Ridiculous Study of the Week: Home Cooked Meals
In a fiery storm of controversy, researchers have come to the conclusion that home cooking is better than restaurant fare. Presented at the American Public Health Association, in New Orleans, the authors claimed to have found that people who eat the most home-cooked ones end up eating healthier and consuming about 130 fewer calories daily, on average, compared to other people. I don’t know about you but my mind is blown….not. Next up on the researcher’s agenda is trying to prove that more auto accidents occur while driving in a car versus watching television.
I don’t think this is the ridiculous study. The ridiculous study will be the one the food industry commissions to prove that this study is false.
Bet that didn’t include the food stamp crowd.
The more quickly we regress into superstition, the more we worship facts. Most facts are meaningless. Occasionally, a few can be brought forth by reasoning to produce useful conclusions. This capacity is largely gone from healthcare.
CONFOUNDING is the grade-school error in statistics – really, in reason – that leads to such studies. Home-cooked meals are prepared by the person who, at home, has the time and resources to shop, cook and serve meals. Over the years, the “luxury” of food preparation has been trimmed out of the population, by necessity, laziness, or ignorance. Latch-key children live on fast food, and our entire economy is based on the supposition that large, impersonal, standardized and mechanized will lead to cheaper, although more mediocre products. It is certainly the vision statement for American healthcare.
Families with the time, resources and insight to consume home-cooked meals are usually the families that are prosperous, intact, and not harrowed by mental illness, violence or substance abuse. Duh.
Fast-food America is not an imperial edict imposed from without, but an unspoken cultural decision. There’s no deli’s in Delhi. In Bombay/Mumbai, there is an integrated and amazing network that operates every workday morning that funnels HOME-COOKED LUNCHES from workers’ homes to the workplace – millions of meals, with a level of precision we never could match in the US. That is THEIR cultural decision and priority. For us, The American Lunch is often a mechanized concoction of lard and pink slime – good enough for US.
No matter what, cultures usually die from within as often as from without. Perhaps America will slip away, having forgotten how to make food (and make sick people better.) The fault is ourselves, alone.