Hi everybody
You’re probably familiar with my name if you read the diaries. BooMan has kindly proposed that I post on the Front Page as well and I am honored to be able to do so.
Being in Europe, I expect to initially use the privilege during the “graveyard shift”, in the morning for me (thus the second part of the night for you, after even the hard core nightpeople have gone to bed), but I thought I’d give you a light tidbit from Paris to start off this new career for me…
And what could be more quintessentially French than good food?
Actually, we are beginning to face, with a few years’ lag, the same obesity epidemic crisis as in the US. As can be expected, it is especially worrying for the young generations, a growing proportion of which are overweight, for much the same reasons as everywhere else: industrial food, TV-meals, snacking, unbalanced diets….
But we’re fighting back! As this story in the Guardian shows, it is all a question of education:
“What we do is inform and explain, as concretely as we can, what foodstuffs are, what they’re made of, what effect they have, how best to prepare them, how best to combine them, and what constitutes a healthy diet. We never talk weight or size; we talk health.”
Manifestly, it works. And before anyone asks what it costs, the budget for FLVS’s entire educational and public information campaign – excluding the accompa nying scientific research, a useful but optional and expensive extra – is €2.5 (£1.75) per person per year.
(…)
Because if you get kids at that age, you have them for life, said Ms Lommez: “We have young men, university students, calling us up these days and saying, ‘Hi, you probably don’t remember me, but I was one of the first kids in the project, 10 years ago. Well I’ve got this girlfriend and, um, her diet’s a catastrophe. She hasn’t got a clue. There isn’t a little course you could give her?'”
Do read the rest, it’s really instructive – and is probably easily replicable elsewhere. The short version: care about what you eat!
Comments and meta-comments on this first story welcome!
Congrats on your first front page story!
The first thing I thought of when I started reading was the non-fiction book that’s #2 on the NY Times Bestseller list: “French Women Don’t Get Fat”. LOL!
I think this program is a wonderful idea. Showing children why they should make certain food choices seems like such a simple notion, but apparently, it’s going a long way in actually teaching them to choose healthier options.
For the second time today, I find myself asking – why is the US so far behind?!
What we Ameican women need, I sadly report, is a book titled “French Women Don’t Get Fat And Know How to Dress.”
To be honest, from my own experience, french men sometimes tend to get fat… but not as fat as american ones!
And, at least, we do so by eating very good food!
I’m so glad you’re here. Three cheers for Booman for asking you to front-page.
The article: It’s not (only) educational. it’s entertaining! I just adore phrases like “lashings of strawberry jam on the bread” and “In British schoolkids raised on chips, turkey twizzlers and what Jamie Oliver recently referred to as ‘scrotum burgers’, this would be unusual.”
Scrotum burgers. I thought I’d heard it all.
P.S. Wow. I just heard military jets fly overhead … the sound was almost deafening. I looked out but it’s too cloudy to see them, and they’re so fast that they’re long gone now. Never hear them here .. well, almost never. Maybe Canada has finally attacked.
yes that was good article. What I liked is that it seems that while teaching about food/healthy choices the teachers did it the right way. Making it interesting even fun to learn about an important issue.
and welcome to the FP.
I hope my posting instructions were clear. It appears you had no problems.
I read your diaries every morning with my first cup of coffee-now I won’t even have to scroll thru the list!
Booman, your international, gender-balanced approach is great.
Bon Jour mes amie…Congrats on the Front Page Gig…The Booman Tribune is soooo International..This is Awesome news..Looking forward to all of your Diaries. Boy do I miss France…..Last trip was to Megeve(alps)…before that Paris…stayed at the La Tremoille…over near George V. I love your city and the people…Chamonix
Interesting first front page post. I wish I had access to such a program when I was a kid… and believe me, there is no better place to start than gradeschool. When I was still teaching and on lunch duty, we teachers sometimes used to read labels on those pre-packaged lunches so popular these days. Some of those suckers are so packed with fat and empty calories it was unbelievable. The list of chemical ingredients was always impressive… it’s like giving these kids a pill of additives every day. I often wondered if this garbage (chemicals disguised as food) caused unknown problems for these kids. You really have to work at it to eat right in this country.
This is a subject near and dear to me. I ate a typically crappy American diet until about five years ago, when I became what some would call a “health nut”. The diet (that is, way of eating) I try to stick to most of the time was inspired by two books, mainly: Eating Well for Optimum Health: The Essential Guide to Bringing Health and Pleasure Back to Eating by Andrew Weil M.D.; and Superfoods Rx: Fourteen Foods That Will Change Your Life by Steven Pratt M.D. and Kathy Matthews. But both books fit pretty well into the Harvard Healthy Eating Pyramid (which includes alcohol–woo hoo!). Though I do dip into various cookbooks (the mainstay being Joy of Cooking) from time to time and splurge on something “bad” like braised lamb chops and mashed potatoes. <g>
I just came back from substitute teaching at the middle school, where I have been subbing a fair bit lately. Boy, at least here in the “heartland” the food hasn’t gotten any healthier since I was in junior high. It’s all meat, cheese, and white bread–terrible for kids not just now, but in setting their patterns for the future.
Alan
Maverick Leftist
Good God! That made me remember what I ate for lunch in high school and I can’t believe I didn’t have a weight problem. Cheese, chocolate, soft pretzels, ice cream… yikes.
I remember hearing a story a while ago (months? years?) about McDonalds in France advertising that it wasn’t healthy for kids to eat fast food more than once a week. Obviously, the American part of the corporation was livid. I could never tell if it was truly for the sake of health or an attempt to fly in the face of American corporatism specifically and fast food in general. Either way, I was glad to hear it. It isn’t healthy for kids to eat that much fast food. Adults either.
All through my studies in French in high school and college, we always heard about the ritual that was the French meal. I’ve always enjoyed the laid-back attitude I encountered on my trips to France. I, however, am a tourist. From the vantage point of my idealism, I choose to believe that the French will avoid what the Americans and British haven’t. Programs like the one referenced above sound great. How I wish American schools would embrace that rather than focusing on creation and prayer.
In an industrial world, we eat an industrial diet. Kids grow up not knowing the origin of food, or that milk comes from cows rather than from a pasteboard carton.
Our military personnel eat something called Meals Read to Eat, which by all acounts is virtually inedible unless you’re desperate. And full of chemical additives.
The food we buy in our industrialized supermarkets comes from industrialized businesses that print the ingredients in 2-point type to make the list hard to read, then spend millions lobbying government to promote genetically-modified plants that grow one season and produce seeds that are sterile.
In the U.S., most of the commercially raised food is grown on industrial farms and sprayed with chemicals including carcinogens from the first day. The soil it grows in is no longer a living ecosystem inhabited by millions of small organisms but dead dirt that has been sterilized to remove all “bugs.”
Industrial food has almost no nutritional value, so we compensate by taking millions of dollars worth of vitamin pills.
The chemicals that are sprayed on our food are tested in isolation, not in combination, so they combine in our systems in unexpected ways. Is it any wonder our immune systems break down and attack themselves in diseases such as lupus, chronic fatigue, MS, and cancer? Why are we surprised when schoolchildren who subsist on a diet of processed food and chemicals seemingly go crazy and shoot their friends and families?
As you can see, Jerome, this is a subject on which I have some opinions. Glad you chose it, and glad to see you on the front page. Sorry about the rant. I’ll stop now, lest I write 50 or so pages.
Annnnnnnnnd while browing the cable news a short time ago Headline news was talking about a new Burger King sandwhich that is this huge monstrosity of 750 caleries and 50 yes 50 grams of fat in it. Can that be any more stupid and irresponsible? I think I gained 5 pounds just thinking about it.