Food is Good

I really like this article. Lots.

On Food: Don’t fret — they’re just guidelines, by Hsiao-Ching Chou in today’s PI regarding the latest nutritional & exercise guidelines. Among other good things she says, “We have to care about food before we can talk about controlling portions.”

The article discusses (briefly) some of the things left out of the latest guidelines — namely the context and cultural values attached to food. It’s rare that the context and cultural values issue comes up in nutrition texts. Sure, lots of them mention “lifestyle changes,” but, maybe it’s just me, I think that’s a cop-out way to address the depths of the changes that need to be made.

For lots of us, food is just another brief stop on the run between waking & going back to bed. God, another thing to think about. Preparing & eating food is a chore, one more thing that needs to get done. Not that we don’t necessarily enjoy it given the opportunity, but the opportunity doesn’t necessarily present itself all that often these days.

Not entirely sure where I’m going with this and I haven’t thought about it much so this is all fuzzy thinking, but I think a lot more thought needs to go into the contexts in which eating and preparing food is done, as well as the cultural values which are attached to eating and preparing food. It may not change the guidelines, but then again, it might enable them to be written in such a way that people won’t look at them and say “what. ever. How does this pertain to me? How am I supposed to do that?”