories. Five. Hundred. Calories. For a half cup. I am not sure what exactly happened to those carrots, but I have utmost sympathy for them.
While something should be done about the eating disorder epidemic, I hope some way can be found to still give people like me that valuable information. I have PCOS, I'm already overweight, and I try to stick to essentially a diabetic diet; I don't need my carrots to have more sugar than my dessert. It's unhealthy. And before you think those carrots were an isolated incident, consider that I gained over 50 pounds since my Freshman year doggedly eating their "healthy way" pre-determined plate of food.
Yes, it may be a contributing factor, but how else am I going to get that information so readily? The website to look up calorie counts (for Sodexho, anyway) is clunky, inefficient, and often wildly out of date, not listing the choices I was actually given to eat, while the cafeteria itself knows what it's serving and can present me with a more accurate calorie count.
So before you say "death to the calorie labels" completely, consider that some cafeterias may be running shenanigans like those 500-calorie carrots.
09/16/09
I also kind of take offense to the notion that people (i.e. women) are so fragile that they'll spiral into an eating disorder if they know the calorie content of foods or weigh themselves. I know for some people these are triggering events, but for the majority of people, it's helpful information.
09/16/09
If you want to educate people in a way that leads to healthy eating, teach them how to recognize the way the media is manipulating their self-images for the sake of profit.
09/16/09
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09/16/09
So, if you're presented with a dish made with butter and a dish made with olive oil, they both have fats, but the olive oil dish will be "healthier" fats. You're still making informed choices, without encouraging the obsessive angle.
I do understand why having the info is helpful for some people, and I wouldn't suggest banning it. But availability and prominently in your face are two different things.
t's like...when you cook at home, do you carefully map out every calorie of what you're making, or do you make a guess and go from there? I don't think awareness is bad, I think encouraging obsessive and restrictive habits are. And as much as, yes, objectively, this information has no judgment...that's just not how we view food right now.
I also don't think this is catering to the needs of a minority or "diseased" as it is acknowledging that we have an overall issue with the way we look at food. I think a lot more people have disordered food behaviors than we realize. It doesn't have to be a full blown ED to be an issue. And I do think we need to look at why we provide the information. Hopefully it's to inform, but I don't think it's wrong to suggest considering other motives as well.
09/16/09
Cafeteria menus vary daily, and student meal counts (per meal plans) are often counted by how often you enter the dining hall; your ID is scanned in and your meal is deducted whether or not you eat anything. You really can't expect a school to set up a system that lets kids enter the dining hall twice for one meal.
09/16/09
Also, as the article states, an avocado is high in calories and fat...but they're good for you. We need both to live and to have functioning brains and systems. All fat and calorie counts tell you is how much is in something. Not whether it's a good or bad fat, or a whole grain, or the rest. There's more to a food than just the calories and fat.
Because of how we treat fat and calories, though, I think people end up with a dysfunctional idea about all fat being bad, and end seriously restricting calories and fat based on that.
I'm also wondering how foods will be labeled with all this information. Will it be a full nutritional label, or just the fat and calories? Because, as I said, that's not the entirety of nutrition. I just don't think the proposed labeling is actually all that helpful. I don't, though, have a perfect solution either.
09/16/09
So many surveys have demonstrated that people vastly underestimate the calories in restaurant meals. I like seeing calorie counts on chain restaurant menus. Some of them are quite surprising.
And if it's not a college's responsibility to provide junk because junk can be had elsewhere, they are likewise under no obligation to provide avocados. Healthy food can be purchased elsewhere, too.
Having worked in food service and catering, I understand that dining halls need to serve food fast, around the clock, appealing to the largest group of people, and at a very low cost. Preparing healthy food well takes more skilled workers, more time, and less students being able to afford the meal plan. Mesclun greens don't keep, but chicken nuggets do. I understand that some schools are serving healthy food, and good on them, but it's no small thing to ask that more do the same, and it's nonsensical to suggest it as the alternative to posting calories.
09/16/09
I think it would be fantastic if the cafeterias didn't provide this crap, but if they are going to (which they are, for the reasons Hana Muru mentioned), taking this measure is better than nothing. If this prevents anyone from thinking twice about putting the aforementioned crap into their body, I'm for it.
From my experience, I'd say the anorexia argument is largely neither here nor there: I don't know a single anorexic (and living in Southern California, in an area rife with the beautiful and rich, I know a lot of them) that doesn't extensively research and obsess over the calorie content of everything. The disease is more powerful than a visual reminder in the cafeteria they probably don't eat in anyway; I don't believe it is going to deter this disordered eating (or non-eating, as the case may be), nor is it going to encourage it in the disordered over eaters.
09/16/09
09/16/09
And I'm really not sure what "part of the nature of ED"s is that sufferers are allowed to nurture and romanticize them" is referring to. Do you mean some sufferers may do that? Possibly. I think it's more of a coping mechanism, really, not romanticism. And anyway, posting this information is not actually necessary for anyone to be able to make food choices, ED's or not. If you're a "normal" eater then you're clearly able to make food choices with or without it posted everywhere. So I don't see how having it, or not having it, would effect people without it one way or another.
Also, this article clearly discusses how often ED' occur -during- college, because of the change in environment and independence, food, depression, hormone changes, etc. Not necessarily before.
Having a "trigger" does not make you unfit to attend to college, live independently, nor is it something people can control. It's an automatic response most people don't know they have until they get treatment. They wouldn't even know it is a trigger until the problem is diagnosed.
I don't know...I get that you think this is "coddling", to suggest that it's not actually necessary to post information that's easily accessible elsewhere, but I don't think it is. I think it's looking at an environment that seems to have an increased risk of something and questioning what the best solution is.
09/17/09
09/16/09
I'm not an obsessed calorie-counter, but I have realized that now that I am heading into middle age, the days when I can eat whatever and not have it impact my health are long gone. And if I want to be good at my chosen sport, I have to be careful about what I eat. This doesn't mean I'm some joyless harridan who eats nothing but flax on iceberg lettuce. I love food, but I also love to be healthy.
I guess I get what you are saying, but I really disagree. I wish more places would post nutritional information about the food they serve. It might make us more aware of exactly what it is we are putting in our bodies.
09/16/09
Dieticians and other health professionals have for years been advocating consumer education and empowerment through the reading of nutrition labels. When you eat out and those aren't available, this is the next best thing.
At the grocery store the other day I picked up a seemingly ultra-healthy ready-made organic vegetarian frozen meal. It was only once already at home that I discovered that this one tiny stupid package contained over 500 calories and almost half of my daily recommended sodium intake.
Though I understand the point trying to be made here, comparing an avocado to a can of Coke is a ridiculous straw-man argument. Healthful food choices are certainly not always obvious.
09/16/09
I wonder if that isn't a better solution than removing junk food. I don't feel comfortable advocating a paternalistic food services policy. Sometimes, a gal or guy really just wants a bag of Fritos.
09/16/09
09/16/09
There's a lawsuit going on right now with Denny's because of the nutrition information was hidden in their website and the sodium in every dish was well over the daily recommendation.
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