Things I know about food:

translunar:

aim2misbehave:

karnythia:

nanner:

likeproust:

1. It’s a hell of a lot more “fun” to cook when you have the resources to make whatever you want, getting the freshest ingredients from a local grocery store you can drive yourself to whenever it’s convenient. Cooking for enjoyment is a delight, cooking whatever you have left in your cupboard because you can’t afford to go to the store is not.

2. Protein and fat are primarily responsible for satiety, but carbs produce serotonin in your brain. In other words, meat and dairy and nuts and oil and tofu and beans and eggs make you feel full longer, but sugar and bread and fruit and candy give you a sense of well-being and relaxation after you eat them.

3. The discussion of organic ANYTHING is moot until we can make sure everyone in this country has affordable, reliable access to three square, balanced meals a day. At least.

4. Canned, frozen, and dried produce lasts a hell of a lot longer than fresh. If you don’t have the resources to cook regularly, or if your family refuses to even eat fresh produce, it doesn’t make sense to buy it. It’s going to go to waste. That’s your money down the drain.

5. For the people who CAN afford to procure and prepare fresh produce, they may not want to anyway, because we vilify vegetables in our society. We treat eating vegetables as a virtue and strip them of any enjoyment by divorcing them from the rest of our meals and insisting that the “healthiest” way to eat them is plain - steamed, boiled, or raw. How about instead we agree that eating vegetables is important no matter HOW people prepare them, and cut out the bullshit morality crap? How about we make vegetables taste good? We could learn this from literally ANY other culinary culture in the world.

6. We cannot separate the issue of food from the issues of class in our society. Period. To eat well, a person needs money, free time, transportation, knowledge, tools, and energy. Not just cheap food, not just fresh food within a reasonable distance - ALL these things. We can’t talk about why people aren’t eating a certain way until we address the fact that our society is not a level playing field, and not everyone has the same kind of access to money, free time, transportation, knowledge, tools or energy.

All of this!

Also, stop expecting the poor to be virtuous eaters. STOP.

Some poor people don’t want to fucking cook. Call it lazy if you want, but whatever. Some people just don’t like to fucking cook. If for the same amount of money they’d spend on cooking a meal, they can order a pizza or hit up the golden arches, that’s they’re fucking business.

Just because they’re poor, doesn’t mean they stop having personal fucking preferences.

Yes. This, all of this is the business.

7. Poor people may not have the ability to safely store or prepare ingredients for healthy meals - they may not have a fridge or freezer to keep meat, dairy, leftovers, or even “healthy” microwave meals, and if they even have as much as a stove it may not actually be capable of getting hot enough to cook meat safely, for example. 

8. “Healthy” food is really misleading - even the microwave dinners that have the words “healthy” on them usually only claim to be so because they contain fewer calories than a person really should be having for a meal, and are loaded with sodium or cholesterol, so they may help decrease your weight but they’ll do no good for your heart. 

ALL OF THIS. ALL OF THIS A HUNDRED TIMES. 

9. Food is fun to cook when you are cooking for others. It’s very easy to take pride in your work when you get to see other people’s reactions and make them happy with your hard work. Food is less fun when you cook for yourself.

10. When you have to cook every day for a family of five and you don’t have the money to procure sufficient food every day, cooking becomes your absolute least favorite pasttime.

//other than that food is sick as hell and cooking is rly rly fun.

(via pyroluminescence)