When I was a kid, this was about the only way to make popcorn at home.
I wrote before about the American diet. In the old days, it was a cornucopia of different foods. Breakfast, lunch, or dinner, you had a meat, bread, starch (potato, rice), vegetable, and dessert. Sometimes there were two vegetables! And us kids washed it all down with 12-ounce glasses of milk. It was a wholesome diet for growing kids, although in later years, we would be convinced that it was an unhealthy and unsustainable diet.
So, what replaced it? Today we eat like children at a six-year-old's birthday party. Popcorn and chips, soda and candy, pizza, hot dogs, hamburgers, french fries and onion rings. And washing it all down is the high-fructose-corn-syrup soda pop - which people actually drink with breakfast nowadays. I still remember back in Ithaca, New York, the McDonald's was offering "breakfast sandwiches" which was a novelty. The guy ahead of me in line ordered two, along with a hash brown. "Something to drink, sir?" the clerk asked. "Sure, a large coke!" he replied.
I nearly vomited. Coffee? Sure. Juice? OK. Milk? Perfect for that hangover. Coca-Cola? For breakfast?
Of course, since then, "Coffee" has morphed into a sugary-sweet milkshake-like thing at Starbucks. 1000 calories a serving - enough to satisfy you for half a day (but you'll carbo-crash by 10AM!) UPDATE: The Mint-mocha-chip frappichino seems to have gone away, perhaps due to shame. Still, you can get many "coffee drinks" that are well over 500 calories there - 1/4 of your daily requirement? Which meal are you skipping as a result?).
The end result of our new diet was a rapid increase in obesity in America (and slowly, worldwide) as well as an epidemic of childhood obesity. That was bad enough, but now children are getting kidney stones? Oy!
Kidney stones are nothing to laugh at - even for an adult. And usually they affect older men and women. I had a friend from India who had more than one - something to do with genetics, his diet (rich in salt, I guess) and lack of hydration. But children? Why? How?
Well, diet is the key, and today while we profess to "eat healthy!" we actually don't. People swill down "sports drinks" that are nothing but sodium, sugar, and caffeine. Parents take their children to Starbucks for a "coffee drink" when they are six years old. And chips and snack foods today have morphed from basic potato chips to orange-powder-covered snacks of all shapes and sizes. They even make taco shells out of them!
I blame the orange powder. That shit ain't right.
I wrote before about "candy vegetarians" at Wegman's in Ithaca. I saw two skinny girls in combat boots roaming the "vegetarian" aisle and in their cart they had vegan oreos, vegan breakfast cereal, and other sorts of candy treats. Yes, technically, Coca-Cola is vegan (gluten-free as well!) but that doesn't mean it is good for you.
That's the problem with the American diet. We've convinced ourselves that the Sunday dinner that Mom put on the table - pot roast, peas, mashed potatoes, collard greens, bread-and-butter, apple cobbler, and glasses of milk, was "unhealthy" and that instead, we should eat a diet of chemicals.
And it didn't happen all at once. When I was in High School, the big scandal was that they put a Coke machine in by the cafeteria. They unplugged it during the day and only allowed kids to use it after classes ended - at first. But then they gave up and let it run all day. And the soda companies paid the school to install soda machine(s) over time. Before then, the only beverages in school were water from the water fountain or milk from the cafeteria. A whole generation has been raised on sugary drinks - 100 to 200 calories a can!
Americans want to eat healthier, but the normative cues they are getting are all off. Instead of just eating normal portions of healthy, ordinary foods, we are exhorted to exclude items from our diet. It started with the "fat-free" and "lite" movements. But as I noted, a sack of Jolly Rancher candies (in the vegan aisle as well) is listed as not only "fat-free" but "gluten-free" as well! How they got all that bread out of the candy, I'll never know!
Sugar-free was next, and today we have a host of "frees" that are supposed to make us healthier - carb-free, gluten-free, peanut-free, dairy-free, and so on and so forth. Granted, some are in reaction to real allergy problems, but most people merely invent some sort of food intolerance in order to get attention.
Note that the most recent "free" movements attack some of the most basic foods in our traditional diet. Youngsters are exhorted to drink "almond milk" instead of dairy - which we are told is horrible for you and the environment. Funny thing, but the French have amazing cheeses and seem to live longer than us. They have good cheese and wash it down with fine wine. We have orange cheese, slathered on a bad pizza, washed down with soda-pop. There is a lesson in there somewhere.
Bread - the stuff of life - is under attack by the gluten-free movement. A food "allergy" that affects a tiny, tiny portion of the population has been projected onto everyone. The no-carb movement followed closely thereafter, renaming the ill-fated "Atkins" diet as "Keto" or "Carnivore" diets. Dr. Atkins is dead, and a lot of people - including myself - got sick from the no-carbs all-meat diet (it gave me gout).
Funny thing, the "eat all of this, none of that" diet approach is not good for you. The traditional meals we had as kids - with a little of this, a little of that - made up a balanced diet and was for the most part, healthy.
Of course, portion control was another part of the problem. The McDonald's hamburger was tiny, but it was something you had while "on the road" or when you were out shopping and needed a quick bite. But it morphed into the "Big Mac" and Burger King responded with "The Whopper" and the fries went from a little paper sack to a cardboard bucket. And the drinks all went to "supersize" as well. It wasn't that an occasional fast-food meal would kill you, but over time, many started to look at McDonald's as their kitchen. No need to pack lunch for work! Just race down to the fast-food miracle mile and drive through! You can wolf it all down and be back at work in no time!
Of course, the problem is us - we like salty things and sweet things, and things that are "yummy!" So it is easy to eat an entire bag of microwave popcorn (it's only 500 calories, right?). Just don't inhale the fumes from it.
As a kid growing up in the 1960's, I saw this transition in eating habits firsthand. Back then, we were allowed to drink soda-pop, but never, ever for breakfast. And Coke came in 7-ounce bottles which you pulled through a little mechanism after opening the narrow vertical door in the Coke machine. But 10-ounce and then 12-ounce (and then 16-ounce!) bottles followed shortly thereafter as Pepsi and Coke tried to outdo one another. The switch to high-fructose corn syrup made soda-pop so cheap it was the cheapest beverage in the supermarket. Cheaper than beer, milk, or even water.
Slowly, over time, soda-pop went mainstream. For people born since I graduated from high school, the omnipresence of soda in their lives seems as natural as breathing. Of course there is a soda machine in the high school - and the elementary school as well! What, you want the kids to go thirsty? At the same time, drinking fountains disappeared, one by one, along with the phone booths of yore. We no longer need phone booths, of course, but when did we stop drinking water?
Similarly, the school cafeteria gave up on serving traditional meals and just went over to fast-food - often contracting-out the school cafeteria to fast-food franchises. It is the same idea as the coke machine in the high school - they pay to have it put there, not because it will make them tons of money, but it will make customers for life. It instills the idea into kids' heads that drinking a lot of soda is normal, and moreover, you should have a brand preferences. I suspect that half the cost of a can of soda is in the marketing expenses. Advertise, advertise, advertise!
So here we are today. People value convenience above all else, as they are so "busy" binge-watching their "favorite shows" or playing countless hours of video games. Making five or six dishes for supper just isn't practical for most people, particularly as family sizes have shrunk. So the hot-pocket is the go-to for busy Moms and Dads - just leave a few in the freezer for the kids to heat up, right?
Right. We had the same thing when I was a kid, it was called the Swanson Frozen TV Dinner and the heir to the Swanson fortune is none other than Tucker Carlson. With the advent of the microwave, their lock on instant meals evaporated overnight, so I guess Tucker needed a job (and would have liked to see the inheritance tax abolished, no doubt!).
But as awful as those "TV dinners" were, they had a meat, a vegetable, mashed potatoes, and a dessert. It was the well-rounded meal we were used to. Today? A pizza with no vegetables (the "meat lovers" please - also known as the gout express!). Toward the end, the Swanson people threw in the towel and came up with the "hungry man" dinner with excessive proportion sizes. Did this normalize overeating, or just follow a market trend? Hard to say, of course.
The point is, we have moved to a new normal. When I was a kid, a "pizza parlor" was a rare thing. Today, every small town has several. Back then, you went to a Pizza Hut and sat down and had a pitcher of beer and a large pie - for the whole family (kids did get a pitcher of cokes). Today, dead Pizza-Huts dot the landscape as delivery or take-out are far more popular than sit-down. We've changed and the change has been around so long that no one alive today remembers otherwise.
And ironically, people today are more likely than ever to have "gourmet" kitchens that are never cooked in, other than to reheat last night's restaurant meal leftovers that were taken home in a clamshell - in the sub-zero fridge next to the other clamshells. We are gourmet sophisticates about our pizzas and hamburgers.
It is just weird. But like I said, it is the new normal, like the record-high temperatures of the last few days or the increased violent rhetoric from a well-armed nouveau-Nazi party. What can you do? Just take a cold bath and heat up a hot pocket and turn on Fox News.
Teenagers with kidney stones. It doesn't mean anything, right?
