Watch What You Eat
Author Jay Hettiarachchy
07/11/2006
Our eating habits are mostly cultural. Some of us have lived through the school lunch programs and college cafeteria days that have mostly laid the foundation of our eating habits. Grandma’s cooking has become a ‘line’ in food marketing. But, who has the time today to watch what they eat and do ‘grandma’s type of cooking when some of us do not even have time to eat!
Most of us eat on the run, mostly while driving what we pick up at fast food restaurants, drive by windows, while at work, in the hall-way going to work, in bed and many other strange places that the reader may want to include in this list. What about those folks who cannot be separated from food at least for a few minutes? All they do all day is eat, eat and eat more. There are some cultures in the world that are based on cooking and eating habits that they have acquired over generations. Their entire family structure and family relationships are based on the culture that has cooking and consumption of food at its center. I do not like to point to one culture and call it a ‘cooking culture’, I will allow the reader to do that; this is because I do not want to get into big trouble by finger pointing to cultures and cultural habits.
Agriculture is big business; manufacturing of food is even bigger business. Food science related research and instruction, not only help the consumption of better food, but has become a growing business and industry. We could add all sorts of other subsidiaries such as the transportation, retailing and all other industries, educational and research institutions and businesses that are heavily integrated with the production and consumption of food. People in the food industry believe that so long as people continue to eat they have a job to do.
So most of us eat to live, and some of us make a living by gaining employment in food production related industry, businesses in which we work, eat and spend a life time. There is nothing wrong with this. We work, we make a living, we eat, and we die after all.
Whereas in some countries people live in hunger due to lack of food supply in some other parts of the world people have plenty of food, and access to food almost within a matter of few minutes (assuming that they have the money to buy the chosen food); they have vending machines that give them hot or cold beverages, cookies, and even hot pizzas. Some food businesses seem to cater for the “spoilt brats” who do not watch what they eat. In this context, someone once said that “there are no bad foods, only bad eaters.”
Enough of ‘bad mouthing’ bad food eating habits; it is time to focus on good food eating habits. The writer is not prepared to make prescriptions as doctors do. The writer simply gives his opinions that he has gained through a life-time of consumption of food in few different parts of the world.
1. You need to pick your food before you eat it. Picking good food could be a life-long experience. One way of gaining this experience is by doing the mistakes yourself or reading that you gain by the mistakes others have made and quickly learning from those mistakes. You could learn the mistakes done by other people in two ways, a) reading books written by others, most of them will tell you how they became sick by eating bad food and how after picking good food before they ate them, they prevented bad things from happening to them, b) by watching how those who live close to you (family members, relatives, and friends) eat and how they are affected by their eating habits. For example, many of us have family members, relatives, friends, or co-workers who do not watch what they eat, and practically eat like ‘pigs’. They may set an example of the bad eaters who ‘live to eat.’ How many of such folks, die young just because they did not pick their food right and cultivate good eating habits? Another way of watching peoples eating habits and how those habits have affected their lives is by watching the shopping behavior in the supermarket food section. I do it whenever I do my food shopping. It has become a habit for me, and it comes for free. Some shoppers have their shopping carts overloaded with fatty food; they easily pay over $200 for their shopping. What is more interesting is the body shapes of those shoppers. No wonder someone said “you are what you eat.” Have you seen how people eat at all-you-can-eat restaurants? It looks like they have never seen food in their whole life. I guess those restaurant owners still make a profit margin by dealing with food that way; otherwise why would they be in business selling all you can eat food? On the contrary, there are the others who eat the right food in right amounts, and maintain healthy bodies that are virtually free from diseases. Like picking good food takes time and discipline, picking material written by others who have the right idea about good eating habits is time consuming. There are many good books written by researchers on good food and bad food. It is up to the reader to make his/or her bibliography of good books on good food and good eating habits. The more important thing however is the discipline that needs to be cultivated to practice good habits backed by research done on food. If the material that you read makes sense, read them. It is too late to start cooking broccoli and feed a person who is having a heart attack. It should have been done long time before that. You get the idea. One more thing. The irresistible temptation to over eat is a curse that bad eaters justify saying to themselves and others “oh, it is just once in a while.” You could do all the weight watching, but if you cannot resist the temptation to eat that dessert, you may eventually fail in life. That is where some folks will have to give all the money that they saved when they were young back to the hospital, when they are old. How sad for people who cannot resist their temptation to eat big desserts saturated with sugar at the end of a rich meal after a stressful day of work? If you do not believe me, just take some time to go to an all you can eat restaurant and watch how people eat there, especially how they consume their desserts. You will not be surprised. There are no bad foods, just bad eaters.
The mantra is the capacity that you develop to see yourself in the mirror carrying all that food inside your body. This is a powerful tool that you could use to resist temptation to eat food that you know are bad. After all, “if you don’t feel sorry for yourself who will?”
2. You need to spend time preparing the food that you eat. It does not take much time to prepare your food. It is simply a matter of choice on your part. Either you could give the control of food preparation to others who prepare your food to make a profit and allow them to control the preparation of your food or prepare your own food and enjoy doing it and eating what you yourself prepare and also keep the control of food preparation under your own control. I honestly think that you are the only person who cares about your health and the way you look and feel. The restaurant owners will greet and treat you well in order to make a profit for themselves, and don’t forget the tip!
3. You need to have someone to eat your food with. In the busy world where we live today, some of us run our lives on a tight schedule. Our breakfasts, lunches and dinners are all scheduled in such a way that what I write here might seem like a sermon that someone preaches from an 18th century pulpit. In our busy world, we mostly discuss business over breakfasts, lunches and dinners with our co-workers. We hardly pay attention to what we eat or the persons who we eat with, other than the objective of the business meal and the business relationship that the business meal would bring forth. Most of us tend to make business deals during such business meals; sometimes these meals for three or four business partners could run up to a $500.00 very easily. What does it matter when these meals come for free (paid by your employer) anyway? On the other hand, have you seen some folks eating meals all by themselves? Of course, some people may not be lucky enough to have a partner to share their meals with and some people may feel comfortable consuming their meals all by themselves— perhaps in haste and in anger.
4. Do not talk business or family affairs while having a good meal. That is one way to ruin your meal and lose your appetite. It would be far better to talk anything other than family affairs, work, or other people’s affairs, or business when enjoying a meal. Have you seen how unhappy some people are when they have their meals? I often wonder why some people are in such a big hurry to gulp their meals. Some of them give me the impression that they want to be done with the meal as soon as possible, like having sex in a hurry or as if they have a plane to catch the next minute. Eating food with partners who are talking business, family matters, and are in a rush to finish their food could be not only be damaging physically but emotionally to humans, especially when the food digestion process begins to take place in the mouth itself and the stomach does not have teeth to chew the food and the stomach secretions themselves will have to do the tasks of making the food digestible. Some of us ‘emotional wrecks’ could drive our stomach walls totally dry of digestive gastric juices. This may not happen overnight, but over long periods of time by unhappy and unhealthy ways of consuming food.
5. Take time to eat your food. We all take our time to work, don’t we? Eating is about living, and there is a good reason to take the time to eat well, because eating is not an automatic function of the body like breathing. There is a reason for breathing to be automatic, that is if one does not take the time to breathe (or forget to breathe) for a while one will not die. However, not eating food will take quite a while for a person to die of hunger, while eating bad food in haste and in bad company and in anger will take even a longer period of time to kill a person.
6. Enjoy what you eat. If the food that you eat and the amount of food you eat make you feel uncomfortable, you are not enjoying your food. Always keep the balance between eating too much and too little because our life is about keeping the balance. Those who do not keep the balance in what they do are bound to crash or fall when they lose balance. As a little boy, I often wondered as to why and how Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. Was he too heavy or did he lose his balance on the wall he sat?
To sum up this discussion on food, someone said “eating good food in good company is like dancing with a partner who you are in love with.” Both the food that you eat and the person/s you eat the food with, and of course the environment that you choose to eat your food takes a long way towards giving you the real joy of eating food that helps you live – and live a happy and healthy life. It goes without saying that bad food, eaten in bad company in bad environments brings unhappiness and contributes to a shorter life that is full of diseases, most of them gained in some ways, by bad food eating choices that we make over a long period of time.
The reality in human situation is that whether we eat good food or bad food we have to die one day. It is a matter of choice that we have to die healthy and happy or die unhappy and sick surrounded by a bunch of very sophisticated machines!
Saying:
Those who live to eat love to eat
