I was in ASDA today, which is a the British subsidiary of Wal-Mart, and just like WM in the US, it's not considered a very classy, quality, organic (read: tasty) grocer, to say the least. I like Sainsbury's and M&S better, but this one is much closer to home. As I really should lose some weight before my holiday in 24 days from now, I managed to commit a horribly complicated intellectual feat bordering on rocket science, one that surely no one without a degree could do: I asked an employee about their WeightWatcher's product line. This brand was very hard to discover, because on about every fifth shelf there is at least one product that carries a bright, big green WeighWatcher's emblem, so surely you must be a genius to discover it. So I asked about it, pointed out that I don't want to cook, anything that takes more than 3 minutes is out (it's not time preference, rather the valuation of leisure, if turning my brain into knots trying to undestand Rothbard's theory about capital goods in MESPM is considered "leisure" :-))) ), and I am mainly interested in tuna products, as somewhere I heard that it has a good "feeling full, feeling satisfied" vs. "low calories" ratio (again something no one below an IQ of 140 could have ever possibly heard of).
So at 6PM I had the following dinner: toast made of 2 slices of WeightWatcher's bread (50 calories each) and a small can of WeightWatcher's tuna in herb and tomato sauce on top of it (80 calories). 180 calories in total. Somehow they managed to make that tuna in tomato sauce feel thick and filling so now at 21:26 I still don't feel hungry. But let's assume that if I would eat this all day - and this is a good balanced diet, protein, vegs, bread, I guess some vitamin pills and it's almost perfect - I would need 4 meals, instead of 3, a day, that's 720 calories a day. Do you how 720 calories a day called by doctors? It's called more or less the borderline case between seriously unhealthy malnutrition and potentially fatal starvation. I kid you not. You could potentially starve to death on 720 calories a day.
So, these bloody corporations, that conspire to turn us all into brainwashed consumer zombies and 20 stone fatty asses, in fact offered a diet a that that would make me feel reasonably full all day lonh, takes practically no time to prepare, is fairly well balanced and healthy and I could still starve myself to death or at least into a walking skeleton on this diet. Interesting, isn't it? (Of course, there is also a 219 calorie tuna canned meal consisting of tuna, pasta, and vegs in 3 different tastes, and other similar products, this isn't the only one.) Especially that all it required is discovering the WW emblem and asking an employee about it - surely something most people incapable of doing, it's so complicated.
Of course, one of the ways the bloody corporations fleece us all is chargin a lot of money for the healthy stuff. According to my calculations, having 4 servings of that 219 calorie tuna, pasta, vegs stuff that costs £2.5 (because I have forgotten the price of today's dinner, the bread and the small can of tuna, so I have to calculate with the price of the other product) would cost about 50 minutes of the UK average wage every day, leaving us only 7 hours 10 mins to spend on everything that's not food.
If you'd rather eat those £1 and very fattening frozen beef burgers three times a day, you could spend about 7 hours 40 minutes on everything else. So if you earn the average wage, you have to work 30 minutes a day to not be fat - the horror! The horror! This is of course rougly the time other people spend cooking, which I don't, and obviously making that tuna pasta salad myself, spending the time, rather the money, would mean I - if I earned the average salary - can spend something like 7 hours 20-30 minutes or so for everything non-food.
So it's obvious the corporations are making us fat. If you were a frozen burger customer, and now you want to eat healthy, you have to spend about as much time working, on the average, as much others spend cooking. Or you can make a salad yourself and roughly spend half of the difference in money and half in time. How unfair. Don't you just hate them?
The primary problem is State farming subsidies. Unhealthy foods are subsidized and healthy foods are not subsidized.
I have my own blog at FSK's Guide to Reality. Let me know if you like it.
Well, that's true, but let's call it on it's real name then: corn. Subsidizing corn. A KFC burger consists of mainly corn, chicken is the smaller part of it. That's your problem in the US.
Here in the UK I think corn isn't very subsidized as the climate is different. But there is still a huge obesity problem. 30% of the children are fat and for another 20% their parents don't let their weight to be measured.
fsk: The primary problem is State farming subsidies. Unhealthy foods are subsidized and healthy foods are not subsidized.
I assume by 'healthy foods' you mean organically grown?
Don't worry none, they're actively trying to get their piece of the farming subsidy...or were as the last I heard they were getting priced out of the market as people were starting to watch their pennies and just buy any old food instead of the organics.
Unless you mean that the State is subsidizing the food production methods on top of the subsidizes for the basic ingredients which I've never really heard of any examples of that happening.
Anonymous Coward: I assume by 'healthy foods' you mean organically grown? Don't worry none, they're actively trying to get their piece of the farming subsidy..
Don't worry none, they're actively trying to get their piece of the farming subsidy..
Actually, the big industrial farms have managed to get the "organic" label be FDA regulated, to the extent that real organic farmers no longer are allowed to advertise their product as "organic".
Good opportunity for agorism. Certify the food yourself under a new name.
I would make a great bureaucrat. Wanna see? Click here. It's fun.
If you really want to return your body to the one that it was always meant to be - check out Intuitive Eating/Normal Eating etc. Dieting will actually get you FATTER and don't for a second think that the 'dieting industry' doesn't know or care to inform you of this fact. Just keep buying their 'magic' formulas and into their 'diet mentality' and I guarantee you will be a life member of Weight Watchers or some other such 'loser' group.
The only thing making us 'fat' is ourselves, with the oh so willing help of the diet industry and its cronies - the 'experts' in government and in the 'scientific' (university?) community. If you wake up to the fact that its not so much WHAT you put in your mouth as it is WHY you do (emotionally driven vs. body hunger), then you can lick the 'fat' gremlins and flip the bird at all the rest who want to get into your pocket via your eating guilts.
Jain
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