Sweet America!?!
January 20, 2008
American people are often stereotyped as the fattest people of the world. Even though this is not true, in every stereotype there is a grain of truth.When I think back to my time abroad in America, I remember lots of sweet food. When I went into an American groceries’ store for the first time, I was struck by the range of different kinds of sweets. For example, you can buy plain marshmallows, which consist mostly of sugar, and then different varieties with marshmallows. You can buy ‘’S’mores“, which are marshmallows between cookies and covered with chocolate and even some kinds of cereals have marshmallows in them. This is only one example of the American love of sweets.Even vegetables cannot be eaten on their own; the average American has to have a dip with them, for example dipping celery into peanut butter. If you want to eat fruit, you are faced with a range of dips, such as caramel, chocolate or sugar. I have not met a single American who eats his fruit without such a dip. I’ve gained some weight, because everywhere I went in America, I was confronted with sweets and food which consisted mostly of sugar and fat. But why are there such strange eating habits in this culture? Why do people eat so many sweets and gain so much weight, without trying to do something about it?
One problem could be the poverty. Unhealthy food and sweets are very cheap in America. If you want to buy healthy food you have to pay more money for it than we pay here in Germany. But this is only one possible explanation for the enormous number of different sweets in America.
Can you think of other explanations?
written by Ann Caterin Kuklinski
I have never been to America and cannot evaluate their eating habits. I watched the movie “Supersize Me” which did not deal with sweets, but the consumption of fast food sold by McDonalds. The main character, who also directed the film, wanted to test the reaction of the human body on eating every meal at McDonalds – breakfast, lunch, dinner. When the sales clerk asked him if he’d like the supersize version, he had to take it, otherwise he was just eating the large portion. To my mind, this movie is really shocking and many facts are unbelievable. He had been a healthy, sporty man before but the permanent comsumption of fast food exhausted his body so much, that it took 1 year to recover from 1 month of fast food – his liver valus elevated a thousandfold!!
All I know about the eating culture in America is mostly taken from this movie, a few reports and the Simpsons. Of course, I dont take the Simpsons as a granted fact, as it is extremely exaggerated to make it funny, but like Ann-Catherine said, every stereotype bears a grain of truth…
Talking about the sweets, I highly doubt that Americans eat sweets because of poverty. Noone buys sweets instead of common food to to be full up! Sweets nearly contain no nutriments and it is impossible to live just on sweets! I think the enormous consumption of sweets is a matter of education – inconsicously culturally transmitted by their parents. Taste is a matter of adaption, if you grow up eating very taste-intensive things, the less intensive will taste bad. It is the same in Germany about “Maggi” and flavour enhancers (Geschmacksverstärker). Children whose parents just cooked Maggi products dont know the taste of real food and reject it. When children grow up with everything dipped in caramel, chocolate or other sauces, normal vegetables and fruits will taste disgusting or slack.