Preface

Dearest food,

Please accept our sincerest apologies. Some people don't even mean to treat you badly, they just don't know what to do! (like when Anthony was talking about his time in the CIA with aspics and table-side service.) We have come a long we have cove a long way as a country though, I swear! With Julia leading the crusade, and Gordon both fixing restaurants and creating mini-chefs, things are coming along.  I, too, am trying to get these people to understand. Just be patient.
 

Countless countries have been treating food as delicately as one should treat a lover for centuries. These counties have mastered the timing, the subtlety and the gentle touch that is required to get the most flavor out of the ingredients they use. They know that the more time and care they take in preparing their food, the more it gives back.

So why the devil have we sabotaged food, making it into almost an enemy. Americans roll our eyes at the thought of having to spend hours preparing a meal. We look for fast alternatives that involve canned and frozen foods and leave the real meal preparation to professionals at restaurants. Part of this is of course our individualistic, fast-paced lifestyle and also that we just have not been brought up to go to the market everyday and get fresh ingredients. 

This is grievously annoying and food really doesn't appreciate how we have come to treat it. It gives us comfort, joy, love, happiness, entertainment, and a lot to think about. The two-way relationship is a happy commitment with food being used for its potential and spent time with, and human satisfied in their taste buds.The marriage between humanity and food must be worked on, for we have lost sight of why we love her so much in the first place.

Food must be savored. For an extreme example, a weight loss exercise my Uncle had to complete was to observe a peanut, next smell it, after that "listen" to it, and slowly eat it- with each activity taking about 10 minutes. That's a bit silly- but please do at least chew your food. Let this country take a lesson from one of it's elders-India. The same country that gave us the Karma Sutra has given us some of the most flavorful, complex, comforting and orgasmic food for the world.You think, “Food” is content when we eat cheese from a can? No. It weeps. It weeps because we tend to eat too fast. Just picture "The Simpson's" wolfing down their food. Now, this is a real problem because we don't give our body time to digest and therefore, aren't sent the 'full' signal until we've eaten way too much.

God. How can we combat obesity and look toward the future of global society? We must-once again-learn from our elders.

For one thing, we are low down the freshness scale. We need to go back to preparing food from fresh ingredients and from scratch. North America used to be appropriately equivalent to other countries in our freshness standard. In many European countries, citizens will go shopping everyday for fresh ingredients like fresh meats, cheese and bread.

It's partly the size of our country, its vast and we need to move goods from place to place. Thus, in about the 1950s, some bright chap invented frozen foods. This was utterly fantastic for commerce and the shelve life of many processed foods. However, the downside of shipping food cross-country was that American tastebuds grew accustom to different kinds of sensations-the kind that can only be for chemicals, and so many American meals consisted of juices from concentrate and TV dinners.A trend that one might still see echos of today. Although the American palette is now more diversified, we still are controlled by those chemicals that make food taste good- trans fats.

We must accept the lessons of our elders and go back to food. She has been waiting.