Generational Degeneration

L.A. OKs moratorium on fast-food restaurants

Article here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25896233/

“Cheap, unhealthy food and lack of access to healthy food is a recipe for obesity,” Brownell said. “Diets improve when healthy food establishments enter these neighborhoods.”

“They should open more healthy places,” Dorothy Meighan said outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. “There’s too much fried stuff.”
Councilwoman Jan Perry said that view repeatedly surfaced at the five community meetings she held during the past two years. Residents are tired of fast food, and many don’t have cars to drive to places with other choices, she said.
Los Angeles’ ban comes at a time when governments of all levels are increasingly viewing menus as a matter of public health. On Friday, California became the first state in the nation to bar trans fats, which lower levels of good cholesterol and increase bad cholesterol.

This is just two quotes from the article that is listed above. Please feel free to read the entire article as posted on MSNBC.

I would like to just take a minute and weigh in on this issue. (pun intended) I am a man of some girth as most of you know. I have been successful in losing about 10lbs since I started my most recent diet a month or two ago, so I am speaking as a person who could shed more than a few more pounds, as well as a person who eats a terrible diet. If I lived in LA, I would now have reason to move, or defect as the case may be. This is well outside the bounds of what a city should have the ability to regulate, at least for the reason they are regulating it. If they ban fast food restaurants from a historic district, or an upscale neighborhood, I might not agree with the practice, but it would be within their legal ability to do so. To ban trans-fats and fast food establishments because the population is too fat, that is beyond their job description. It is also beyond any sense of logic because it wont work.

I am fat.........

I am not fat because of evil restaurants who serve fatty, high cholesterol foods.

I am not fat because of some conspiracy to make me so.

I am not fat because of my government permits me too much freedom and allows me to make too many of my own choices.

I am fat because I am lazy. Period.

Now, to the topic at hand, why is obesity such an issue in LA? Well, lets just go all the way and say why are we as Americans by and large a bunch of lard butts. I already gave you a clue. I am lazy, my bet is they are lazy too.

To illustrate my point I will pick one group of people to use as my case in point. That group of people would be the moms. All the problems of this country can be simply explained by the generational degeneration of the work of moms. Its all moms fault in other words. Obesity of the population is no exception. What makes me think that? Well lets run through the stereo types of moms for the last 4 or 5 generations and how they fed the family.

My mom, the microwave society and the working woman.

My mom is the generation who first fell in love with the microwave. It took cooking to a whole new high in low. The classic TV dinner now didn't require heating up the oven or burning your fingers on the aluminum foil trying to get the thing open. Just toss a frozen pizza (99 cents from the local grocer) and 90 seconds later you have food (or something like it) This is also the generation who caused the mass influx of the drive thru. Women on their way home from work could pick up dinner for the family, in Styrofoam containers no less. The last nail in this coffin is that it is this generation who brought cola to the forefront. Its packaged in every imaginable size shape and flavor. We don't make drinks anymore, we buy tea in a jar, and we drink gazillions of gallons of Pepsi and Coke a year. All this stuff really consists of is sugar water and some artificial colors and flavors.

My Grandma, women take on a bigger roll, need more convenience.

My grandma was a depression era child. She knew about being hungry and made sure her family was fed and wouldn't know hunger. She was a mom when women started taking on a bigger roll outside the home and needed some conveniences to save some time. Her generation is were processed foods began and therefore a larger number of grocery stores with more and more stuff on the shelves. Items like hamburger helper, Manwich, etc. are the inventions that filled the need of this generation. Grandma could make a mean cake from scratch, but she usually didn't have time, so Duncan Hines to the rescue. The other upshot from this is that because she was depression era, she was a food hoarder. She could buy, and would buy, lots of canned goods and store them for later. Her basement looked like what a mini mart looks today, a few cans or boxes of just about everything. Then you have the staples, bags and bags of flour and sugar, rows and rows of saltines, gallon upon gallon of Talawanda distilled water.

Great Grandma, the age of self reliance.

Great Grandma was what we would call old school. She had a gas stove that almost never got used because she was happier and more used to the wood burner. Her kitchen had both but the only time the gas got used was in the summer when it was already 100 degrees in the kitchen. The nearest grocery store was about an hour away so this was an event and a day trip. Most things she needed she either had on the farm or could get at the market anyway. If she wanted to fix breakfast she just had to move a chicken. She wanted corn, just a trip to the field. She wanted a cake she needed to move the chicken and go to the field. They grew or made almost everything on their own. Sunday dinner started Saturday night with Grandma picking the greens, picking the beans, picking the corn, and pulling down a lump of cured meat out of the smokehouse. Cooking could then begin, and finish up right after church on Sunday. She wanted noodles, first she made the dough, rolled it out and then sliced it up.

Let me break it down this way for you, a little simpler.

• Great Grandma got up early and hit the field, the barn and the coup, spent all day preparing three meals from scratch. Making her own corn meal and flour, using her own lard to fry, cooking over wood that Grandpa cut. Now remember those critter she was using, like the chickens, they needed fed too. So, all day was spent working towards the goal of a home and 3 meals. She then went to bed late, tired, and well fed.
  
• Grandma got up early and cleaned the house, worked on the family finances, ran her errands, cooked three meals a day using some shortcuts her mother didn't have but still spent the majority of the day caring for the family and the home.
  
• Mom got up when necessary, and presented a Hungry Man dinner for the evening meal. The other two meals, the family was on its own.
  
  
• The current generation is eating in the car, while talking on the phone and driving their kids to soccer practice.

Meals have gone from the point of the day and a shared time of rest and rejuvenation, to an after though and inconvenient reality. This nation is fat because we lost something from generation to generation. If I had to harvest my own food, and or hunt and kill it, I would be skinny. I don't because I am lazy. I therefore am fat because I am lazy.

Its the fault of mothers everywhere. Lets ask LA to ban mothers, I think it would work just as well.