Want to Live a Short Life?
If one looks at what Americans eat, it’s easy to be pessimistic about their health. Scads of fatty fast foods kept on the edge of acceptability by strange petrochemicals, gallons of super-sweet brightly colored beverages, loads of sugar and salt in everything—it’s not a happy prospect.
On Memorial Day weekend, Martine and I went to a Greek festival in the San Fernando Valley. We were shocked to find that, within a short few years, the ability of the church kitchen volunteers to produce good Greek food has declined precipitately. I’ve always loved fried calamari, but what I got was super thin slices of calamari with heavy, slightly burnt breading.
Go to the supermarket, and you will find whole aisles of what purports to be food and is all to frequently of low or no nutritional value. And that is what tends to predominate in the shopping carts of the people in line in front of me. It appears that more and more people are buying prepared food and not bothering to put ingredients together in the kitchen and cook them.
I think that the Covid epidemic is partly responsible. Curiously, it had the opposite effect on me. I started cooking more—and enjoying it more! The only unfortunate thing is that Martine and I are heading in different directions insofar as food is concerned. No matter, I think it’s important to compromise so that, in the long haul, we both get what we want.
Tarnmoor 
As a very regular visitor to the USA over a period of 40 years (though not since Covid) I’m fairly confident that Covid is not to blame ….. unless, I shudder at the thought, things have become somehow worse.
I think it might date back to the concept of a ‘family restaurant’ and, along with it, the accepted wisdom that everything tastes better with sauce – leading to sauce becoming the primary ingredient and the only reliable way of differentiating between one meal and another. And sugar, of course. Everything tastes better with sugar too. And it’s not good enough to just ensure that sugar be a major component in the sauce – it’s important to add it, in a factory, to the milk, to the bread and to anything else it can be glued to. Just about everywhere else on the planet a ‘soda’ is water with bubbles. In America it is water with sugar and bubbles.
And then one day when Oprah or some other luminary reveals the shocking discovery that sugar makes you fat the marketing gurus replace the sugar with some other shit that is even worse for you than sugar and call it a ‘diet drink’. So everyone obediently files into the supermarket and fills their massive trolleys with gallons of diet drinks and ‘reduced fat’ chips and bottles of colourful chemicals gathered from one aisle that is entirely dedicated to the mass sale of ‘sauce’ just so they can later splash it all over anything that’s fallen into the trolly that might actually qualify as food and thus avoid having to discover what that tastes like.
Don’t worry. This is not some sort of international cultural attack. Australia is not much better. One reason, in fact, for there being little point in travel between America and Australia is the realisation that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell one from the other.
There is a lot to what you say. As a person who was raised in a Hungarian household (in America), I am free of the whole sauce thing. In fact, I find the use of sauces to be an admission of failure that the cook did not use the appropriate seasonings embedded in the dish being cooked.
Take hamburgers, for instance. Hungarians did not just slap a meat patty on the grill and rely on sauces to be added later. Instead, the ground meat had salt, pepper, minced onions and garlic, and occasionally minced parsley. Result: The hamburger patty itself was flavorful. (In Hungarian, it’s called fasirt, pronounced FUSH-eert.)
You’re right about sugar, too. Even as a diabetic, I do not avoid sugar entirely, knowing full well that any ingested carbohydrates turn to sugar inside the body. I just try to keep it to a minimum so my A1C readings don’t go through the roof.