What was your favorite food when you were growing up? What was your most memorable experience with the food? What does eating mean to you?
Last time I visited in Tokyo, I brought back a green glass bowl from my parents’ house. It was rather heavy to carry back home but, I love the well-balanced design and the fresh color, and it brings back great memories of my childhood. My mother used to serve salad with the green glass bowl, and I was very fond of the memory — a fresh taste of tomato and seasonal green.
I’ve always loved vegetables more than anything, perhaps, because I grew up with them. Like New York City’s kids who love sushi, I grew up in Tokyo with many different diverse foods. It greatly influenced my taste buds — I can eat anything and like to explore new and different things.
These experiences have led me to believe that “we are what we grew up to eat”, rather than “we are what we eat.” Food is our most basic need, so it follows that our preference of food and cravings for particular food are usually developed when we are much younger. In other words, what we are feeding children today will shape tomorrow’s diet and future life style.
This very fundamental idea of “we are what we grew up to eat” is finally seeming to sink into our society following two recent widely publicized food-related initiatives.
One is coming from Disney. All products advertised on its child-focused television channels, radio stations and Web sites must comply with a strict new set of nutritional standards. This is a serious decision for Disney, since it means Disney may risk losing some advertising money — the media industry’s lifeline. Major American food companies spend $20 billion on marketing, and $950 million annually are spent on television marketing tailored to children under 12, according to industry estimates.
The second one is coming from New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. His proposal is to place a ban on the sale of large-size sodas and other sugary beverages. The ban would outlaw such drinks larger than 16 ounces at restaurants, food carts and any other establishments that receive letter grades for food service, with the exception of grocery stores. Perhaps taking a cue from NYC’s proposal, now the Massachusetts city of Cambridge wants to outlaw large sugary drinks in restaurants. Cambridge is looking into a similar crackdown to combat obesity and diabetes.
Why do we care now? What’s triggered these initiatives?
Did you know that Americans spend $100 million for diet aids and $200 billion for diet related illnesses each year? With these huge figures, we finally had to face the music: we realized how costly to it is to be ill, the significance of our diet is to our health, and that healthy eating habits prevent us from being ill. We started seeing food as health.
American Grown:Michelle Obama's recent book
Michelle Obama seems to take “food as health” a step further to “food as health reform”. In 2009, she planted a kitchen garden on the White House grounds, becoming the first first lady to do so since Eleanor Roosevelt. She has recently documented this in her new book called “American Grown“.
I discussed the community garden as a platform of a trust-based society in my last post, “Building Trust in the City: The Case of El Sol Brillante ” — a post I received a lot of positive feedback on. The first lady also sees gardens as a symbol of the growing movement of eating healthy. As fresh vegetables, fruit, and herbs sprouted from the ground and her first harvest yielded 1,600 punds of produce, her effort inspired a new conversation across the country about the food we feed our families and the impact it has on the health and well-being of our children.
The first lady was a working mother in Chicago when she first addressed the issue of childhood health. Her pediatrician pulled her aside one day and suggested that she check out her family’s diet. She was shocked when she found out how many things she could improve, and it was a beginning of a health awakening at her home. Her family stopped sugary drinks, started using portion control, and started going to local green markets to buy fresher foods. Her point of view has therefore been shaped from her initiative as working mother who cares very much about her daughers’ well-being and the next generation’s. She described her approach in a recent interview, saying it’s about learning how to treat ourselves as gently as we treat our garden.
We are indeed what we raised to eat. With our generation, we are resetting the clock and rebuilding our health and healthy future, literally from ground up.
What balance do you try to achieve with food and health? What do you think of your diet?
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