One thing I forgot to mention before is that, now that Lando is going to sleep earlier (finally!), Dawn & I have been able to watch a couple of DVDs. We have a very long row of DVDs accusingly staring out at us from their shrinkwrap packaging. "Why did you even bother buying us?" they ask. "What a waste of money!"
Well, we've finally been able to start watching some. Back on April 4, we watched Ratatouille, a Pixar animated film about a rat that loves cooking (and eating) good food. I had just picked up my first dozen eggs from the James Family Farm, so I felt it was an appropriate choice for that evening.
One thing I noticed was that the French chef was depicted as being extremely fat. While I'm sure there are many fat chefs in France, there is also something called "the French paradox." Traditional French cuisine involves eating high fat foods, yet the French have significantly lower rates of heart disease and obesity when compared to the U.S. population.
One possible explanation is that the French tend to drink wine with their meals. The theory is that there is something in the wine that protects the heart. This idea has gotten plenty of publicity, presumably because it's attractive ("Hey! We get to drink wine!"), it's easy to understand ("More wine. Got it."), it doesn't involve a change in lifestyle ("I don't have to change the way I eat or exercise more? Sweet!"), and it can be profitable ("Wine: It Does Your Heart Good!™").
There's another idea, however, that is more complex. Michael Pollan suggests in his book In Defense of Food that perhaps the source of the French paradox isn't just one thing. Perhaps it is the combinations of food that the French eat, the way that they eat, and the quantity. Traditionally, the French tend to eat smaller portions; a wider variety of foods; fewer processed foods; and at a more leisurely pace. And French cuisine has been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. Pollan suggests that traditional cuisines might have evolved the way they have simply because they turned out to be healthier. The U.S., by contrast, has never really had much of a traditional cuisine, perhaps in part because we have been a melting pot of displaced peoples.
No, a hamburger and French fries does not qualify as a traditional cuisine, simply because we've only been eating this way since about World War II. Today, much of the rest of the world is starting to adopt the "fast food" cuisine of the U.S. As a result, the health problems of the U.S. are showing up in other countries. In fact, it was the opening of a McDonald's on the Piazza di Spagna near the Spanish Steps in Rome that led to the creation of the Slow Food movement.
Anyway, there isn't really a purpose to this post, other than to point out the irony of an American film portraying a French chef as being grossly overweight. (Although, in their defense, the other French characters in the film were not fat. So perhaps this post had no purpose whatsoever!)
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