I think it all began for Americans after the Great Depression, we never had the large percentage of overweight people that we have today. After the Depression and during the Second World War, everyone had a job and people were making good money. The government started the boom by increasing the military and handing out government contracts to make things the military needed. Americans were making everything from battleships and airplanes to uniforms and helmets. We were at full employment for the first time in decades. People started to move off the farms to the cities for jobs.
This was the beginning of a real economic boom. Workers had the money to buy all those things they never had. Single-family homes started to sell like crazy. The first tract housing development started in California and people wanted cars. It wasn’t until the 1960’s that restaurants started to boom and that trend just kept going right up to today. That seemed to be the beginning of America’s overweight problem. As restaurants became more popular, the types of restaurants grew larger. Fast food started to take hold in the late 1970s and kept growing until today when fast food seems to have control of the market. Today, we have chain restaurants that aren’t really fast food but the fare is so low-end that what they serve is the same as fast food.
The food manufacturing business is so large today the FDA (the government agency that safeguards our food) can’t keep up with all the new products the industry puts out. So we have a lot of manufactured food today, that isn’t really food, it’s just stuff to fill you up with the promise that if you eat it you won’t die. Somehow we have gotten away from eating real food and now most people either eat in restaurants or eat something you heat and eat like a frozen meal.
The end result is that 2 out of 3 adults are overweight and half of those are seriously overweight, I’m talking 40% body fat and taking 7 or 8 prescription drugs just to stay alive. It’s a sad situation and the only way we can change things is if we stop buying processed or manufactured food. Outside the big cities, there is a trend to buy produce in Farmer’s Markets like I remember 60 years ago.
In the 1960s, I lived in a suburb of Chicago and you could still go to a produce market, a real bakery, and a butcher to buy meat. And yes, there have always been overweight people but not as many as today. The food we used to eat was better quality and there were a lot fewer chemicals in our food.
The overweight problem we had in the 1950s and 1960s was caused more by the number of calories consumed due to food preparation and portion size. Today we still have those same problems but today some of the blame can be put on the high carb content of snack foods and the chemical additives that can be addicting like these sugar supplements.
I’m against chemicals in food. I understand that the idea is to keep food costs low by substituting natural foods with artificial ingredients, but why is that so important. Europeans still prefer real food and have been slow to accept processed foods. You can make the case that dairy is processed food but the Europeans don’t see it that way. When you study the food culture of other countries I think you’ll find that North America may be the only part of the world where manufactured food is widely accepted. I wonder why that is?
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