United States - Fatty Food Heaven?

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No, you can't! If you actually knew how fast meat starts to go bad, you would never even think of eating left-over meat products more than a day or two at most after cooking it...let alone a week. This assumes that, as soon as it was taken off the heat, you immediately refrigerated it. If it sat at room temperature for as little as half an hour before refrigeration, you've cut down the time it'll still be good to a matter of hours. Sure, you can eat it, but it's a terrible idea and the odds of not getting some sort of food poisoning are extraordinarily low.

 

On top of what Harbs said... My dad maintains an allotment and grows loads of stuff. He only owns a small section of an area, but grows enough potatoes, tomatoes, rubarb cabbages, lettuce etc etc that he ends up giving most of it away. That's after he's given me and a my sister some. It's neither hard work, nor expensive to grow vegetables.

 

Yes, I guess I should have used the word 'overly'. Although my dad works full time, goes to the gym, swimming and running clubs 4 days a week and still finds time to keep a really well maintained garden. He says it's a piece of piss, but then I guess he really knows what he's doing.

 

That's right, HB. You only imagine that you've been eating that chicken for a week. But you are right, there are always heathly alternatives, if you are resourceful enough.

But Tal is also right: The solutions are not that simple, nor are they cheap. It's easy to say just do X and Y, and you will get Z. But getting there requires research, thoughtful meal planning and extra expense, that for many is just not very practical. One can say that we have to "eat to live," but by the time you are finished with the proper alternatives you find that you are really "living to eat" instead. And Tal is also right that to have a healthy diet should not have to be that difficult. The market encourges the quick and easy - the mostly unhealthy - solutions. I mean, the basics should not have to be rocket science for anyone.

They have more fun.

 

Really? I've made soup plenty of times and even forgotten it for as much as half a day on the stove before putting to the refrigerator. I make this sort of soup about once a month and guess what? Never in my life have I had any sort of food poisoning and usually eat that soup for four days or so, neither have I ever gotten any serious stomach aches about it. I also know several fellow students that do the very same thing, and this is with minced meat probably the meat with most inherent bacteria and the one that should be going bad the fastest.

To be honest healthy food is often more expensive, soups may not be but more often than not it's easier and cheaper to buy some instant freezed food which you warm up in the microwave. I do that myself sometime but I've tried to limit it to once a week max. And even then it's mostly about the time and no the expenses, and I'm living on student budget meaning that I'm not exactly swimming in money.

 

Did you know that 90% of "flu" cases are actually food poisoning? Did you know that most of the time you get diarrhea or constipation without any other symptoms, it's usually food poisoning? Not all food poisoning puts you in the hospital or kills you, and most people suffering from food poisoning fail to recognize it as such. Nevertheless, food poisoning does weaken your immune system and can cause a host of unpleasant symptoms which are generally attributed to some other ailment. Further, in much the same way that you don't develop symptoms every time you are exposed to the cold virus (although your body still fights the virus), you won't necessarily have any symptoms every time you get food poisoning. Symptoms or no, you still just ate tainted food, though.

Of course, if you are immediately moving your soup to the freezer (rather than the refrigerator) after taking it off the heat, it can last quite long. While a pain in the ass to re-heat from the freezer, it is at least safe to do it this way.

 

I'm very rarely sick or have the flu, usually once a year or so and usually it's associated with the autnum epidemics season when everyone seems to have it. So unless my food poisonings are periodically set to arise at that period and everyone else too has it then, I'm not very convinced that it's a food poisoning I'm having. Also I don't really care if the food is "tainted" or not when there's seemingly very little consequences from eating it.

 

@Morgoroth: Whatever floats your boat, man. I, for one, would prefer to avoid unnecessary risks where I can, but if rolling the dice makes you happy, knock yourself out.

 

Actually, that is a VERY unsafe thing to do. Putting food fresh from the stove into either the refrigerator or the freezer actually shortens the life of the items that are already in cold storage. The space is designed to maintain foods at a stable temperature, not to quickly bring items down to taht temperature. Dumping a large pot quantity of food into the cold space has the effect of raising the temperature of the cold space until such time as equilibrium can be restored. Until that happens, all other items are at risk for accelerated bacteria growth.

The best practice is to chill your new item in isolation from things that can spoil - such as in a cooler full of ice, or a wintertime porch or garage. We happen to have a spare fridge that we use for only sealed beverages, and that works nicely (as long as there's no milk there).

@Tal: Do you remember Sprite? She doesn't buy vegetables for much of the year, because the yard of her urban home produces enough to feed her family of four. She manages to do this while working on her doctoral thesis. Gardening doesn't have to be a chore.

People don't understand the idea of a "treat" anymore, IMO. The idea of "delayed gratification" is out of societal favor, and expanding waistlines and deteriorating health are only some of the effects.

 

Thanks, Rally. I didn't know about that.

 

What I claim is that you exaggerate the risks otherwise something bad would have allready happened to me or someone I know. Surprisingly nothing bad has happened. If the situation was as bad as you seem to imply then the probabilities would have allready kicked in a caused something to happen. Of course I don't doubt the bacteria amount increases and that there is a possibility of symptoms following but you are greatly exaggerating the odds and the consequences.

I'm also the kind of guy who learns through expirience, when something bad happens I'll stop and food poisonings are rarely lethal so the odds are that it won't kill me. So as soon my habit kicks me in the head I'm sure to stop. It has not done so for four or five years now so I won't be holding my breath.

Also the gardening part is a very unrealistic option for people who can't afford healthy food otherwise. Poor people rarely do gardening for one simple reason. They don't have land. People who are poor rarely own their own house with a big backyard, it's more likely that they live in a flat without any personal yardspace. Making gardening a very distant choice for them, this also applies for most people living in bigger cities.

 

Things must work differently in your country then because where I live, it is most definitely much much much much much cheaper to eat healthy fresh food than processed fast food. If I wanted to slash my food bill in half, I would do it by buying loads more fresh vegetables from the local grocer and meat from the local butcher and cook big hearty meals at home.

All the talk about food poisoning is a bit off-topic because the point I was trying to make was the same as Ragusa and Barmy.

I would agree that growing your own food isn't always that economical these days, but certain things are good to grow. Examples:
- fresh herbs (e.g. rosemary, thyme, basil). They cost about $1 as a small plant in a pot and they grow like crazy and you just snip bits off as you need them. Your $1 lasts almost forever and is miles cheaper than paying $4 for a packet of dried herbs every few months.
- lettuce: 50c for a packet of lettuce leave seeds, which will result in about 30 bags of prepacked lettuce at $4 each. Saving of $119.50, less the cost of water and dirt.

How ever you look at it, fresh vegetables and meat are miles cheaper than biscuits and chips and lollies and TV dinners and all the other unhealthy rubbish that people eat, especially when those same people also pop loads of vitamin pills to supplement their health, that would be unnecessary if they ate real normal basic food to start off with.

 

OK, this point has been made before but I want to re-iterate it. The problem is not localized to food choices, the problem is a lifestyle one that is bigger than just food consumption. I don't know about Europe but I know that a prevailing North American attitude is that "time is money", and many of us con ourselves into believing that we are "too busy" to cook our own food from first principles. We certainly don't want to take all that time to simmer something. We want something that we can pop into the microwave and eat, all within 15 minutes or less. Then we have time to other important things like watch Seinfeld reruns that we've seen 12 times anyway (pardon the sarcasm, this is self criticism, please bear that in mind.)

Anyhow, even better is the concept of grabbing something at a restaurant on the way home. No dishes, no cleanup, easy peasy nice and cheesy. Because of the focus on getting the most for our buck, we want things "supersized", missing the logical point that getting quality for your buck is more important than getting quantity for your buck.

All of that being said, there are many North Americans who have taken steps to get off that wagon -- lots of people are eating healthier. This is why I don't buy into the idea that fast food chains are somehow magically sapping our will to choose and are therefore responsible for my bad eating habits. They are supplying demand, plain and simple. Many people still want that fast, greasy food, and the restaurants service those people. Do I think the market will self-correct itself? Not really. Do I think that tons of government regulation of the restaurant industry will solve the problem? Nope! Educating the people and offering them incentives to eat healthier foods would be more effective in the long run than strong arm legal tactics that are punitive in nature.

2 little asides before I sign off. The first is that in Calgary, AB, they have banned trans fats in all restaurants. While I applaud the intentions, the implementation method here is flawed, totalitarian, and will not work. The second is a little anecdote that I heard, I wish I could remember the source, but the upshot was that Canadian soldiers serving in Afghanistan complained to their superiors about the food that American companies were serving the soldiers. Those American companies were apprently based in the South and most of the things they served were fried and greasy -- fried chicken being a staple. The Canadians liked it for a little while but eventually were getting sick of it. I don't know how this story ended or if the Canucks got some different foods in their diet. I just thought it was funny.

 

I find exactly the same. Eating (reasonably) healthy is certainly the way to keep the budget down.

 

While my wife and I are by no means obese, we are overweight (we could probably both stand to lose between 5 and 10 Kg), and with a new baby at home, I can't remember the last time we went out to eat. (Actually, that's not completely true, I do know it was sometime prior to August 14, 2007.) I do almost all of the cooking now (only Mrs. Idiot has a boob, and thus Mini-Fop is much more attached to her - in both the literal and metaphoric sense of the word). I do not cook TV dinners, or frozen, pre-packaged meals. A typical dinner consists of some type of meat - usually chicken, a starch, and a vegetable (usually fresh). I make more than we need because whatever I cook for dinner also serves as lunch for the following day. So even if you do all of the right things, sometimes you still don't maintain a perfect waistline.

As far as leftovers are concerned, while I do not think I have ever eaten leftovers that were 7 days old, I certainly have eaten things that were a few days old, and I have never got sick from them. This very week I'm eating beef stew that I cooked on Sunday. It was lunch the past two days, and I probably have enough for one more lunch left in the fridge at home. AFAIK, I've never had food poisoning ever. While I have no idea what the exact amount of time can elapse and it is still safe to eat something, I'm inclined to believe that it is at least a few days, simply based on personal experience. I'm sure bacteria begin to grow on things quite quickly, but will not thoroughly reheating something kill off the bacteria?

 

Obesity is becoming a result of what seems to be almost automatic behaviours in many people. To overcome this means forcing yourself into changing these habits. It means making different choices. Maybe put a TV in the kitchen, so you can cook real food while that Seinfeld rerun is on (That way if it's something you may not want to watch whilt eating, it's okay because it will be over by the time you eat). Maybe it's putting the candy across the room from your computer desk so you have to walk across the room for a candy when you want one (And you can limit yourself to how many you eat at a time, rather than having the whole one pound bag disappear within 48 hours). Maybe it's keeping the drinks down the hall from where you'd be sitting (let's face it, how much is there to do that you pretty much have to be sitting for these days?) so you at least get some excercise? It's little things, but we have to figure them out and do them. I just have to get back in the habit of usig the stepper machine that's beside my TV chair in the room I watch hockey in...

 

The military really enforced my belief that food needs to be seriously tainted in order for you to get food poisoning. Some of the food had been left standing for hours before we came to because of lat schedule and still no one got food poisoning, and when in the woods even the slightest sign of diarrhea means the end of your trip in the woods. Of course cases of food poisoning in the military are relatively common since the food made in the forests are rarely of a great hygienic standard, not to mention that washing your dishes is practically impossible, but still the human body seems to tolerate a surprisingly bad hygienic standard for food without apparent consequences.