How We Became A Nation of Heart Patients

[Guest guest]

All Americans with any brains and cultural awareness ought to be ashamed

that this is how we're viewed overseas, as ignoramuses and buffoons. With

a great deal of justification, I might add.

 

Still, it's not universally true, I assure you.

 

I'm 44. As I grew up, I distinctly remember beef in particular being

relatively rare in our diet... at first. The idea of a steak was a treat,

because of the rarity. They cost a good deal, too. Same with good

grades of hamburger, etc. Beef was an exception.

 

It became consistently more common as I aged, due to Big Beef's marketing

and pervasive distribution. Nowadays, there are people who eat beef every

meal, and perhaps most eat at least a little every day.

 

As for poultry and fish, again, when I grew up fish was every Friday for

Catholics and rare for most of the rest of us, with chicken making up most

of our meat-eating... at first. Gradually, as I say, things phased

through to being predominantly beef.

 

If I have seen this trend develop over my lifetime, then we can easily

deduce how it was only two generations back, 44 years ago and more. Meat,

particularly beef, was not a staple. Of course it benefits Big Beef to

make it one, and so it happened.

 

Same sort of marketing and lying went into promoting milk. Once they got

it into the schools, it boomed. Well, many schools now sell fast-food

chain burgers at lunch. And ketchup, remember, counts as a vegetable --

the Reagan administration declared it so.

 

It's all down to big business practices putting profit ahead of all other

concerns, even genuinely bad health risks. It's this more than anything

that has rendered us so universally obese and unhealthy, and incidentally

it's also the marketing that keeps us complacent, even apathetic, about it.

 

 

On Monday, January 13, 2003, at 07:20 AM,

wrote:

 

> I'm mentioning this, because most of the people in these lists and their

> friends are Americans, and they are not very aware of the conditions of

> life

> in the rest of the world, especially in old times, so they tend to forget

> these facts when discussing vegetarian or other diet and its effects.

 

 

" But for me, security is not knowing what's to happen because if I don't

know, it could be terrific. "

--Gloria Stenem

[Guest guest]

Quite an interesting post and thought on the topic.

My grandmother is 86 and she and I have had many conversations about

diet... how it was for her then as opposed to how people eat now.

She was raised on a small farm; they farmed to survive but her dad's

job

was as an iceman for the old iceboxes.

What they ate for dinner Monday thru Saturday was beans with a tiny

bit of

salt pork in it for flavor, some canned veggie they put up or fresh

depending

upon the season, and bread if they had enough flour.

On Sunday they would kill a chicken and have a big meal of chicken

and

dumplings (Gram's favorite). They didn't get beef hardly ever, and if

they did it

was usually salted bits that was preserved from an animal they

raised;

keeping a beefer cow was expensive though, so she can still name them

that

they raised. *lol*

 

Meat was not an everyday food at all; more seen as something very

special.

 

~ P_T ~

 

Every man will fail sometime.Ê Be charitable and liberal with your

substance,

for it is only a secondary consideration --the use you make of it is

the

primary consideration.Ê You may do good to some one who is down

today

and who will rise and be on top of the wheel when you are down, for

every

man will fail sometime.

~ Joseph Smith

~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~*~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~>

, The Stewarts <stews9@c...>

wrote:

 

> I'm 44. As I grew up, I distinctly remember beef in particular

being

> relatively rare in our diet... at first. The idea of a steak was a

treat,

> because of the rarity. They cost a good deal, too. Same with

good

> grades of hamburger, etc. Beef was an exception.

>

 

> As for poultry and fish, again, when I grew up fish was every

Friday for

> Catholics and rare for most of the rest of us, with chicken making

up most

> of our meat-eating... at first. Gradually, as I say, things phased

> through to being predominantly beef.

>

> If I have seen this trend develop over my lifetime, then we can

easily

> deduce how it was only two generations back, 44 years ago and more.

 

Meat,

> particularly beef, was not a staple.