First World Food

We Americans are a funny bunch. The things we worry about and the decisions we make can only be explained by saying, that they are first world problems that most of the rest of the world can only dream about. This is especially true when it comes to our food.

We live in a land of so much that we waste a tremendous amount of food we buy. I feel ashamed each time I clean out the refrigerator and throw away even the smallest amount of produce. We try hard to plan, use what we have on hand and not let anything go to waste. Inevitably plans change and we eat fewer meals at home and the great meal ideas we had become mush at the bottom of the crisper drawer.

I know it is a sign of our busy lifestyles and that, itself, is a first world problem. We are so busy that preparing what we eat has become a hassle and we no longer have time for it. It is so much easier to run through the drive through at some fast food joint than it is to come home and chop, dice and prepare the food already in our fridge. There are few other people in this world that don’t have time to cook their own meals and even more importantly, even fewer people in this world with the means to pay someone else to cook their meals.

Because we don’t have time, we trade meals we would have cooked at home for highly processed foods. I am not a nutritionist but I do know enough to know that foods prepared from fresh fruits, vegetables and meats are better for you than processed food we get from those quick, easy drive through meals. For that matter, nutritionists telling us not to eat so many processed meals is a first world problem. In many countries the problem is not too many calories but rather too few.

Then when we do take time to prepare our food, we often over do it. Only in a first world nation would you have not one but several tv channels devoted to food. I would guess many of us subscribe to magazines about food and spend time on our electronic devices looking at web sights and blogs also dedicated to what we eat. We can’t prepare a simple meal anymore, we must create a masterpiece and those recipes are never small.

That means in the end we have something everyone dreads, left overs. You know the dishes that linger on the shelves above the mushy produce. No one wants to eat left overs, we make jokes about them and teenagers would rather starve than eat left overs. That brings up another point. We often talk about starving or that we would rather starve. Very few, if any of us really know what that means and I assure you it would take most of us a long, long time to starve.

In any case, those left overs languish on our shelves for a long time until we can’t remember how long they have been there and who wants to take a chance on them going bad so we throw them out. Dare I say that in most places food going bad is not a function of how long it has been around because no one wanted to eat it. Turning our noses up at perfectly good food because we do not want to heat it up again is a first world problem. Like much of the things in our refrigerator we have become spoiled.

In the middle of all this food waste and poor choices about what we eat, we have the nerve to worry about how the food is raised. Only in America would we demand that our food be grown in the least efficient, least productive method. Nearly everywhere else in the world they are worried about how much food is grown, not how the food is grown. We chose to ignore sound science and breakthroughs in technology so food can be grown in a less efficient system that does not make good use of limited resources. Then we take the food grown in less efficient systems and we prepare it in a way that is not healthy and after a day or two we throw much of it away. That is the definition of a first world problem.

OK, enough of my rant because I don’t know how we can fix this. Other than we wake up and use common sense and we all know there is nothing more uncommon than common sense. I guess the silver lining in all of this is that maybe if we would focus on three things we could make a difference. First to try to use all the food we buy, second to choose our calories more wisely and third to trust the hands that raise our food. Seems like a simple fix to me, but then again, maybe that is a first world view too.