Kitchen Pimpin’ Obesity

The Lonestar State has the highest percentage of overweight adult males at 75.5%, only second to Alabama’s 75.9%. There are plenty of attempts to educate the population on how to eat — nutritional charts and dietary recommendations, for instance — but these are not solutions. The majority of us know that we need to consume more vegetables, but we are less compliant to do so because we don’t enjoy being told what to eat (maybe more so what NOT to eat). Our diet is really a personal relationship with food. We need personalized methods to improve our individual ways of eating. Instead of a massive health campaign telling people to eat healthier and exercise more, a more impacting solution would be to create a healthier environment that empowers people to learn and care for themselves. In other words: get cookin’. In particular, get young males like myself into kitchens to cook for our family and friends.
I got the idea from Coolio’s recent (and amazing) cookbook, Cookin’ with Coolio: 5 Star Meals at a 1 Star Price. The former multi-platinum rapper grew up poor with little knowledge about food, stating that he had the skill of making something out of nothing. He learned how to cook, probably something unique amongst the male youth of his childhood community. What is cool about Cookin’ with Coolio, is that it empowers young men to build confidence, take control of their health, and potentially prevent obesity by learning how to successfully cook real food at home on a tight budget. By presenting his personal story as a living example, Coolio shares his recipes and cooking techniques so that people in lower-income situations can utilize their resources to become successful “Kitchen Pimps”. Taken at face value, this cookbook might seem like a comical sales gimmick, but Cookin’ with Coolio is a masterpiece for public health and could benefit thousands suffering from malnutrition and obesity.

Click the photo to check out his cooking show!

How does Kitchen Pimpin’ prevent obesity?
Cookin’ with Coolio helped me realize that home cooking is more than a luxury; it is an approach to solving the obesity epidemic. There are many people that are too reliant on fake industrial foods, and “[Coolio] want[s] people to know that just because you’re poor, you don’t have to eat fast food every day.” Eating healthy food is more complicated when you are in a difficult economic situation. Some people insist that we need to eat only vegetables grown locally and spend a lot more for our food. Coolio argues that is not necessary for most: “Whole Foods and Gelson’s have a lot of great stuff, but [normal grocery stores] have everything you need to make haute cuisine at home.” Kitchen Pimpin’ and learning the art of “The Ghetto Gourmet” brings awareness to the more realistic problem and solution in our national obesity epidemic that people need to learn more about food and how to cook at home. Instead of focusing all of our attention on paying more for ethical foods (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), we should educate the population about food and create the environments and resources needed to get people cooking.

Eating Pizza in Brazil

My first Food Studies paper has been published in the 2010-2011 issue of Portal, the yearly academic publication from the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. It is a simple account of my recent study abroad experience in Brazil. It is so interesting how eating pizza with my host family made me aware of so many social issues in their society and lives. This, is how I study food.

Eating Pizza in Brazil: poverty and other social issues

The entire world eats Pizza, or something that resembles it, such as seafood pizza in Japan or the pizza with fruit Brazilians eat here in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. At LLI- LAS, my concentration is officially Portuguese, but my true focus lies in food studies. Normally, a student like myself, who is interested in learning about pizza, would probably focus on the food itself: the toppings, the sauces, or the crust. However, in my studies, I learn about larger social issues through my personal experiences and interest in food. I am currently studying abroad in Brazil and have had the honor of living with an amazing host family of four: father, mother, and two sons, ages 22 and 16. The other night on the way home from an event, we decided to get a pizza for dinner. I did not realize how different the whole process was going to be from the “American” way of getting a pizza. The experience revealed many social and economic issues related to poverty. The following story about eating pizza with my new Brazilian family reveals a deeper social context, beyond gastronomy, in the way pizza is obtained, received, and consumed. Enjoy.

My Garden, Our Garden

My Garden, Our Garden: my first vegetable garden with my host family in Brazil

I decided to try my hand at growing a vegetable garden. The project was initially for myself, to learn and connect more with my food studies. Yet, I quickly realized that there is a lot more to gardening than just biology and manual labor. Every time I stepped foot into my garden, tons of metaphors came to mind. The most important was learning that nature is life. We have to treat it like a relationship and not an obstacle. It needs to be loved, fed, and wanted or it will die. If it dies, we will die. Maybe not instantly but we will decay eventually from inside out.

In my food studies, I always hear this statistic that only 4% of the population of the United States grows all of the country’s food. I assume that there are not many Americans who want to do the physical labor or devote the time required to grow real food, nor understand the complexed science and biological relationships between nature and food. But, I feel that we have to challenge ourselves to learn about food. Just like any field of study that we might get into, we must learn the basics, the history, the traditional ways and thoughts to achieve something different, great, and truly innovative. I always remember the example that Rocket Scientist, Wernher von Braun; it is said that he didn’t like mathematics and physics but his fascinations with space travel inspired him to study the subjects he needed to achieve his dream. So I thought, if I want to bring food sovereignty to the world, then I need to understand what is food. Hence the garden.

My Food Pantry

In my last post, I wrote about the Cesta Básica (CB), a basic package of foods that my host family and I eat everyday. Another month has passed and we received our CB, this time there was no toothpaste but some coffee.  When opening up the CB and putting the items away, I thought about about my mom, my biological mother that is, coming home from the grocery store and together my family would “upload” the car full of plastic bags. Here in Belo Horizonte, they just passed a law banning plastic bags and my the way we store food is very different.

Basically, there are three places where we store food in my Brazilian home–well, three visible places that is, because my family is know for hiding food as well, comer na graveta (eating in the draw)–in Kitchen Jars, the Refrigerator, and my host Dad’s Closest.

Kitchen Jars 

Keeping basic ingredients in kitchen jars seems like something from my grandmother’s era. I grew up in the plastic world of pre-packaged processed foods, zip lock bags, and Tupperware (notice how the last two are brand names). Yet, here in Brazil it common to have a collection of 6 to 10 kitchen jars containing the basic foods they eat. My home has 5 Potes Mantimentos (Grocery Pots), listed from largest to smallest respectively:

1. Arroz (Rice)
2. Açúcar (Sugar)
3. Farinha (Cassava meal)
4. Fubá (Corn meal)
5. Café (Coffee)

   In the past, a lot of people used a 6th container for Feijão (beans) but now most people just cook batches from the 1kilo bags.

Looking at kichen jar’s size, number, material used in their construction, what ingredients stored inside can say a lot about Brazilian society.

What kitchen jars are common in the States? In your home? A cookie jar?

Refrigerator

The frige is the second most popular place to store food in my home. One day I opened up our Geladera and saw the following:

1. A pot with milk that was old and spoiled when my family bought it. They refused to throw it away, because it could be used for something. After about a month, I pitched it. For some reason I felt kinda bad not knowing how to utilize it.
2. Half a head of cabbage, one of the few vegetables that my family Mineira eat.
3. A leftover dinner plate that my mom didn’t finish eating (spaghetti and beans).
4. A plate of chicken bones (don’t know what we did with this).
5. A plate of frozen fat. I think that it was pork fat.
6. Bowl of Chuchu that I chopped up.
7. A pitcher of juice that I made from the orange tree in the front lawn.
8. Plastic container of Tempeiro (a mixture of salt, garlic, parsley, and green onion) that my family uses universally to season everything. My mom also makes Tempeiro to sell, but it rarely gets sold because she is not physically capable (obesity) to walk around and sell it. Even though she pays my brother to sell it for her, he doesn’t do it because there is little profit and with the few hours he gets away from college and work, he would rather do other things like sleep.

My refrigerator here is so different from my mother’s (full of condiments) or grandmother’s (full of food that goes bad) in the States. Even though this refrigerator looks poor and empty, I think there are many positive things that we can learn from it.

What is your refrigerator like? How do you use it to store food?

Papa’s Closet

The most socially complexed of all the areas that we store food in my home is my host father’s closet. In addition to the tons of random stuff that he saves in there, there is a metal self that acts as our food pantry. Unlike many pantries in the States, our pantry does not hold a variety of goods that we like to have on hand to eat, instead most of our food is surplus from the Cesta Básica. When something runs out in the kitchen jars, we are allowed to go in a take a replacement. At first, I did not understand why they didn’t keep the food pantry in the kitchen, but over time I learned their eating ways and realized the more food out, the more they will consume and are likely to waste.

Initially, I was surprised to see that my host father never locks his closet, considering that he tries to control food consumption and utilizes every little bit possible. There is a lot more to the social politics of his closet but that investigation will require much more timing living with my host family.

Some might read this blog post feeling sad for my family for lacking an American style pantry, yet I have come to learn what is more sad is our foodways in the States. With our abundance, we don’t respect food and spend most of our time complaining about it. I argue that really, we are the poor and dumb.

Cesta Básica

In Brazil, the government considers food a social right and requires as part of their minimum wage law. One attempt to combat hunger in the country is the Cesta Básica. It is a package of basic necessities, almost entirely food, to hopefully sustain a family of 4 for a month. This is just one of the country’s initiatives to feed the population.

What national food security programs are commonly known in the States: Food Stamps.. WIC?

My attraction to the Cesta Básica started while living the last few months with two Brazilian host families. One I will classify as poor and the other as rich. With my rich family, my 1st pai (father) would buy and give his house maid a Cesta Básica once a month to help support her. Now, living with my poor family, my 2nd pai receives a Cesta Básica monthly from his work to survive.

The other day my 2nd pai let me open up our Cestá to see what we got to eat this month.

Weekday Mindful Eater in College: The Economics of my food

What does it mean to eat for me, here in college life? After reading Warren Balasco’s book “Food: The Key Concepts“, I wanted to apply his Mindful Eating assignment as “a step toward more consciousness” in my life as an undergraduate in college. So, I recorded different things about my weekday meals. I did not track the nutritional facts. Instead, I focused more on economics, time, phycology of eating.

Economics of my food
It was hard to track the economics of my food since I was living in Co-Operative house which bought most of my food with rent money. Although I could always eat for “free” at home, I am not a fan of packing PB & J that just gets hot and nasty in my backpack come lunch time. I was told that approximately the Co-Op spent about 4 dollars a day to feed me.