What could be healthier than starting dinner with a seaweed
salad, then moving on to brown rice and black beans with a side of kale? What a
rich balance of delicious tastes and colorful foods, and how healthy. Lots of
cancer fighters, cholesterol reducers, plus no salt, sugar or chemical
additives. Perfect for a vegan, and even good for a meat-eater who might add a
small piece of chicken, fish, beef or lamb and still have a healthy meal.
But what a lot of work. It might take as much as a half hour
to dress the seaweed, boil the rice, heat the chickpeas, sauté the kale and
broil the meat.
How much easier to open a few bags and munch brown rice
crackers, dried kale leaves, black bean chips and roasted seaweed snacks. All meat-eaters have to do is add some beef
jerky.
Yes, there are now chip versions of all these foods and
others, too—cabbage, chickpeas, peas. In fact, American food processors have created snack chip versions of virtually every hot “super food” fad of the last
few decades.
For example, manufacturers have introduced 16 new versions of seaweed chips
this year alone.
As readers may have already suspected, all of these chips
are loaded with salt and many have sugar and chemical additives. All involve
processing the life out of the original fruit or vegetable. An ounce of all
these snacks delivers many more calories than an adult serving of the
unprocessed food.
While 71% of all U.S. snack foods now make health claims,
according to a recent Wall Street Journal
article, no one really believes that eating this stuff is healthy. It
certainly is not as healthy as eating a serving of brown rice or kale.
People prefer the chips because of convenience and
flexibility. It’s much easier to carry a bag of spiced dried chickpeas around
than a plastic tub of chickpeas. And many people prefer the taste of salt and
sugar to the bitterness of kale or the tang of cabbage. (Yes, there are also
cabbage chips!). They’re used to process
food.
There is no doubt that chips bear a major part of the
responsibility for the epidemic of obesity and obesity-related disease we face.
But beyond health, the proliferation of faux-healthy chips represents another
example of the homogenization of reality that we see everywhere. Instead of
authentic Italian or Mexican food, Americans go to themed versions that use a
few stylistic elements from the authentic cuisine to dress up American fare.
These ethnic-themed restaurants tend to load down healthy traditional recipes
with unnecessary frying and extra sauces laden with so much sugar and salt that
they taste more like some standard muck than like Italian or Mexican. Check out
how many chain restaurants serve the very same menu: hamburgers, fajitas,
chicken strips, blackened meat. And
doesn’t it seem as if pizza dough and bagels now share the same consistency and
overly sweet taste in most chain restaurants and packaged versions?
And it’s not just food. National chains for auto supplies, clothing,
movie theatres, fabrics, toys, sporting goods, furniture, jewelry, hair
stylists, urgent care facilities, drug stores, convenience stores, fitness
clubs, massage studios and consumer electronic stores make every mall in every
suburb and most smaller cities look virtually the same. Many of us prefer
taking a phony riverboat at a Disney resort to a real one in New Orleans or
viewing the faux Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty in a Las Vegas casino to
the real deals in Paris and New York. One
theme—a landmark—associated with New York or Paris is placed in a homogenized
environment, like a vegetable dehydrated and encased in salt, chemical
additives and binders.
On another level, the concentration of media has led to
homogenization of the information we receive, too, as more media run the same
stories with the same point of view.
One could make the case that this homogenization is a good
thing, because it turns the disparate cultures and nationalities of the United
States into a unified whole—the melting pot that produces the cookie-cutter
suburbs. I prefer a vision of the United
States as a rainbow of beliefs, practices, customs and cuisines, each retaining
its own authenticity while also contributing its own richness to a glorious
American mosaic.
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