Hat tip to Daily Green for pointing me to Food Politics, if for no other reason than learning about how the most famous cookbook in America (The Joy of Cooking, natch) has adjusted its portion sizes over the year.
One example cited:
That recipe calls for about 4 pounds of ingredients to make only 18 cookies, each of which runs 500 calories — one quarter of the amount needed by most people for an entire day. I’d call one of those cookies lunch or share it with three friends. By the way, a similar recipe in the 1975 “Joy of Cooking” made 45 cookies with just half the ingredients. These would be just under 100 calories each.
Wow, right?
I, too, would like to know how the editors justified this ballooning of portion sizes over the years. Certainly, as people with free will, we could always choose to serve more than the recipe calls a portion if we protested against their original small portion size, but when recipes (and restaurants) put portions of immense size in front of us, it does sort of re-set our expectations of how much we should eat.
Seems like this is just another way that our culture is killing us slowly and insidiously.
Am I being over-dramatic?
I would like to put forth the position that we can exert control of what we put into our mouths. Let's take responsibility for our own behavior.
We are at fault for eating too much, for teaching our children to eat too much, for a culture that celebrates excessive eating, and for yielding to our genetically-programed preference for sugars and fats.
A good topic for food politics is the insidiousness and pervasiveness of fats, sugars and salts and their related compounds. That's why having good nutritional labels, and education on understanding labels, are worthy of serious political discussion and, in my opinion, sponsorship and funding.
Posted by: Maria Tseng | March 29, 2009 at 10:06 PM