Lauren Ortega
Dr. Wasserman
Human Diet #4
It’s strange to think that my time in France is now coming to an end, but at the same time not so alarming just because time keeps going and stops for no one. So much has changed since I came to Europe, and its fascinating to see how the body copes, changes, and reacts with the kinds of environments we put it in. Although my body didn’t change in drastic measures, like it had when I lived in other countries, it still felt like a reality check to me because its true what they say when you are what you essentially put in.(To your body internally and externally). Before coming to France, I had a pretty good idea about the importance of having a good diet. I I mentioned in my previous blogs the difference in the kinds of foods I would consume at home versus the foods I would eat outside of home (mostly in restaurants). But when I talk about my eating habits back home, I mean how it always consisted of a clean/wholesome diet, where moderation, variety and an aim for balance was a must for me and my family. Today in class I mentioned the fact that since I arrived, I felt like my diet had shifted a tremendous amount from the normal and it had effected the way and the time I spent sleeping, my energy levels, attention level, etc. I tried my best to not eat out when I was hungry and buy groceries instead to prepare food for myself. But the turn out wasn’t so great. Sadly enough it became annoying too cook and I felt like it required too much of my time that I could be spending on other things like, sleeping and doing homework. So naturally I just resorted to take out food that wasn’t always necessarily unhealthy, but not as good as actual prepared quality food. In my last blogs I talked about two of my main determinants on why I decided to just “let go” and that was time and proximity. Time is so crunched that the easiest thing for me to do was buy take out foods or buy food that was already prepared for me to easily get my hands on, and call it a meal. I found myself eating a lot of the same things, over and over again. Normally back at home, I would eat moderate portion sizes of everything I consumed, wether it be healthy or not, because too much of anything isn’t ever good. Also in terms of proximity I thought, why not just buy food that is already prepared (pick from the batch that wont make me feel so bad)? It makes it that much more time efficient.
(Food I would sometimes eat back home, however I had a MX dish in Barcelona-close enough)
Although I am fully aware that if I kept eating this way, the most obvious things that would happen would be the progression of my already feeling of tiredness, (so less physical activity like running), increase in weight gain, and perhaps a continuation of the already weird sleeping cycles I have. So with that being said, and after all of the blogs reminding/keeping me updated with my body, I came to realize that the importance of having a well rounded/good diet is probably the most important factor to living a longer and healthier life. I feel like people who follow a well balanced diet are overall the one who feel better and are in better health, they are more physically motivated and able to think more clearly. Also, sometimes when you take really good care of your body, it results in lower chances of you getting a disease or becoming ill over time due to a poor health.
(Typical Plates I would eat here in France: Top is a galette. Bottom right is a quiche. Bottom left is a typical sandwich I would prepare myself for lunch and last plate was a pizza I ate in Geneva, Switzerland)
I always thought that eating at home was always the way to go, because I assumed that most if not all families would prepare home cooked meals that were much healthier than food a family would buy at a restaurant. I couldn’t believe how mistaken I really was, because sometimes eating at home could mean that you eat the worst. Not all families cook to maintain a healthy diet, most families just cook to get rid of the feeling of hunger. For example in a documentary I watched named “Food Inc” a family described their eating habits, and they mentioned that they would eat McDonalds everyday because it was cheap and it kept their children full for a longer period of time throughout the day. In the documentary, I saw that they ate mostly in their car on the way to work, and it reminded me about the fact that most Americans being so busy spend less time enjoying their meals than the people in France and mostly all of Europe. “20% of all American meals are eaten in the car” (DoSomething).When asked why they didn’t choose equal priced vegetables over fast food, they took a while to respond and they eventually ended with the same response, because it was too expensive for them (FoodInc). “Although people don’t knowingly shop for calories per se, the data show that it’s easier for low-income people to sustain themselves on junk food rather than fruits and vegetables” (Pope).
Most families in the US especially are pressured by the pace of life and the constant feeling of wanting to keep moving until you work your body to exhaustion. Consequently, this creates a tight schedule for most Americans and it also leads to the “wolfing down of food” in a way that is almost unhealthy (Nutritional Anthropology) . I didn’t think about that so much until I came to France, because the French, and most Europeans spend a lot more time actually enjoying their foods unlike most Americans. This is also true for a lot of Mexican families that haven’t adapted to the American lifestyle like my family back home in Chihuahua. My aunts and uncles and even cousins that are in school always come back to their homes for a midday lunch, and if they cannot make it back home they always pack their lunch with them. (Back at home my mother always packs my dad lunch before he goes to work, and us too before we left for school). They don’t ever rush themselves, or feel like they are being pressured by a smaller time constraint like most Americans have.
It wasn’t until more than halfway throughout the semester that I started looking into the amount of calories were in my food. Even though I knew I wasn’t eating the most nutritious foods, one thing I did make sure to do was to not eat too much of that same thing and not as often. French portion sizes are smaller in comparable restaurants, in the sizes of individual portions of foods (but not other items) in supermarkets, in portions specified in cookbooks, and in the prominence of “all you can eat” restaurants in dining guides (Rozin, Kabnick, Pete, Fischler, and Shields). For example, my classmates ate kebabs everyday for lunch or pasta, and on Sundays they would eat the usual, McDonald’s. Although the McDonalds experience is meant to “encourage people to take their time” and “doesn’t feel like fast food” there was still that programmed thought in my head that reminded me that it didn’t matter where I was or when I was eating it. McDonald’s was always going to be fast food (Pamela Engel). From one standpoint I can understand that proximity and time were probably the deciding factors in this situation, but from another standpoint I feel like it was brought upon themselves and myself to later feel upset about not liking the food in France and mention that they couldn’t wait to get back to American food (well Tex-Mex for most). I think that if I were to do that, I probably would have looked and felt like how I did when I was in Ecuador. I gained 16 pounds while I was there, because I didn’t really take care of myself. And I wasn’t taking a class or constantly watching out for how much of one thing I was eating. All of the calories came from the pounds and pounds of rice I ate while being there. I never really noticed how different I looked until I came back to Houston. My friends and family were shocked, so it was an experience that helped me get by while being here in France.
This might sound a bit odd, considering that many people would think that even if I ate a lot of different unhealthy foods I would still gain weight (intake of a lot of carbs). But I feel like if I would have continued to eat foods like McDonald’s that have a high number of calories with each meal, very consistently, then I really wouldn’t have a consistent/varied diet at all. I wondered why I gained so much weight even if more than not, I ate at home. And I remember mentioning in my past blogs that perhaps eating at home wasn’t always the problem or the solution, because I took into account how everyones body is different, the way we process our foods (how fast we do), the type of habits families have in the kitchen, and really just the overall quality of foods we choose to select, keep and consume on a daily basis. Also I think that our habits at and from home, have a lot to do with our personal cultural boundaries and how we relate to the kinds of foods we eat. Although I still believe that eating out at restaurants can never really relate to the way we eat at home (because we are our own personal chef’s and we get prepare what we desire), I can’t say that eating at home would necessarily be the key to maintaining a healthy diet. Sometimes the things we buy that we believe are healthy, can be falsely advertised or contain more calories than we had imagined.
For example, here in France I drink more whole milk than I ever did back in Houston or in Mexico. In Europe it seemed like everywhere I went there wasn’t any other kinds of milk people would drink besides whole milk. Back home my family sort of forced me to stop drinking whole milk and switched all instead drink soy milk or almond milk, (the one with coconut-which I hated) and it was really hard for my body to get use to it. However I did notice a difference in my body because for many year my knee bones would always pop and a couple of years ago I started having pain on my knees any time I would bend down. Changing the kind of milk I drank and substituting some dairy products for others, made me feel a whole lot better. This was due to the fact that the almond milk I was drinking, had 50% more calcium than dairy milk. While being in France, I started drinking whole milk again (here the calories are 4.8g, meanwhile in the states the amount of calories in the Silk Pure Almond milk I drink are 0g-I drink the unsweetened kind.)
(Whole Milk I drank here in my home in France)
So I think that my body had to readjust to my old habits and perhaps didn’t take it so well. Some other food products I would eat most often here in France was strawberry jam with my toast. I ate this as a substitute for peanut butter (since here in Europe it is extremely hard to find almond butter). In France the amount of calories on a strawberry jam bottle was 51,0 g, meanwhile in the states the almond butter I would eat was marked at 2g of sugars and protein 9g (Shoptimise). Also I found myself eating more cereal here than I did back home, and the calories on the box of cereal my host mom would buy was marked at 26,1g. While in Houston I would only eat quaker oatmeal squares (with cinnamon cereal which contained only 2g of sugars and 210 amount of calories, with 6g of protein. Although I ate from a wider variety of foods, I noticed that these food products here were marked at such a low price when I would go to the grocery store to buy food. Even though the portion sizes were smaller, I would be eating less of a food product that contained way more fats than one thats exactly the same food product just with better quality ingredients. I also noticed that the foods I ate back home, although looked the same as the foods here in France, were more expensive.
(Cereal I ate here in France)
(Jam I would eat here in France)
For example, the kind of peanut butter my parents would buy was marked just under 10 dollars, while the star berry jam (said by my host mother to be the best) here in France was 1.85 euros. I remember once when I went to Target with my dad, he was helping me grocery shop/buy things for my apartment and I vividly remember going down the isle with jams, cereals, etc and I put a jar of peanut butter in the cart because I noticed that it was creamy one (without the peanut chunks and less expensive, so I thought, well why not? My dad immediately put it back and told me to rethink what I had just done. I was like who cares, I mean its the same thing and just cheaper. He then picked up a jar that had less sugars, with more nutritive ingredients, and as you guessed, more expensive. He told me afterwards that its expensive to eat well, but remember you only have one body and you should always take care of what you put into it because it is a machine, and for it to function properly, you need to give it the upmost quality foods. (He would always compare the body to the engine of cars. If you pump crappy oil into your car, then eventually your motor would become clogged and create more engine problems. As it circulates through your engine and ages, oil gradually wears out.). It wasn’t like I didn’t know that that peanut butter jar was crappy, its just its hard not to pass up a price like that, and I think that thats what most food companies want people to live by. Then I tell myself, well its no wonder that a lot of people go to McDonald’s, because its cheap and its tasty (similarly to the family from “Food Inc”.
After falling slightly during the 2007-09 recession and its aftermath, food away from home’s share of total food expenditures rose to 49.6 percent in 2013. In 1960, the away-from-home market had a 26.3-percent share of total food expenditures (USDA). By having two people in the household earning income, then you have two means of money coming in and also adding on to the busy lifestyle, leads consumers to spend less time cooking and seek the convenience of food prepared away from home. Sales at restaurants and bars overtook spending at grocery stores in March for the first time ever, according to Commerce Department data released Tuesday that dates to 1992. From some reports on the way our generation eats now is causing restaurants thinking about how to cater to those growing ranks of millennials.That younger cohort has been identified as being more willing to spend on “food away from home,” according to a November report from Morgan Stanley (Jamrisko). In 1901, according to a 1997 Bureau of Labor Statistics study, the average family spent almost half of their budget on food. Just 3% of that went to meals away from home. Today, we only spend an average 13.3% of our budgets on food–but 42% of that money is spent in restaurants (Holland and Ewalt). When you place things into perspective, and really think about the way most Americans have went about let time and proximity effect their eating habits, its hard not to wonder if its a case of ignorance or if its a case on lack of knowledge, income, etc.
Founder of the Garrett Planning Network, Sheryl Garrett says “If you think about it, if you count packing the family into the car, driving to the Applebee’s, standing in line for 20 minutes, getting to your table, waiting for your food, checking out, paying the bill of 40 or 50 dollars, and then driving back home, have you saved any time at all? No, definitely not. And you’ve probably spent four times what you could have at home.”
Garret definitely made a good point, and I think that since I’ve been in France I have definitely let that side of slight ignorance, time, and proximity take over the way I went about eating. I think that if I were to continue eating the way I did here in France, and if I continued to travel a lot like I did this semester (and let time be my constant pressure) then some time from now I probably wouldn’t be in the best shape, and I would start to see bigger differences than what I see now. I have learned that things like advertising and marketing for corporations have taken over the world of food, and other things, especially in a country like the US. In countries like France, although there are fast food places like McDonald’s, people don’t let those advertisements determine what they will continue to eat. But rather they, like most Europeans, and Mexicans and I’m sure many other cultures continue their traditional ways of cooking at home and spending time with family. It was really interesting to see those kinds of differences while studying here in France, I never thought I would really grown to appreciate the growth and process of the food we eat. Its something we really ignore, and don’t spend enough time considering. So throughout the semester I am glad that I was able to really seek out the information I didn’t know about before, especially with the help of this class! It was probably one of the most engaging and helpful (real world) class that I ended up really appreciating.
Works Cited
“Confitures BONNE MAMAN.” – Comparez Vos Produits Petit Déjeuner Au Meilleur Prix Chez Shoptimise. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Dec. 2015. <http://www.shoptimise.fr/n/epicerie+sucree-petit+dejeuner/t/confitures+miels+pates+a+tartiner/b/bonne+maman/a/confitures>.
Dufour, Darna L., Alan H. Goodman, and Gretel H. Pelto. Nutritional Anthropology: Biocultural Perspectives on Food and Nutrition. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.
Engel, Pamela. “I Went to McDonald’s in France and Discovered How the US Is Doing It All Wrong.” Business Insider. Business Insider, 13 Apr. 2013. Web. 07 Nov. 2015. <http://uk.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-in-france-is-better-than-in-america-2015-4?r=US&IR=T>.
Food, Inc. Movie One, 2008.
“Food Prices and Spending.” USDA. USDA, 10 Sept. 2015. Web. 4 Dec. 2015. <http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices-and-spending.aspx>.
Holland, Laurence, and David Ewalt. “How Americans Make And Spend Their Money.” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 19 July 2006. Web. 4 Dec. 2015. <http://www.forbes.com/2006/07/19/spending-income-level_cx_lh_de_0719spending.html>.
Pope, Tara. “A High Price for Healthy Food.” Well A High Price for Healthy Food Comments. The New York Times, 05 Dec. 2007. Web. 07 Nov. 2015. <http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-healthy-food/?_r=0>.
Root, Waverley, and Warren Chappell. The Food of France. New York: Knopf, 1958. Print.
Rozin, Kabnick, Pete, Fischler, and Shields. “Result Filters.” National Center for Biotechnology Information. U.S. National Library of Medicine, 14 Sept. 2013. Web. 07 Dec. 2015. <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12930475>.
Jamrisko, Michelle. “Americans’ Spending on Dining Out Just Overtook Grocery Sales for the First Time Ever.” Bloomberg Business. Bloomberg Business, 14 Apr. 2015. Web. 4 Dec. 2015. <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-14/americans-spending-on-dining-out-just-overtook-grocery-sales-for-the-first-time-ever>.
“11 Facts About American Eating Habits.” 11 Facts About American Eating Habits. Do Something, n.d. Web. 07 Nov. 2015. <https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-american-eating-habits>.