Submitted by Hardscrabble Farmer
“Not everybody has the time or means to cook healthy meals from scratch, so let’s not pretend it’s that simple.”
When your first sentence is demonstrably false, can anything that follows be trusted? There is no debate that preparing your own meals, from scratch, is less expensive than buying a meal that has already been prepared. And if you do find a prepared meal that costs less, what does that tell you about the value of the ingredients and preparations?
Food propaganda is really starting to take off and we all know what the end game is; divorce people completely from access to foods except where it can be provided by the Government or a corporation and make them 100% dependent for their next meal.
Why ‘Just Cook More’ Isn’t the Universal Solution to Healthy Eating
Healthy eating is an endlessly complex topic that often gets distilled into sound bites—some short directive that assigns a simple solution to a myriad of problems. For example: Just cook more. These days, home cooking is presented as the holy grail of healthy eating, and the way to meet every dietary ideal we’re supposed to be working toward—whether it’s what we should be eating less of (salt, sugar, calories, processed foods) or what we should be eating more of (vegetables, fiber, whole foods, vitamins and minerals).
Food reformers and celebrity chefs are loudly spreading this as gospel, and it’s rampant in public health messaging and food media. Heck, I’ve written my fair share of very easy weeknight recipes in an effort to encourage apathetic cooks, and I’m guilty of implying that time-saving kitchen appliances like slow-cookers are simple fixes for cooking on a tight schedule.
But really it’s not that simple. A lot is implied and expected in this call for more home cooking. The message is: Cook more from scratch, with mostly unprocessed foods like produce, meat, dairy, whole grains, nuts, and seeds. Boxed mac and cheese and white-bread-and-bologna sandwiches don’t cut it. And for many people, this is asking a lot.
To be clear, nutritious home cooking isn’t a bad thing—experts generally agree that eating mostly unprocessed food can lead to better health outcomes, and it’s easier to control what you’re eating if you cook at home. But presenting it as an easy solution or even as a choice that everyone can make isn’t helpful. It might actually be harmful.
The message to cook more from scratch comes from a place of socio-economic privilege. “People who make these kinds of recommendations often underestimate and overlook the privilege they have,” Melissa Carmona, M.S., a clinical mental health counselor who works primarily with immigrant communities, tells SELF. “When my clients see doctors or other health-care professionals, they’re often hit with, ‘You should cook more, eat better, change your lifestyle in order to improve your health.’ I heard the same thing when I moved to the U.S. from Colombia as a teenager.” But she says the reality of actually doing it wasn’t easy. She couldn’t necessarily afford the foods that were being recommended, and she also found that many of the cultural foods she was used to eating weren’t included in the Americanized picture of healthy eating and home cooking.
I’ve been writing about food for seven years and I feel comfortable saying that extolling the virtues of healthy home cooking is a staple in the repertoire of a great many Instagram influencers who are white and if the rest of their feed is any indication relatively well off. This creates an unrealistic and culturally narrow expectation for what acceptable healthy home cooking looks like. It ultimately makes home cooking a status symbol, Tamara Melton, M.S., R.D. a registered dietitian and cofounder of Diversify Dietetics, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the dietetics profession, tells SELF.
“People are already confused about what healthy eating is, and now a lot of people think it’s about re-creating all of the beautiful, trendy food they see on Instagram.” A lot of this food is very whitewashed, Melton says. It’s also expensive and often made by food professionals and influencers who are paid to cook and photograph it.
Of course not everyone feels pressure to eat the way they see people doing it on Instagram. But even a less Instagrammable home-cooked meal isn’t as attainable as mass media makes it out to be.
Cooking from scratch also isn’t in fact budget-friendly for everyone or more affordable than how they’re already eating. One of the selling points of healthy home cooking is based on a tremendous paradox—the idea that cooking at home is the budget-friendly choice. This is true for someone who might start cooking as an alternative to eating out, but not for someone who already does eat most of their meals at home. And, a 2016 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the lowest-income households are spending a larger percentage of their food budget—about two-thirds—on food prepared at home (which includes unprepared foods bought at the grocery store) than the highest-income households—which spend only about half.
But what these lower-income households are cooking may not actually live up to the ideal of a wholesome meal cooked from scratch. In the book Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won’t Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It, authors Sarah Bowen, Ph.D., Joslyn Brenton, Ph.D., and Sinikka Elliott, Ph.D., draw on interviews and long-term observational study of several mothers, most of whom are poor or working-class, in order to explain the nuanced challenges of and barriers to healthy home cooking.
“There’s this widespread idea that if you just try a little bit harder or get a little bit more organized, you can be healthy and cook your kids a good meal,” Brenton tells SELF. But, her research proves this wrong. “It doesn’t matter if you know the ‘right’ way to eat or cook—what matters is having the money to do it.” Brenton and her coauthors describe a huge divide “between families…who can afford fresh, seasonal, nutritious fare, and families…who search for the cheapest deals—10 for $10—to keep everyone fed on the smallest possible budget.”
It’s also pretty much impossible to prioritize healthy food and cooking when you’re worried about having enough food. According to a 2016 report from the USDA, one in eight Americans is food insecure, meaning they don’t have access to, “enough food for an active, healthy life.” The USDA has tried to quantify food insecurity by mapping “food deserts,” low-income areas where at least a third of residents live more than a mile from a grocery store. But many experts see this as another oversimplification of a very complicated problem. “Just having a grocery store near you doesn’t mean that you have a way to get there, that you’re going to be able to afford the food there, or that you’ll even want to eat it,” Kathryn De Master, Ph.D., assistant professor of agriculture, society, and environment at the University of California, Berkeley, tells SELF.
Federal food assistance programs like SNAP (food stamps) are designed to help low-income individuals buy food they couldn’t otherwise afford, but these benefits can only go so far. Processed foods are generally cheaper than unprocessed or minimally processed foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and meats. Even with SNAP benefits, cooking with mostly unprocessed foods “requires a huge amount of planning and maneuvering,” De Master says, and in some regions where fresh foods are more expensive, it often isn’t possible at all.
Cooking healthy food also takes time, a luxury that many don’t have. A basic sheet pan dinner of chicken and potatoes will take about an hour from start to finish—but many people, especially shift workers or working parents, likely don’t have this much time to wait. Brenton and her coauthors find that time is an issue for many. “Even middle-class mothers who do have the money to cook healthy meals don’t necessarily have the time,” she says.
It’s true that people spend less time cooking than they used to. A 2013 study in Nutrition Journal found that on average women spent nearly two hours a day in the kitchen in 1965, while a 2018 study in the same journal reports that by 2016 that number had dropped to about an hour a day. But it’s not fair to assume that this is always a choice. “A lot of it has to do with work schedules,” Brenton says. And even time-saving hacks don’t work for everyone. “When you hear advice about how to eat healthy with a busy schedule, you hear things about meal prepping on the weekends” she says. “But what if you work on weekends?” What if you’re taking care of small children and sick parents? What if you’d rather spend what little free time you have doing something other than cook? Assuming that everyone can make time to cook if they choose to just isn’t fair.
There’s no easy solution to these problems, but we need to stop talking about healthy eating like it’s an individual responsibility. “The way we talk about home cooking, we convince people that it’s their responsibility to cook healthy meals for themselves and their families,” Brenton says. “This detracts from the real causes of poor health, like massive economic inequality, racism, long work hours, and stress.” These problems won’t soon be solved, but there are ways to make healthy food more accessible in the meantime. Brenton and her coauthors suggest large-scale solutions such as government subsidies for healthier school lunches, plus paid maternity and paternity leave, paid sick leave, and affordable child care, all of which would give people more time to prioritize food.
On the community level, things like cooking healthy food in bulk in commercial kitchens and selling it on a sliding scale can help. Melton emphasizes how important it is that community-based solutions actually take each community’s unique needs into account. “It’s important to encourage people to eat in a way that they’re comfortable with, a way that’s culturally relevant to them, with food that they can access,” Melton says. “In low-income communities, teaching cooking skills based on the ingredients and equipment available is very important,” Melton says. “Pay attention to what’s at the local grocery stores and food banks, and teach people to cook with these things.”
Ultimately experts agree that just encouraging everyone to cook healthy food in order to be healthier isn’t very helpful. Instead of promoting a lofty ideal of home cooking, we need to first and foremost find ways to make healthy eating accessible to more people.
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Stopped reading when the author said food advice on Instagram was provided by white people who appeared to be well off.
This isn’t really about food, is it?
Exactly. The end of the article makes that clear.
How hard is it to makes eggs and bacon, beans on toast, beans and rice, Crockpot stew, a homemade soup with biscuits, homemade oatmeal, noodles with butter, homemade spaghetti, baked potatoes with butter? It doesn’t have to be limited to a few dishes. Just add a couple of veggies to a simple main course. Maybe these people need a Depression-era recipe book.
When I was little, we didn’t have a lot of money, and those are the types of things my mother cooked. We had homemade hot chocolate made from cocoa and homemade cinnamon toast in winter. That breakfast was one of the best things from childhood to me. And my mother cooked it before getting us off to school and going to work.
People on welfare and food stamps have no job to do and have all day to cook so what’s the problem?
Yup, I’m impressed that most folk commenting on the article caught the propaganda. Growing up we didn’t have much and my mother cooked and baked, sweets were relegated to a pie or cake she made, nothing like candy or soda in our house.
Staple foods form the basis for meals: rice, beans, pasta with fresh veggies and some meat were the bulk of the menu. That staple menu can vary from culture to culture but the premise remains the same. A pot of beans can last a week, ditto rice and learning how to cook using leftovers as the basis for the next meal is a must. Think about Thanksgiving turkey and how many meals can happen with those leftovers.
Nope, the article is just pushing an agenda of control and uses false premises to promote collectivism.
That’s exactly right. In our house, there was no desert every night. Desert was occasional, either fruit, fruit cocktail, but my mother would make homemade lemon meringue pies or cakes or banana pudding occasionally. No cookies unless she baked them. Sometimes, we hand-churned ice cream. When you went to the grocery store, if you asked for something like cookies, it was always, “No, we can’t afford it right now.” You eventually learned not to even ask.
My mother grew up much poorer than what we kids experienced, so she learned the hard way on how to keep us fed. And as you state, it’s the same for every culture.
In my house desert was limited to either Mojave or Sahara.
We didn’t have much.
Do you mean Sonora? The Sahara is in Vegas.
Thanks for pointing that out, Rdawg. Sorry, I just don’t proof on here.
In our house, soft drinks were verboten, because my mother said we couldn’t afford them….which was fortunate, as we avoided a very unhealthy habit.
I remember on fridays we got to pick out a 16.9 oz bottle of Faygo, whatever flavor we wanted. Or Crush. That was all the soda we got.
Never heard of Faygo. Does anybody remember 3V Cola?
Yup, So why is HSF inflicting this drivel on us, testing our bs sensors?
@ Deplorable Paul
“This isn’t really about food, is it?”
3d paragraph from last:
“…the real causes of poor health, like massive economic inequality, racism…”
Well, whatever it’s about, it’s White people’s fault; only they are capable of racism.
3d paragraph from last:
” Brenton and her coauthors suggest large-scale solutions such as government subsidies for healthier school lunches, plus paid maternity and paternity leave, paid sick leave, and affordable child care…”
Yes, obviously we need bigger government, more spending, more mandates, more entitlements. This is clearly not an individual responsibiity. White people are rich and should pay more taxes.
Kinda my point. Didn’t have to read it to know it was in there.
‘Kissinger: “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.” US strategy deliberately destroyed family farming in the US and abroad and led to 95% of all grain reserves in the world being under the control of six multinational agribusiness corporations’
https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/kissinger-control-oil-and-you-control-nations-control-food-and-you-control-the-people-us-strategy-deliberately-destroyed-family-farming-in-the-us-and-abroad-and-led-to-95-of-all-grain-reserves/
annuit coeptis novus ordo seclorum- all been planned.
The Kissinger quote was from back in 1974 (?)……here’s something from this century:
https://www.naturalnews.com/033343_food_weapons.html
So true Order or Chaos , they will use food as a weapon. I should say food and water. These treasonous bastards will starve people to get their way. In a sense they have made all of us depending upon them for our very lives. The family farm is all but gone Hardfarmer being the exception. Oh how I wish my grandparents would have kept our family farm but they didn’t know the future any more then we did.
It is hard to eat healthy for me personally because I work on the road but it can be done. You just have to be wise. One part of eating healthy is to cut down on what you eat. I eat anything I want but I don’t eat much. I go for very small meals 4or 5 times a day. So far so good.
BB
We’ve still got a few family type farms around here, and my wife’s in laws and nephews are all family owned beef operations, and I aallllllmmost live in the Beaver’s neighborhood, so all in all, I’ve got the world by the butt. We never did have a family farm on either grandparents side, but my poor old dad would tell me to “wish in one hand, crap in the other, and see which one fills up first”….haha
I ignored my BP for two decades, but I started taking pills for it after a quadruple bypass, and it seems to be good. You are spot on about that eating healthy challenge on the road. I’m a big believer in moderation, no matter what you eat, and I’ve been doin similar method of smaller portions, but still only eat one good meal each day (I don’t pigout on it anymore)- on a side note, BB, I’ve probably loaded ten thousand trailers for you long haul truckers back in the day, and could have a lengthy conversation with about ‘dock encounters’…
annuit coeptis novus ordo seclorum – dang freemasons……they wanna live forever !
Yep, Kissinger…puppet of the Rockefellers along with the Rockefeller puppets in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) one of the most successful hydra heads on the NWO monster snake.
Yep, weaponized food is one of many reasons I prep and live on a modest working farm.
Mark-
I saw your reply to me over on HSF’s thread. I’m sorry for your loss, but given the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, I will only be happy for her.
I thought maybe you were a little further along on your diggs, but sounds like you dodged a couple of pit falls already, and gotten past the Big Brother Permit Police…..still wish I was helpin on a project just like that…….what was that I just told BB about ‘wishin’ ?
Your past year, (and a number of others that frequent this blog) sounds similar to mine. I just keep runnin the race, and try to be grateful for each day…..
annuit coeptis novus ordo seclorum-
I don’t put much stock in the idea of a Fourth turning. Not that the concept is validated over history, but because the conflagration of events, the scientific, military, and medical advancements, geo-political alignments, hell, even the procession of the Equinox, all put me firmly in the ‘last chance go-around’ catagory !
“We need to stop talking about healthy eating like it’s an individual responsibility.”
I literally can’t think of anything that’s more of an individual responsibility than what you choose to put in your own (or your kids’) mouth. How about wiping your own ass? Can we concede that THAT is an individual responsibility? Or is that also to be handled by the government? I can hear it now:
“Poor people can’t be responsible for their own personal hygiene. They live in ass-wiping deserts where personal care attendants can’t be found or afforded. This affects their ability to find employment and is why we don’t have more doctors and scientists from these ass-wiping deserts. You can’t go to medical school if your ass stinks. This is just another blind spot for people who come from a place of clean-ass privilege. Studies at UC Berkeley have shown that one dollar invested in government-provided ass-cleaning saves eight dollars that would otherwise have to be spent on mass incarceration. “
Good comparison.
Isn’t that why they butcher the baby boys, that they are dirty and incapable of hygiene? Or maybe it’s really just about control and inflicting misery. Burn it all down.
The fact that people start getting uncomfortable when a racial angle is introduced is just a symptom of the race-mongering black and white politicians use as a weapon against white people. That does not make this untrue. The more I have learned about the world the less I am inclined to blame the individual solely for his mistakes. The culture also is to blame. God, I hate sounding like a hell-bound bolschevik but the capitalist system we have allowed to be created around us is killing us. There are other people than the bolscheviks who critique the capitalist system and more to the point, offer alternatives. You should do some research. Why would I be so interested in making blacks act like me. Let them make their own culture, let them be responsible for it and let them pay for it. In the meantime, whites need to take down this judaizing capitalist system of resource extraction which is killing my people. If we don’t kill it, it is going to kill us. It is literally killing us with unwholesome ‘food’ and the promotion of ‘medicine’ for whatever complaints we have.
It’s not Capitalism that hurts people. It’s Crony Capitalism.
The Soviets, aka: Bolsheviks, were big on collective farming, they killed off the Kulaks aka: capitalist peasants who owned their land and grew the food that fed people, in order to get those massive collective farms going.
What was the result?
Massive environmental degradation and food shortages.
The American Black person is a creation of the same culture that created White Americans. I would dearly love to leave the black community to itself to sink or swim without assistance but that cannot happen since the government controls them like it controls the indians on the reservations and the ghetto blacks are a protected class just like the democrats are making a special class out of illegals.
Capitalism, free market capitalism, hasn’t been allowed to happen since before the Great Depression. Factory farming replaced family farms and that started during the Depression, wonder why? Qui bono?
When economic activity allowed a mother to stay home and look after the children, cooking good meals was, in my world, a normal everyday activity. Population increase and government excess has lead us to the point where damn near everyone has to work, even at some menial job, just to survive. The wealth that has been produced has not improved everybody’s life, it has been squandered by governments at all levels. The time will come again when we will work all day for that meal we are going to eat that night and nothing else. Most people have debt proportunate to that of governments, we really are fools.
“Healthy eating is an endlessly complex topic…” Of course, it has to be, or how could anyone make a living writing about it, teach at universities on the subject, or get jobs as nutritionists at high schools telling kids to eat more fruits and vegetables? It is actually a fairly simple subject, mastered by peoples all over the world for millennia who had no access to grocery stores or the internet. What the writer has done is make a fairly common error, which is to confuse ‘simple’ with ‘easy.’ Something that is simple is not necessarily easy, and just because a task requires work, it is not necessarily complex. It is true that healthy eating requires planning, and more time and effort than unhealthy eating. A simple solution, I would suggest, is to borrow a little time from that several hours a day the average person spends watching TV or on the internet, and use it to learn how to cook and plan meals, none of which requires higher mathematics.
Of course, the author does point to extreme circumstances which may severely impact an individual persons ability to spend time cooking. But I just recently visited the hospital, and I was amazed to see how many of the staff, from doctors on down, were overweight, some severely. Is it possible that none of them have the means or time to devote to cooking, or that they were unaware of the importance of healthy eating? Same thing with the young women, presumably without children, I see at the nearby coffee shop, staring at their computers and cell phones. Same with a lot of young men, retirees, and suburbanites in the more affluent suburbs. I’m sure they would point to the same thing that everyone point to as an excuse–lack of time. Oh, please.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeNmyE4Orws
Maggie, I told you about the time my 5th grade science teacher gave me an F for food. The question was, what do you have for breakfast? The answer she wanted was bacon, eggs, toast. The ready answer I had was beans and flour tortillas. I miss those home made tortillas and refried beans! On regular days we had oatmeal – yecchh!
I still recall the old film on the great depression; an old looking white woman took off her glasses to soften the sight of maggots on the pile of meat she was picking through for dinner that night.
I love homemade tortillas. You know who made them for me a time or two.
Haha…
Did you ever watch Letters from Iwo Jima?
Alejandro?
Hank Azaria? The voice of Moe Szyslak?
Huevos rancheros, homemade corn tortillas, refritos and salsa along with some fried potatoes or Migas and chorizo plus flour tortillas or fried plantain and huevos con queso and veggies and fried potatoes and…..now I’m hungry.
Here’s something you didn’t know, mygorilla, LA has the biggest burritos in the USA. We got the message loud and clear, size matters.
https://www.foodandwine.com/news/best-burritos-america-all-50-states
Too many carbs,,,
Last paragraph says “we must make healthy eating accessable to more people”. Bull shit, that is their responsibility not ours or mine.
It seems the approach changed and now they want to encourage po’ folks to die sooner. Food stamps used to be limited to uncooked food. Now, people can buy liquor and cooked hot dogs at 7/11 with EBT.
Food assistance was once a box of staples that the folks carried home and made meals from. You are absolutely correct with the ebt and garbage food. I was in the local supermarket, area I live near is equal black, white, hispanic population ratio, and most of the people were fat. Only ones who weren’t fat were the workers and those you knew what they did by their clothes. Exercise is key to maintaining a proper weight, couple that with a good diet for a healthy weight and lifestyle.
I happened to be in a Tarjay today in an upper-middle-class suburb. Target used to be noteworthy for having only truly attractive women in their in-store ads (up on the walls)- tattoo-free women who a healthy man would enjoy impregnating. Today I noticed that they’ve added fatties to their in-store photos. And they had some fat mannequins, too! Jiminy Christmas – we don’t want to encourage it.
“tattoo-free women a healthy man would enjoy impregnating.”
Is that healthy man you?
Tarjay is outré ever since they implemented their psychotic toilet policy.
We should create a new SNAP program where the only thing you can buy is Newports.
HA!
Gotta subsidize ADM and Wallyworld…
I hate to admit it but I had to go on food stamps for several months after my son was born because I was out of work longer than expected due to complications and recently separated and what I had saved for my leave of absence ran out. When I was approved, I asked them if they had a list of items I could buy with the card. I was told I could buy any food item in the store, except cooked food (that rule had not changed yet). I was flabbergasted to say the least. I thought I would only be able to buy flour, eggs, milk, veggies, etc.
After I knew what the cards looked like, I noticed other shoppers checking out around me and realized that people on food stamps ate better than I did without the food stamps (and with, because I tried to be frugal). I definitely think they should go to giving out boxes of staples, as Mygirl suggested, and be done with it. That would have suited my situation just fine. Once I was back to work and getting my paychecks again, I didn’t renew the food stamps. Plus, it was so damn embarrassing.
Cheap convenient processed calories are very attractive for the poor…sugar, fats and carbs….low cost and widely available even in the so-called food deserts. Fast food….might as well beat yourself with a hammer. Think about a fresh cheeseburger and fries from a small diner vs. say, Burger King…..one is unprocessed fresh food and one is not…..but Burger King is cheap and has a drive-thru! Remember “pink slime” used at Taco Bell…..gross.
You fell for that crap story? “Pink slime” is a perfectly wholesome food. It is a matter of portion control . It is simply beef and beef fat emulsified.
A lot of not-so-good-for-you items make economic sense on a cost-per-calorie basis:
Stuff like organic chicken, pastured beef, or wild-caught salmon are going to be off the charts. If I want to stick to “clean” local products, basic grass-fed ground beef costs me $8-9/lb. Two hundred calories is 3.33 oz of 85/15 (can’t really get fattier unless you somehow custom order it), which is $1.66-1.87/200 calories. Compare to glazed doughnut, Smarties, and potato chips.. hovering in the $0.30/200-cal. range. There are better options (peanut butter, butter, whole milk, etc.) but crap foods do deliver a big caloric bang for the buck.
====
I don’t think it is entirely about “personal responsibility” because there clearly are people who don’t have access to raw or organic foods, even if they could pay for them… (think of the poor souls in hospitals or institutions).
To a certain extent, we are born into captivity, and the reason there are almost 8 billion of us is because of inordinately-cheap carbohydrates obtained via massive lashings of fossil fuels: 10 FF calories for every food calorie in the industrial system.
Hispanic and asian areas seem to offer decent amounts of fresh food in their ethnic markets.. in the black and white-trash areas, not so much.
Grass finished ground beef at W/M is $5.88/lb
Westerners have developed and thrived for thousands of years on four-legged furry animals, so it makes perfect sense that the elites want us eating veggie burgers, tofu loaf and maggot pies.
My wife stayed home and cooked and cleaned and I always made a point to thank her in front of my children for doing these things that made our lives better. Now I do it all by myself and I can tell you that it’s better having a husband and wife to raise kids. Single moms are not that bright arguing this.
I tried giving vegetables away to people in a food bank and the number of people who know nothing about vegetables was amazing. The women at the cash register don’t even know what certain vegetables are, this tells me they don’t ring this stuff up much.
hey, you want some zucchini?, it’s fresh from my garden, I’ve got too much right now:
“nah, my wife doesn’t know how to cook that, got any cucumbers? we know how to eat those”
is usually how it goes.
LMAO
As a kid we had a Victory garden in our back yard. Corn, potatoes, green beans, onions, radishes, beefsteak tomatoes, cucumbers, cantaloupe, and yellow summer squash. All grown in a plot one-third the size of our 100′ x 100′ property. It produced so much for three people over the warm months that we canned, gave stuff away, and traded.
There are people who don’t know how to properly boil water. Why is that? Could it be the same ones shoving ice lollies inside themselves and breeding eaters of Tide Pods?
Meh, we’re better off without them…
They could bring back home economics classes but I guess the Feminazis would have a fit.
In El Paso, you go door to door and sell the excess.
Add some to tomatoes for wonderful lasagna sauce!
Young girl at the Walmarts didn’t recognize a cabbage and rang up brussel sprouts. Moron.
Young bagger girl at Sam’s didn’t know what ox tail is, she got visibly nauseated when we told her.
Good thing we didn’t get the mountain oysters.
EC- The combo of mountain oysters, chitterlings and hog brains would have sent that young’un packing , never to be seen around those parts again. YUM YUM! 🙂
Brains and eggs, the breakfast of champions!
BIG question for EL Commensal, which is the very best,al pastor, carnitas, or canasta tacos IYO?? I needz to know.
Don’t know what canasta tacos are. Al pastor is beef or mutton, carnitas is pork.
Al pastor (from Spanish, “shepherd style”), also known as tacos al pastor, is a dish developed in central Mexico that is based on shawarma spit-grilled meat brought by Lebanese immigrants to Mexico. Being derived from shawarma, it is also similar to the Turkish döner kebab and the Greek gyros.
Bring Mexico’s street food to your kitchen with this easy-to-make recipe of tacos de canasta. Also known as tacos al vapor or tacos “sudados”, these tasty soft tacos are steamed in a large wicker basket. From carnitas and refried beans, to seasoned potatoes, the filling varies.
EC- Canasta tacos are street food of tacos packed in a basket and driven to neighborhoods on bikes. They pour hot grease over them right before they close up the basket so they are really greasy.
I am learning to be a beaner in case I move to Ajijic.
I usually ask for carne asada – beef. The sexy mulatta loves tacos de lengua – beef tongue. Back when we used to go to Tijuana, you found taco stands with a pile of meat in a vertical rotiserie with a blow torch cooking the meat. I liked to look at the works but never ordered any.
El- I eat a lot of Cuban food and Lechon Asada is one of my faves with yucca melanga…. MMmmmmm
Bet you thought we just ate squirrel and possum here in KY?
What does one do to cook a beef tongue?
It tastes boiled. the sexy mulatta peels it and trims fatty stuff she doesn’t like. Serves it with diced cilantro, red onion, radishes and salsa on 2 heated taquito tortillas (4″ diameter).
Thanks! I sent a donation to Admin and credit half to you, half to None Ya Biz.
Tacos Al Pastor are (in my humble opinion), hands down, winner of best fusion fast food evah. Mexican-Lebanese magic; who’d a thunk it?
A resto in Madrid near Puerta del Sol called Takos Al Pastor. Can you guess what they serve there?
Day and night a line to get in because the best Al Pastor tacos in the universe are made there. And cannot beat the price either. Unbelievable with either a local or imported (Mexican) beer.
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g187514-d7294529-Reviews-or10-Takos_Al_Pastor-Madrid.html
I have the frozen tongue and the heart and liver from that young steer we had butchered. What does one do with a beef tongue?
Mags- You can parboil it then slice it and fry it like chicken.
If you get hungry enough Maggie, you would eat the ass end out of a boar hog.
Aw, see what you did, Maggie? You derailed an important theme and turned it into a cooking thread, for shame! As Hollywood might say.
Maggie, you could always make some Haggis…
18 sheeps tongues, blood and lungs and…..
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/haggis-recipe-1911083
Mygirl- I just threw up in my mouth. Bleeeech!
Take one large sheep and toss it in a blender…add more sheep….
Videos like the Haggis video almost turn me vegan. Almost. I confess to enjoying my little shrink wrapped bits of meat from the supermarket. If I had to butcher and kill my own meat I would most assuredly be a vegetarian.
It’s really not that hard. There’s actually more satisfaction because you can get the cuts you want, and you know how the animal was raised (generally not in super-shitty confined spaces).
Mygirl, if you don’t know how to butcher animals, how do you plan to get meat when TSHF?
By the way, if plants had eyes, you wouldn’t be able to eat anything. Cover the eyes and you can do it.
There’s a Scottish pub a ways away from us. If we are in transit we try to stop there. They serve haggis, and it’s actually really good.
Not sure how “authentic” the ingredients are: I asked for a recipe and they said they got it from a butcher who prepared it.
I would like to try haggis. I understand they don’t make with the same ingredients as in the past due to diseases and Mad Cow Disease, which didn’t only affect cows.
Do not summon the demon.
What are mountain oysters?
Testicles
Went to a mtg. of the local farmers’ mkt., asking what they might need to offer. They said “prepared foods” (!)
Quote: “The problem with selling fresh food is that people don’t know what to do with it.”
No mention of GMO’s ?
1. I really dislike some of her political/social commentary. I doubt we would get along in real life. Nevertheless, she makes good points.
2. It is an absolute fact that just because you cook at home, that this is no guarantee you are eating healthy. Mac and cheese ain’t that healthy even when making it from scratch. Buying shitfuk farmed Salmon is very very unhealthy. Cooking with vegetable oil will kill you, eventually. What about using gobs of sugar or salt? The list goes on and on …… Being a home-chef ain’t enough. You need to be an educated/informed home-chef.
3. Home cooking isn’t necessarily a bargain. The number of ingredients and the quality of ingredients play a big role. Especially if you’re buying organic.
4. Check out the author’s list of articles. Almost every single one has to do with cooking at home. lol
——https://www.self.com/contributor/christine-byrne
5. Check out her article titled; —- “7 Easy, Healthy Dinners You Should Eat This Week”. They look really great!! I printed all of them. Tonight I’m going to try the “Chickpea Fajita Bowl”.
— Farro Bowl with Garlicky Kale, Parmesan, and a Sunny-Up Egg
— Sheet Pan Chicken Fajitas
— Pea and Farro Stir-Fry
— Open-Faced Smashed Pea Sandwich with Tomato and Fried Egg
— Pan-Seared Salmon with Farro and Wilted Spinach
— Chickpea, Feta, and Herb-Stuffed Peppers
——– here; https://www.self.com/gallery/seven-dinner-4
Stucky- All that Farro with blah, blah, blah sounds like food guys that wear skinny jeans eat.
Where’s the beef? Chick peas do not trump a piece of real nice meat. IMO
Stuck! The sexy mulatta is back and I am eating again. It’s my mamacita’s fault that I never learned to cook.
I feel SO guilty! I ‘m white and I had a pizza with extra sausage and cheese the other night.
AND obviously racist bacon and eggs too!
I may just give up eating to atone for my white privilege.
How CAN I go on?
golfer- White guilt is disgusting, eat whatever the hell you want to eat….F’em.
Unlike ghetto dwellers, WE pay for our food and I am going to eat whatever I want even if it comes from a flatulent farm animal, it ain’t none of their damn bidness what we eat.
All American meal, hamburger, french fries, soda pop and candy bars.
If I could choose somebody to validate pupusas, it would not be DiCaprio. My libtard sister thinks a pupusa is a gordita. Nope, Salvies like bitter taste where Mexicans like sour. There is no way Mexicans can imitate the taste of refried beans with queso duro in a pupusa. My pedantic boss, the Italian Stallion delicately called them Pup oosas, there are no such things, they are ‘poo POO sahs’.
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/social-media-freaks-out-after-leonardo-dicaprio-says-he-like-pupusas-more-than-tacos
We are still cooking pancakes in our pupusa machine EC. If I ever get out of the corporate rat race, I’m going to learn how to make corn pupusas.
So, to sum it up, Hardscrabble thinks that it takes a village to make a meal. That fall from the tree must have been more rough than he let on.
Not my article.
If you don’t have a vegetable garden, you don’t get it.
Yup on the garden. I just went outside and picked some cucumber, a tomato. and some peppers for a nice little salad. The tomato is still warm from the sun and the peppers are sweet with a small jalapeno tossed in for a touch of spicy….
Lots of off the rails crap in this one, along with some obvious truths, but this, “processed foods are generally cheaper than unprocessed or minimally processed foods” tells a whopper of a lie.
Yeah some Jimmy Dean biscut breakfast(or whatever) might be cheaper then a couple eggs and home made bread upfront, but years of eating that shit wrecks havoc on your body.
I’m almost 70 and a lifetime of what I consider a healthy diet has left me with glowing skin, a sex drive, lots of energy and a positive outlook on life(knock on wood). Several of the folks I work with, in their 40s and 50s, have horrible skin blotches, are on numerous prescriptions and almost all of them are not just 10 or 20 pounds overweight but have huge guts. They can hardly bend over without turning beet red. It would scare the crap out of me.
My protein sources are mainly wild caught fish, grass finished beef and animals I’ve killed. I avoid soy, whether in chicken feed or in feed lot beef or as soybean oil in fucking everything, like the GD poison it is. My chickens eat soy free feed, grass and bugs.
I swim( 1 mile minimum) or lift weights every day. My body is the greatest gift imaginable and the older I get the more reverence I have for it. It’s taken me from SCUBA diving the Great Barrier Reef to the top of many of CO’s 14teeners to sailing the Carib for years.
Just yesterday I was talking with someone about the guy who ate McDonalds everyday for a month. He said that while that would “of course” not be healthy, once in a while is fine. I said he was crazy, eating that shit anytime, no matter how infrequently is off the walls idiocy. He says, “What are you, one of those health nuts?” through a mouthful of missing and crooked teeth that are the dreams of dentists. He’s 41 and drinks soda like water.
Fat, winded and unable to see my dick anymore ain’t no way to go through life. It starts with eating right.
Good comment. That’s the way I eat as well. I’d rather pay a little more for what I eat than have to pay it in health care costs. I have to eat anyway so might as well work on my health at the same time. But I do need more exercise. Since my dog died at the beginning of the month, no more walks with him, and I don’t walk as much now. I hope to have either one or two dogs again in a couple of months.
It’s not just the cost but a lifetime of unhealthy eating takes it’s toll in the quality of life you have. I know many people that take 4 or 5 or 6 pills a day for whatever, WhoTF wants that?
Sorry about your pup, I have one nearing the end too, best dog I ever had.
Thank you for the condolences to Scooter. He was such a good dog. He was a very large dog that lived to 16. And he hated Democrats! (If you know what I mean.)
The way I look at medications, I don’t have a shortage of them in my body, therefore, I don’t need to take any. I use natural medicine. Now, if I was in an accident or had an emergency situation, I would used medical care. For anything else, no thanks.
A racist dog, I’m not sure that puppy will be going to heaven, I don’t care what they say about that.
He was a great dog. Just like people, dogs are wary of what they don’t know. And it was his mission to make sure that unknown didn’t come closer. He succeeded beyond measure.
Make sure they have all their shots and sensitivity training.
MMinLamesa,
I agree with VV good post.
We are the same age and have approached nutrition and health with similar attitudes, practices and results.
My Mother was always into Prevention magazine and I read it constantly as a young man, then focused in like a lazar on detox and healthy practices after realizing I had been exposed to Agent Orange.
Vibrant health, energy, the right weight, sex drive, etc. the most important factor is what you put into that hole under your nose and physical work/exercise.
My come to Jesus moment was discovering Adelle Davis when I was 18. Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit and later, her cookbook. I swear, she saved my life.
I also was very lucky to get onto Life Extension when they were just getting going in the early 90s. Fantastic resource and their monthly magazine has cutting edge nutrition and anti aging articles & studies. Inexpensive blood work too which is a health necessity.
And the right weight is of course important but when I hear overweight folks tell me they’re going to start going to the gym, they just aren’t getting it. Trying to “burn” off the calories in a donut would take you a couple hours on a treadmill. It all starts with your diet. Yes the gym is important, but that’s to maintain your health.
What a bunch of crap. Racism is why people don’t eat well? Sure. Watch youtube vids of govt tax eaters spending their EBT at wally and see what they get. Wings, hotdogs, soda, etc. In Cali, you can see people on youtube bragging about how they can get their hair and nails done and get fried wings on EBT. In northern VA, I used to talk to cashiers to ask about EBT users. One griped she couldn’t afford to buy what the tax eaters were buying. She said they would get expensive steaks she couldn’t afford with her salary. In 2000, I watched a tax eater in Norfolk buy a case of beer with food stamps. It’s obviously racism that made this possible, not ignorant asshats doing what ignorant asshats do.
If we’re going to persist in giving people handouts, I think we should copy Iraq and give the tax eaters a box of rice, wheat, oil, sugar, etc every month and let them figure it out for themselves. It would cut down on fraud and we could laugh as they starve to death staring at the packages for inspiration.
Food deserts? If the residents of utopias, like Chicago, Detroit, and elsewhere didn’t wreck their own communities, perhaps stores that offer something beyond liquor and check cashing would still be open for them. Time? That’s the ultimate monkey, but you can learn to better spend your time. A crock pot can help. You could also get off your lazy ass and plant some of your own food. Even a potted tomato can be extremely productive on a porch. I’ve been nursing plants all season through the strange late cold and heavy rains we got this year. It’s finally paying off in fresh apricots, the first couple tomatoes, lots of fresh mint, huge onions coming in, and other goodies. If you eat weeds, like the dandelions that will grow in your plot with no help from you, you can do even better. If we can get a man on the moon, you can probably figure out how to feed yourself.
Exactly.
I am triggered by the term “WhiteWash”! /sarc
Sent a donation to Admin for your comment the other day about wanting to support but not able due to obligation to grandkids.
Sent Admin my ill gotten gains from selling those goats to a Mexican goat farmer in Arkansas. You almost have to sell them for something or no one will get them.
So, 50 bucks and a good story about the goats I sold into the Arkansas goat trade was what it took.
And, EC gets credit for the great recipe, for goat and for beef tongue.
It’s such bs. Last night I took two bags of frozen veggies, poured them into a pan just like the one shown, added some avacado oil and some butter, a bunch of spices, turned the heat on low, and walked away. Came back 15 minutes later and dumped it into a bowl. Wow that is so difficult! I’ve been doing this more and more. Usually I add chopped steak or chicken but I am so tired of seeing fat people everywhere that it just makes me want to eat the simplest possible keto meals and not even think about food.
You must be from the South, over here, we call them avocados.