Common-Sense Weight Loss: Introduction Part 1
For previous posts on common-sense weight loss, see the category list on the right.
Introduction
March 2006. Round Rock, Texas. Yesterday my wife and I visited a phenomenal Temple of Food. We are in Texas visiting my daughter and her family, and we accompanied her to the gigantic new HEB grocery store near her home. I don't think most warehouse stores could compete in grocery acreage and shelf space with this incredible food emporium. I was overwhelmed. Massive meat counters. Yards and yards of chicken. Case after case of cuts of beef and pork. Snacks and free samples everywhere. Long row after long row of freezer cases, convenience foods, soda, beer, candy, chips, crackers, cookies, and bakery goods. Spacious produce displays. It was worth coming in this wonderful store just to look around and marvel at its size and to see the varieties and quantities of foods on display.
Grocery supermarkets in this country are truly miraculous creations. Foreigners who come to America and step into a modern grocery supermarket for the first time are typically bewildered and astonished by the choices available to them. Everywhere in these stores signals appear urging us to buy more food and, particularly, to buy food items we hadn't considered buying or didn't need when we came into the store.
Saturday morning television pounds food ads into the brains of our children and then they beg for the cereals and other products that the advertisers have successfully urged them to buy and eat. Free samples tempt us to consume unnecessary calories and to buy the food items sampled. The jingles and images from the television ads are floating in our brains and ringing in our ears. Special displays convince us that we can save more by buying more. Buy this item even though you know you don't need it! Load up your grocery cart! Pay just a little more and get twice as much! Fill up one cart and then get another! Buy more so you can eat more! Eat more so you can buy more and then come back and buy even more! Don't quit now, ten more long aisles await you, beckoning you with tasty and delicious products loaded with fat, sugar, and salt!
Huge shares of the American and global economies are devoted to growing, raising, manufacturing, processing, refrigerating, distributing, transporting, cooking, serving, marketing, and advertising food. Carloads of grain; loads of cattle; shipments of hogs, sheep, and poultry; tons of frozen pizzas, ice cream, hamburger, convenience foods; fresh fruits and vegetables of every variety imaginable; bread and bakery goods; truckloads of chips and cookies, enough to fill up aisles of grocery store space; countless cases of soda pop and beer; candy and every kind of snack available; breakfast cereals by the aisle, many overloaded with sugar and short on fiber; dairy products, eggs, margarines, oils, dressings, pickles, spaghetti sauces; soups and ethnic foods and tens of thousands of other items. Countless new food items are introduced each year and new varieties will appear in your super market to tempt you the next time you shop for groceries.
Every hour and every minute of every day countless motor carriers complete the final leg of the food distribution chain with their endless deliveries to individual grocery stores, convenience stores, and restaurants. And every morning many of us go to the store and miraculously find everything we are looking for plus a few items we had never thought of before. We, the consumers, are the end of and primary reason for all of this frantic activity, for all of this production on all of the farms and ranches, for all of the motor and rail carriers who haul produce and livestock to processors and then to markets; for all of the ordering and inventorying and inspection and displaying. The fact that we can go to such wondrous food stores and usually find everything we want or need is truly one of the wonders of modern commerce.
to be continued . . .
