Have You Heard About Denmark's New Fat Tax?

Thank you to Fooducate which is where I first heard about this story. It was originally reported by the BBC over the weekend. Apparently, the country of Denmark has passed the world's first 'Fat Tax'. Starting soon all foods with a saturated fat content of greater than 2.3% will carry a tax of aproximately 8 cents per ounce.

Oh, this is wrong on so many levels. I was rather angry when I first heard about the tax because it doesn't make alot of sense to me. The tax is only on products containing SATURATED fat. The types of products to be taxed will be items like butter, coconut oil, lard, some meats, cheese and full fat milk and the products that contain them like ice cream and pizza. It means that candy, chips or french fries fried in soybean oil, cakes and cookies made with canola oil or deconstructed fat free milk products will remain untaxed.

The items to be taxed are largely unprocessed items that my healthy weight family eats every week. Meanwhile the products that we avoid to maintain our health, like chips and cookies will remain untaxed!! While I am sure that some processed products will be taxed, it will be quite easy for food companies to reformulate those products and circumvent the tax. Manufacturers of butter would be unable to reformulate, of course. The tax means that a pound of butter will cost about $1.28 more! Raising the price of unprocessed food seems counterintuitive. Don't we want people to start making their own food rather than letting some unknown company do the cooking for us? Food is expensive enough already, levying a tax on so many unprepared foods makes little sense to me.

Perhaps it surprises you that I am against this tax? Actually I am all for taxing unhealthy foods. I fully support the once proposed NYC soda tax. I supported the once proposed ban of sugary beverages from being part of the SNAP benefit plan. I just disagree with the item being taxed here. If you want to address obesity, tax sugar. Our bodies need fat, even saturated fat. But our bodies don't need sugar at all!! Obesity is undoubtedly a complex problem. It is not one that a single bad ingredient or food caused. The causes of obesity are cultural as well as food related. But it makes no sense to me to blame the foods that we have been eating throughout history.

I don't anticipate additional countries following suit. I will be curious if the law even lives. Sometimes bad international press can turn the tide against such laws. This could be a difficult additional expense for the average Danish family. Suddenly your meat, milk, butter and cheese have an added tax. It could end up being $5-10 a week on otherwise unprocessed healthy foods. Over the course of a year that could mean an extra $250-$500!!!

It is clear to me that many people in positions of authority do not understand nutrition. Many folks do not understand the partnership between healthy fats and satiety. Meanwhile, how many hundreds of calories could you ingest of saturated-fat-free potato chips before you burst? I think the Danes got it all wrong. If the government should have any say over our diets, it ought to be them standing strong against sugar and banning non-food chemicals from the food supply. This tax is completely off base.

Do you agree with government taxes on food items? Why or why not?

This post is shared with Traditional Tuesdays and Real Food Wednesdays and Simple Lives Thursdays and Fight Back Fridays

Cibo Express, For Shame, For Shame

Recently I had the pleasure of flying jet Blue out of the old TWA terminal at JFK. The terminal is airy and white, all around modern.

Arriving at 6am I went on a search for an egg sandwich. I have a low opinion of airport food. But never have I been unable to find an egg sandwich of some type. Yet here I was breezing past juice bars and French style bistros serving press coffee, unable to locate two eggs on a roll.
I like getting eggs when traveling because even if they have followed a dubious path on their way to my plate, they will keep me full through long and delayed flights, car rental lines and traffic. Generally the alternatives to eggs are pastries and bagels. Those just aren't working for me. An occasional pastry as a treat is one thing, but it is not a stand in as a meal any more than a piece of cake.

Finally I found my way to the Cibo Express, purveyors of the easiest and freshest mass produced fare I have found at most airports. They are everywhere now, right? Cibo Express did have one line for egg sandwiches made to order but the line was crazy. They also had a hot bar of eggs, but I settled on a pre-wrapped egg salad sandwich because it required no fork.
After getting my coffee I turned to see this...

*GASP* the muffins were so big they were practically erotic. The seemingly steroid pumped flour bombs were piled up like cantaloupes. I think I might have actually muttered something aloud to myself in disbelief. I...had to. I had to read the label.

First of all, forgive my lousy photo, It was 6am and I was holding a muffin and taking a picture with my phone all before consuming coffee. Each muffin weighed in at a whopping 7.5 ounces, just under a half a pound. The label clearly stated that each muffin was two servings. And therefore, it contained 672 calories, 34 grams of fat and Holy Cannoli 52 grams of sugar with only 8 lonely grams of protein. That is gross. Cibo Express, you make lots of good food. You offer fresh options in an otherwise fried landscape. You are my airport go to. But this muffin is inexcusable and unnecessary. Shame on you for producing something so large and unhealthful! I do hold you to a higher standard because you are filling a gap in fresh food for health minded travelers across the country. I could lower my expectations of you to equal that of your faster paper bag take out competition, but then I would probably no longer patronize you.

Later, when I unwrapped it, I realized that my egg salad had been made with 'lite' mayo, so God only knows what I ate that morning. Stabilizers? Fillers? Dextrose? Who knows.

Why is it that it is so hard to find real food when you are traveling? Why is it all triple bacon cheeseburgers or fat free yogurt? Where is the middle ground for people like me? I am not on a Diet with a big "D". I am not always trying to "live life to its fullest" by over consuming greasy dopamine creating calories. I just want to eat food. And I would like to have enough protein and healthy fat to last me 4-5 hours until my next meal. And I am like everyone else, I have a budget and a plane to catch, so sitting down to table service for $12 French press coffee isn't an option. I am starting to see that this pendulum swing between over eating and over deprivation is the real problem of food and health in our great nation.

Great Wolf Lodge

Here it is, another rant on the average food of middle America food I presume to be the average of middle America. I am trying not to be a snob or come across as a snob, but sometimes it is a challenge. I live in New York City and we take advantage of most of the glorious food that it has to offer. So when we leave town sometimes it can be a shock to spend time in a town with only one grocery store. Or where Friendly’s and Applebee’s is a dinner out. I know that I am spoiled with choices in Manhattan. There are millions of people that don’t even have the most basic access to unindustrial food. But this post is not really about that. It is merely the story of our family’s three day trip into “kid food land”.

I have taken this week off work. And so far I have managed to do only a little work. It has been so nice to be home with the Things, and to sleep until 7 o’clock every morning. DH and I made reservations late last week to the most kid friendly resort on the planet-The Great Wolf Lodge. Though we didn’t know it when we made the reservations, Great Wolf Lodge is a group of 12 indoor water park resorts. We went to their resort in the Pocono’s in Pennsylvania. The resort is a full service hotel and has a couple of different restaurants, children’s activities, an arcade, an adult and a kid spa and oh yeah, I forgot to mention-a huge indoor water park. The water park boasts a kiddie pool depth about 1 foot with baby slides that both Things really liked. It also includes a towering two or three story playground filled with dump-able buckets of water and hoses that kids can turn on and off, spouts of water coming up from the floor and some two story water slides that even Thing 1 wasn’t too afraid to go on alone. Amazing how fast they grow up. For the older kids (and ahemmm, the adults too) they had 4 cool tube slides that felt more like roller coasters and a couple of full fledged water roller coasters that we just couldn’t get to while having little ones. They also have some real swimming pools (which we didn’t use because our kids are too little), a wave pool, 2 hot tubs and one of those lazy rivers. But the crown jewel was a 1000 gallon bucket of water that filled up and then splashed down onto unsuspecting park-goers every 5 minutes or so. Both Things thoroughly enjoyed watching the water fall both in the park and from the enormous windows within the hotel. It was a fantastic trip where the Things got to fully enjoy, and we didn’t worry once that they would hurt themselves or drown. They could fully use the facilities even though they are technically babies. And DH and I didn’t have to hover around them. The kids are aware of the dangers of water obviously, because they didn’t roam too far from us. So overall it was a brilliant trip.

The facilities are very well designed for both kids and parents enjoyment. But…the food left a little to be desired. This first night we went down to the restaurant within the hotel and ate the buffet. I am still confused as to whether there is a sit down table service restaurant available. There were two places with different names, but I think they serve the same buffet. Not sure about that one. For the parents I did find some good options: good tasting chicken cassoulet and grilled asparagus, fresh salad. But for the kids it was a bit of a train wreck: pizza, pasta both with and without sauce, chicken nuggets and other unidentifiable fried items, hotdogs, hamburgers, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, jello, chocolate pudding, weird burritos, and the absolute winner, French fries which really were just mashed potatoes squished into smiley faces then batter and fried.

No, I am not going to say that I was just happy that they ate. I kept thinking about that mentality while we were there. So many kids were eating fried crap and hot dogs from food stands in the resort for lunches and snacks. I saw fatty egg sandwiches and pancakes for breakfast. There were sodas everywhere. For a mom who is worried about serving goldfish crackers AT ALL, to be in a place where goldfish crackers were the least malign thing available was a bit shocking. I want to believe that just like me, everyone there was on vacation and that the vast majority of families aren’t eating like that every day. But, I don’t think that is entirely true.

My kids travel pretty well. They are up for a good trip; they get excited by going new places. But on virtually every trip, food is tough. Food that is foreign or looks different or is presented in a different way is a challenge to my kids in a strange environment. Many veggies are tough even in the comfort of our own home. To me, this is the biggest reason I stress eating and cooking at home. The controlled environment increases the likelihood that my kids will eat more healthfully. But when we are in a public setting, we usually choose the path of least resistance. Say I am a bad parent, I don’t care. For the sake of everyone out with us, I choose to not have screaming kids if I can help it. And there was decent food (even if it was industrial). There were vegetables available that were palatable and not overcooked. There was a fresh salad bar, even if it was basic. I really enjoyed my meal! But to try and fight my kids to get them to eat chicken cassoulet when they can smell pizza and see every other kid in the joint eating a hot dog, well, it just won’t happen. Maybe if we took our food to go, yeah. But you don’t have complete control in a buffet setting.

I have a feeling that we might have been in the minority for parents that thought the food wasn’t up to par. Sandwiches looked big and juicy. Fries were plump and fresh. There were cooked carrots put out for the kids (that we did tell Thing 1 he had to eat with his dinner), and there were fresh items throughout the buffet. I just didn’t see one kid in the place eating the fresh stuff. No, the food wasn’t bad in the traditional sense. It was not like a stale Mc Donald’s where the burgers have been wrapped up and sitting for an hour before you get them. This place had staff coming out the wazoo ready to help take of you and make you happy. And a year ago I probably would have said the food was great, I just felt robbed of options. What about when you don’t want pancakes with bacon for breakfast? Where is the yogurt with fruit? And that’s great that there were veggies available, the asparagus were delicious, but what about ANOTHER vegetable?

I am proud of a couple things. First off, I packed ahead!! I brought with us our expensive local grass fed low-temperature pasteurization milk, as well as granola purchased at the farmer’s market (my oven is STILL broken-can you believe that??), sprouted bread and organic cheese and salami and lots of fresh cut apples and carrots, celery and cucumbers. I also packed snacks like raw nuts and local dried cherries and the pretzels which we still eat because we don’t eat that many. And I did splurge and buy a bag of potato chips just so everyone could feel like we were on vacation. So all breakfasts, lunches and snacks we had en suite. For dinners we went out. But after the first considerably expensive buffet, the next night we found a local pizza place that was much cheaper and less troublesome. Overall, we didn’t eat enough veggies, but our planning ahead saved us money and constipation.

I am also really impressed that neither kid begged for food that they saw someone else eating. The smell of beachy snacks was all over the place (in addition to that chlorine smell). When I was a kid I would have BEGGED my parents for a basket of chicken fingers and fries. But our kids didn’t. They didn’t complain about sandwiches in the room even a little. May it ever be so.

Now that we are back in New York with all our access to farmer’s markets and organic groceries, I keep wondering how many of our fellow vacationers have the same access? How many of them care? How many of them even know the reasons WHY one should eat unindustrial food? How many realize that there is such a thing as unindustrial food? I left understanding why the real food movement is consistently lambasted for being elitist and a hobby of bored intellectuals who each day have to ask the question ‘what should I have for dinner’. In New York I feel like one in a movement of people, but at Great Wolf Lodge I felt like an oddball.

Now, with all that being said, we had a wonderful time. This vacation wasn’t about food. And it will get easier as the kids get older. They can start to make their own healthy choices without being freaked out by being in a new place. Thing 1 actually impressed us by how much he ate and his willingness to eat the healthy stuff we asked him to eat. Thing 2 ate French fries only, except for the good stuff we brought with us. But he is at that age now. This too shall pass. This vacation was about splashing water and slippy slides and trying to answer questions about how they make waves in an indoor pool. I would think it a shame to miss out on such a fun time for fears of too much processed food. We had a BLAST, and we will totally being going back next year. Only, I will probably pack more fresh healthy food.

Food is a Socio-Economic Problem, Part Two: How Processed Food Began

Food is a socio-economic problem. The more wealthy you are in the United States, the more likely that you will eat nutrient dense food. Poor nutrient quality food, excessive sugars and overly processed fats are omnipresent in the diet of low-income Americans. That is not to say that every person of meager means is eating a crappy diet of cola and fast food hamburgers. So no need to write me any letters scathing me for being elitist. But being low income increases the likelihood that you will be eating lousy food, simply for financial reasons.

I have been interested in how we got here. If you read Fast Food Nation then you know the story about McDonald's being started in Southern California by the McDonald's brothers. They had a restaurant or two, were making a good living flipping burgers. And they ordered a ton of ice cream mixers made for milkshakes. The mixer salesman was so intrigued by the large mixer orders that he went down to check the place out and he discovered a gem. Ray Kroc was the mixer salesman and shortly after meeting the McDonald brothers he bought them out. Now I wrote that from memory, and I read the book 6 years ago, so please correct me if I am wrong. But I tell the story because how does something grow from a fun diner you hang out with your friends to becoming the nations largerest purchaser of beef and potatoes? How did they go from being a charming burger stand to a national pariah sickening hundreds of thousands with their low quality fare?

My honest opinion? It wasn't their fault. I cannot blame McDonald's for being McDonald's. And in my mind it isn't even them that is the problem. They are part of the problem, one finger of a national body of problems that is our sickened food culture. But I repeat, how did we get here? How did we go from homemade healthful food to soda and fake food in a mere 100 years? Baby steps, baby steps.

I have been reading an interesting book recently: Something for the Oven by Laura Shapiro. The book examines food in the 1950's, largely from the perspective of the women cooking it, but also with a fair amount of company insight. I admit, when I began reading I had some preconceived notions about how processed food evolved. I thought (as I bet 90% of you guys do) that processed foods like TV Dinners and cake mixes began when our environment began to modernize and consumers began to demand faster products. But Shapiro corrects me. That wasn't exactly how it happened, that is just what the food marketers want you to believe.

In the beginning of the 20th century the average homecook was spending virtually all her food dollar on food that she prepared from scratch. If she lived in the country, she was shopping locally, gardening and canning much of what she grew. She was doing alot of work, defeathering chickens, fileting her own meats, trimming and washing all her vegetables, etc. Major advances in freezing (I'll write about that later) and canning created companies that had vision for America. Food companies realized the potential for their time savers: frozen spinach that was washed and chopped and ready to use, canned macaroni and cheese, complete dinners prepared and frozen solid? Many manufacturers assumed that this would be something that the average housewife could not resist! More leisure time? Yes, please!

But the average housewife did not care for the first processed foods. However in a sea of canned hamburgers and frozen tasteless peas, there were certain stand out favorites. TV Dinners eventually took off, but the average family reported using them for a meal fix. For example she might buy them for the children to be eaten on a night that husband and wife were going out rather than far Sunday dinner or when you had company coming over. Other products also took off, frozen orange juice concentrate, cakes mixes, etc. After reading the book what stands out to me is that the products that took off were products that tasted reasonably good and replaced very time consuming things that most women really hated doing, like juicing oranges and baking cakes. If you think about it, these products are largely unnecessary, yet making them is difficult. I like having dessert at a meal, but if I am too busy I simply will omit it. For a food company, making dessert easy makes it more likely that someone will prepare it (or buy it) at all.

It steamed the early food companies that women looked down upon ready made food like a second class citizen. If you really wanted to show your love for your family, you made a from scratch dinner. You didn't open up a can and just throw it onto a plate. Most women liked cooking above other household duties, and early processed foods took away their most pleasurable chore. And if it didn't taste good why on earth would you accept that? Not to mention that many women experienced guilt in serving food that was so easy to prepare. The food companies knew that these issues were inhibiting sales. So they worked hard on their marketing.

Glamorizing was the tool that food companies latched onto that really helped sales. Glamorizing is what takes time saving into the socio-economic realm. Glamorizing is the art of taking a simple box of cake mix and dressing it up with homemade frosting and fresh fruit, for example. A woman could buy canned soup and add a little cream and voila! A homemade delicacy that required real creative ingenuity! This is where processed foods finally found their niche and acceptance. For the homemaker, the guilt was removed, because she was contributing to the final product. Now a cake mix could be used for company, because the cake could be adorned with coconut, or pecans or whatever! Food companies heavily marketed glamorizing to low and middle income women, because it allowed them access to the other food trends of the 1950's, cooking with wine and cognac or more difficult french recipies, all that were time consuming and challenging. Shapiro states "Glamorizing sounded expensive, but it was utterly democratic".

Once the door had been opened for packaged and processed foods, their rise to the top could finally begin. "As the concept of easy haute cuisine spread from kitchen to kitchen, often via pantry shelf items, it banished the dowdy image of packaged foods and gave them a powerful boost toward the ranks of company cooking", Shapiro states. I have mentioned before that the journey forward then becomes generational. Children of the Fifties remember the special occasions that they ate TV Dinners and they readily served them to their children. Their children of the Seventies and Eighties ate and loved processed foods, however they were expensive. But by the time they had children in the new century, that had changed and now delicious packaged fare was cheap. Not to mention that our lives are now filled with new activities like talking on cell phones and texting and Facebook! Who has time to cook anymore?

And by the time we got to this new century, there were few home cooks left to teach kids how to cook from scratch. My own mother "cooked from scratch" with canned vegetables. She is turning over in her grave right now because I have just told the world that she didn't cook from scratch. But truthfully, while my mother did cook from scratch to the best of her ability, she bought such fine ingredients as Velveeta Cheese and Tater Tots and Crisco Vegetable Shortening. I always had a hot (and usually homemade) dinner on the table every night, but we ate the same way as other middle-class Americans did. With no Internet, we didn't have the knowledge that certain groups of people were starting to see that this fake food was hurting us.

Food is a socio-sconomic problem. It always has been, since the days when being poor meant being hungry, to today where being poor means that you are more likely to be diabetic. Our culture needs to be examined. We seriously need to look at our taste buds, our food policies and our defense of all things drive through and fastfastfast! This is a bigger problem than just McDonald's and soda. It is a cultural issue.

Crazy Cheap

I am constantly surprised by the endless parade of commercials advertising cheap food.
I remember a few years ago (okay, let's say 15 years ago) a certain fast food chain advertised a whole group of foods for 59, 79 and 99 cents. At the time that seemed perfectly legitimate to me. And I must admit, I ate several of the 59 cent items. But I was not old enough to buy beer ( or even cigarettes) heck I might not have been old enough to drive I can't quite remember.
Now it is 15 years later and I don't feel like the prices have changed. I see constant commercials for an enormous sandwich for five dollars. Now I have been saying for years that I didn't want to eat anything that had a built in profit margin at a price of five dollars. Or what about the ad in which a family goes to the grocery store to see how much a pound of raw chicken costs and how much a bag of flour costs among other ingredients. Upon to finding out the real cost of groceries, they throw out the list, and drive on over to their local fried chicken shack. I admit I sat slack jawed through that one. I also remember the chain that actually advertised "Fourth Meal" as a legitimate dining option. Seriously? Is anyone buying this?
But now that has all changed.
One of the key players just introduced a 2 dollar value meal. An ENTIRE meal for $2. Preying on those who cannot afford food, it is now cheaper to eat every meal at a fast food restaurant rather than buy groceries and cook your own food. Think about it. 7 days a week, 3 meals a day? For a family of four you could eat every meal at this particular restaurant for $84 a week. Sad really. But of course that whole family will get sick on the food. Or sick of the food, whichever comes first. Although, I am not so sure that my calculations are totally accurate because I do not believe the offending chain is open for breakfast. However I guess if you rolled out of bed at 10:45 am, I bet you could eat your 'breakfast' by 11am, lunch really anytime you like and your dinner could be more around that 'fourth meal' time slot.
Apparently this has all just gone down. My google search of "the cost of fast food 2010" yielded a ton of websites discussing this recent offering. Apparently other regional food chains have started to offer less expensive menus and the king daddy of them all (that chain whose food is synonymous with the single yellow alphabet letter out front) just wrapped up an 18 month project to completely revamp their dollar menu.
I don't mean to stand up on a soapbox today. And though I am a personal fan of capitalism, it will drive companies to the edge of profitability when there are no other selling features to offer. But what are we to do? The Government can't step in because who wants to live in a police state with the government telling us what to eat? We aren't getting what we need in terms of education. The gap between the haves and have not is not only getting wider but sadly that gap is also now showing that those who have not are also sicker than the haves. Not fair in my mind.
I am in favor of a large scale home economics programs coming back into our schools. Schools: teach our kids to cook because so many of our generation didn't learn it from our mothers. Before our kids get any fatter or sicker, we need to teach our children how to prepare a healthy meal and to eat real food.


Notes:
Fast Food Maven. The Orange County Register. http://www.fastfood.freedomblogging.com/ 18 May, 2010.