The Corporate Take-over of my Meals

I live in an American city, I mean a city in the United States of America. Listed below are the meals I had on Sunday, 21st August 2005:

Breakfast: Cereal - my favorite Honey Bunches of oats with almonds - with Silk Soy vanilla soymilk; guava juice from a carton pack.

Lunch: Morningstar Garden Veggie burger on Oroweat cracked wheat bun with a slice of Kraft Deluxe cheese, ketchup, mustard, dill relish all from Heinz, and packaged salsa bought from Trader Joe's. My burger also had a couple of slices of a "fresh" tomato from my refrigerator. I washed down my burger with a cheap local brand ginger ale. (I don't remember tasting ginger ale before, but I really liked it ice cold this hot afternoon).

Dinner: Maggi noodles prepared in the typical "2 minutes" style. Boil water, add noodles and the accompanying packet of flavoring powder.

Why am I listing my meals? After all, I am not some celebrity, in whose diet people would be interested. What is the common factor we notice among all the stuff I ate yesterday? Yes, except for the two slices of tomato on my burger, everything else that I ate was processed and packaged food! I am amazed that 99% percent of my one full day's diet is food, which came out of a box and was several days (months actually) old! This must be one of the defining factors in the Americanization of my lifestyle. Yet, I did not even notice when exactly this happened to me. I have had countless meals like these since I came to the US.

I am amazed at how much of processed and packaged food people eat in the US. When I was growing up in India, almost 100% of my diet was fresh, home-made stuff. The milk we drank in the morning was milked from a cow that very morning and the milk we drank in the evening was milked that very afternoon. We bought our vegetables fresh daily. Except for vegetables like onions, potatoes, ginger, garlic, etc. which could be kept for a few days, all other vegetables were bought fresh every day and consumed the same day. We did not have a refrigerator! There was no question of eating left-over food. Either we made sure nothing was left over or we gave the food away to beggars who came looking for left-overs, late in the night or early next morning. When we were kids, often my mother not even let us eat at night, food prepared in the afternoon. All our spice mixes were home-made from scratch. We did not buy packaged spices (except for asafoetida, perhaps). Everything we ate was either fresh or naturally dried or processed at home. The only ingredients of our daily diet which were processed and bought in packets were salt and sugar.

Talking of sugar, what's with the American breakfast? Except for the cholesterol-rich and non-vegetarian omelettes, is there any other American breakfast dish that is not loaded with sugar? In my South Indian home, a sweet breakfast is a rare thing. We had it once in about 1 or 2 or even 3 months. Although there are countless varieties of Indian sweet dishes and delicacies, they are not usually consumed on a daily basis. The only daily sugar in-take for Indians would be in coffee, tea, milk or some other hot beverage. Like me, if you do not sip any hot beverage on a daily basis, your consumption of processed sugar would be very rare and low indeed. In America, 99% of the breakfast is loaded with sugar. At meals, the average person does not drink water. At lunch and/or dinner, the culture - no doubt with ample encouragement and conditioning from soft drink corporations - is to have another load of sugar in soda pop. If not soda pop, it is some alcoholic beverage at dinner. What the heck! What is wrong with simple, healthy water?

In the India I grew up in, fully 90% to 100% of any meal was freshly prepared at home, with ingredients made from scratch. In an average American home, anywhere from 80% to 100% of the meal is processed and packaged food. Even Indians in the US, who stick to Indian diet and cook their own food at home, can't avoid an increase in the percentage of processed food they consume compared to their life in India. This is not a healthy state of affairs.

Unfortunately, this trend is increasing in India also. More and more food is processed and packaged. This will only increase as more and more multi-national food companies setup shop in India, as the local street-corner grocery stores and travelling vegetable carts disappear giving way to grocery super markets, as the Indian public ape America's consumerist culture, as the woman of the house no longer sees feeding the family healthy food as one of her primary tasks. It is a sad change. A change which will reduce the quality of the Indian diet and increase the number of diet-related illnesses in India, the way it is already happening in America.