First World Food

One of the great things about modern America is that, unlike in the old days, you can now just eat for the heck of it. By this is mean that food is no longer seen as a means of survival, we no longer eat because we need to in order to survive, now we eat because we want to. Think about the last time you ate something, what was going through your head? Was it “I need to eat these skittles so that I can survive and reproduce” or was it “I really like skittles so I’m going to indulge even though they are very empty calories”(https://www.google.com/search?q=define+empty+calorie&oq=define+empty+calorie&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l2.8370j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8.)? I am going to take a shot in the dark and say that is was more than likely the latter of the two. This is thanks to how much cheap food we have in this country and dates back to the begging of the industrial revolution. During the industrial revolution people and products were moving faster than ever before thanks to inventions like the rail road and the insulated rail car that allowed meat to be shipped anywhere in the US from cities like Chicago that were very big in the meat business. Meat and other foods were becoming easier and easier to get and at cheaper prices than had ever been seen before.

All of this incredibly cheap and easily accessible food has led to another problem, obesity. Today in American an estimated two third of adults are overweight or obese and about one third of children are overweight or obese. The problem is (for the most part) not that healthy food is not easily accessible, the problem is that it is much more expansive than less healthy food and also healthy food (at least in my opinion) doesn't taste nearly as good as unhealthy food.

Another problem is how much less people are doing these days. Way back when people would eat a pound of bacon for breakfast and other bad things like that all day. They would die at about fifty from heart attacks but for the most part people weren’t obese. Why is that? I have theorized that it is because people back then were working on the farm for eight teen hours a day, or working in the steel mills or doing some other strenuous job that burned a lot of calories. Unfortunately for them these jobs didn’t help them with their terrible cholesterol levels. (407 words)