Know what heroic eating is

Heroic eating — this is what I call my cheat day that marks the end of a painfully heavy workout program. 

I was wolfing down a quarter-pounder to go with supersized French fries and soda in a delusional belief that my caloric meter would not budge with the amount of heavy lifting I made the past week.  

“What a perfect way to celebrate Hunger and Nutrition Month,” I said to myself. 

I was trying to figure out the mathematical alibi to justify my binge when a family of 3 walked by and caught my gaze. Looking at the food on their table, it wasn’t easy to see that the family was not as guilt-stricken as I was in making dietary decisions. 

They had pasta, burgers, fried chicken and a little of everything else on the menu. The combined girth of the family suggested to me that this was an ordinary meal. The kid was anywhere between 7 or 9 years of age, and every indication pointed to his body mass index (BMI) — a measure of fatness or fitness — far exceeding what is considered normal for his age. Both parents had bulges. 

When I had those bulges, my wife Cecil who has an uncanny sense of humor, would say that I could rest my arm on them whenever I slouched. Whenever I wear jeans, she would say, “Can you tuck those bulges in, Pops?”

Two things caught my interest as I furtively glanced at the family that just walked by. The first one was subtle: they hardly talked to each other. The kid was doodling on his Playstation while the parents did  the same with their smart phones.

I wondered how this image of a typical Filipino family has become more commonplace nowadays, when eating has become a mild nuisance that gets in the way of the more important things in life, something that needs to be gotten over and done with as quickly as possible. 

It used to be when eating was more than eating. It was a ritual that binds the family together starting with food preparation where just about every family member had a role to play. The meal itself was an occasion to know how each and every member of the family is doing and what their plans are.

I guess this notion of eating is the casualty of the mass proliferation of fast food. 

Fastfood  

The second thing that caught my interest was something more obvious: the food of the typical urban family is simply way too much.

If I make a guess of the amount of food that the family was eating, I wouldn’t be surprised if it reaches 4,000. A plateful of pasta with cheese and meat sauce is roughly about 400 calories. Fried chicken leg is about 300 calories. An average-sized soda is another 400 calories. Sundae with chocolate topping is 200 calories.

Cheeseburger? That’s another 300 calories. And oh, the French fries, that’s another 300 calories.

To put this amount of calories in perspective, assume that an average male child from 4-8 years old needs a 1,400 daily calorie intake to stay nourished. Average adults need at least 2,500 calories. Assume further that a normal body could process 1,500 calories.

Excess calories need to be burned with the aid of physical activity (FYI doodling your gadget or using TV manual buttons instead of the remote control don’t count as a physical activity). Unburned calories stay in the body as fats. The more fats you have, the more your system needs to work harder. 

Cardiovascular diseases, osteoarthritis, and type 2 diabetes are symptoms of a body system going awry. Studies show that in the Philippines non-communicable diseases such as these kill roughly about 200,000 people every year. 

No wonder a special sections on heart ailments and diabetes have now become commonplace in supermarkets and grocery shops. This was unthinkable a decade ago.

To say that such a situation takes a terrible toll on one’s quality of life, of the family’s quality of life, is to state the obvious. And it seems to me that the problem is growing in such menacing proportion.

A survey shows for instance, that as of 2008 26.6% of Filipino adults are overweight, a sharp increase from 16.6% reported in 1993. About 6.6% of children aged 5 to 10 years old, a spike from 5.8% in 2003. Not only that it will affect the Filipino family but it will also strain our public health system, which can only cope by social protection remittances and taxes.

Food insecurity, hunger, #BuyLocal

But our increasing reliance on fast and convenient food has another profound impact, one that pokes an accusing finger at us as a society. If you imagine how much of the food value ends up in the hands of food producers in the countryside, you’ll be very astonished to see how little it is. This is because much of the values end up straight in the pockets of fast food and agribusiness companies. 

Such a situation brings about a paradox where the urban areas are over-nourished, while the rural areas, unable to earn enough, are undernourished. 

According to the World Bank’s report, “The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012,” 16 million Filipinos are undernourished from 2010 to present, even as the number of chronically undernourished people dropped in other southeast Asian countries. 

The Social Weather Station reported that in March this year, about 3.9 million Filipino families said that they experienced hunger, a figure which was higher by 16.3% in December 2012. 

Certainly the government has a lot to do to fix this problem. More public disclosures on the part of fastfood companies of the amount of calories in the food they are selling should top the list. The public education system must begin to scrutinize the kind of food sold in school canteens. That should be on the top of the list too.

Heroic eating

But parents have a bigger role to play and they can do quite a lot. A good starting point is what I call heroic eating.

When deciding what food to eat, parents must ask themselves the goodness that they are doing not just for the family, but also for the rest of society. 

Will their choices really bring health to the family? Will their choices not harm the ability of the food producers in the countrysides to provide nourishment for their own families? Parents must ask these questions the next time they queue up the fastfood counter.

Buying locally grown food produced by our small-scale farmers and fishers helps address poverty and brings back jobs, especially in the rural areas. Asking about where our food comes from and how food is made is a start in helping smallholder food producers’ livelihoods. – Rappler.com
 

Dante Dalabajan is currently the manager of Oxfam’s Building Resilient and Adaptive Communities and Institutions in Mindanao (BINDS) project. He was a former policy and research officer of the economic justice program of Oxfam. He has 17 years of experience in public policy research and advocacy and campaigns.

This piece is part of Oxfam’s online campaign — #GROWChallenge which calls for netizens to commit to at least one of the 5 calls #GROWChallenge: #EatBrownRice, #BuyLocal, #ReduceFoodWaste, #SaveWater, and #ConserveEnergy. 

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