Nowadays, food needs to be healthy, local, sustainable and not filled with too much fat, salt or sugar. It should be slow-cooked and seasonal. That's my vision.
One of the reasons we eat fast food is that we don't have to cook fast food. We are out-sourcing cooking to corporations, they tend to cook with far too much salt, fat, and sugar.
Salt is one of the flavors that makes food taste good - salt, sugar and fat. So it's a natural thing for all chefs and cooks to add salt, because it enhances the flavor of the food. If you go out to eat, I guarantee you're going to be eating a lot of salted foods that you are going to have no idea.
We also call for a healthy food system that prioritizes sustainable healthy local food production.
Nearly all runners do their slow runs too fast, and their fast runs too slow." Ken Mierke says. "So they're just training their bodies to burn sugar, which is the last thing a distance runner wants. You've got enough fat stored to run to California, so the more you train your body to burn fat instead of sugar, the longer your limited sugar tank is going to last." -The way to activate your fat-burning furnace is by staying below your aerobic threshold--your hard-breathing point--during your endurance runs.
We've become slaves to words like 'local,' 'fresh,' and 'seasonal.' We all want to be Thomas Jefferson's agrarian hero, but sustainable food is a difficult beast.
Take a cup of coffee, keep adding sugar until you reach the point that you like it the most, and then when you add more sugar, you actually like it less. Well, the food industry knows that, and they spend huge amounts of effort finding the perfect spot, not just for sugar, but for fat and salt, as well.
Let me say two things about the costs - one is that there are detailed studies that show this, this is what some of the Stanford studies show, in fact, that we get so healthier, so much more healthy, when we eliminate fossil fuel pollution - 200,000 [fewer] premature deaths a year for example. And that's just the death part of it. Not to mention the asthma part of it, the heart attacks and the strokes and the cancers. And we also call for a healthy food system that prioritizes sustainable healthy local food production.
Anybody interested in solving, rather than profiting from, the problems of food production and distribution will see that in the long run the safest food supply is a local food supply, not a supply that is dependent on a global economy. Nations and regions within nations must be left free and should be encouraged to develop the local food economies that best suit local needs and local conditions.
Fast food is inexpensive, convenient, and it tastes good. I'm all in favor of that. My problem is how heavily processed it is - how full of salt, fat, and sugar it is.
I eat three home-cooked meals a day, all prepared in advance. My ethos is to stay away from unsustainable low-calorie diets and aim for something balanced: loads of veg, protein and enjoy the carbs you love. Be realistic. I don't count sugar or salt or grams of fat: it's very restrictive and unenjoyable.
I eat only white foods: eggs, sugar, grated bones, the fat of dead animals; veal, salt, coconut, chicken cooked in white water; fruit mold, rice, turnips; camphorated sausage, dough, cheese (white), cotton salad, and certain fish (skinless).
There is one thing that very reliably try to trumps the food supply and that is food demand. At the end of the day, the business of business is business and they are just trying to keep the customers satisfied, it depends what we want. The problem in our current mess is we want all the wrong stuff. Why do we want the wrong stuff? Because taste buds are very malleable little fellows. They learn to like what they know. We're bathing our taste buds in too much sugar, too much salt, too much processed food all day long. That's what they know and crave.
I think cooking is really key because it's the only way you're going to take back control of your diet from the corporations who want to cook for us. The fact is, so far, corporations don't cook that well. They tend to use too much salt, fat, and sugar - much more than you would ever use at home.
People in America are addicted to sugar and to fat and to salt.
They may have salt, sugar, and fat on their side, but we, ultimately, have the power to make choices. After all, we decide what to buy. We decide how much to eat.
If people ate local and seasonal food they'd eat far better and cheaper foods and it would help farming in this country. There are far too many imported vegetables.