/ck/ - Food & Cooking

It's not the calorie density that makes fast food and packaged snacks so fattening, it's the fact that they taste so good. Mcdonald's fries are not more calorie-dense than mashed potatoes with butter, and McDonald's burgers aren't more calorie-dense than bacon and toast; but how often do you cook bacon or boiled potatoes and then wanted to keep eating until it felt like your stomach was going to split at the seams? In my experience, the food I cook for myself is good, but it's not good enough to eat when I'm not hungry. Whereas if I go to burger king and eat my fill, I'll experience physical pain afterwards from how much I've consumed (not that I do this with any regularity). You just can't eat plain bacon to the point of sickness, because it straight up isn't good enough.

I think the modern American obesity epidemic is most accurately pinned on improvement in flavor rather than other more commonly touted factors:

>increases in calorie density / food is worse for you
This can't be it for the reasons I gave in my first paragraph. Americans have been eating potatoes and bacon since the country's founding.

>creeping increase in portion size
It can't be this, because portions are driven by appetite and not the other way around. If you gave the same person a plate of either infinite baked potatoes or infinite fries, and told them to eat as much as they want, they'd eat more if given the fries. The only explanation for increased portions is the fact that people want to eat more of the modern foods. People have always eaten until they were full.

>muh food desert
The USDA definition of a "food desert" is an area that's one mile away from a large supermarket. Yeah, a 15 minute walk sure is inaccessible...

>muh education / muh poverty
I'll grant the fact that black and poor people are extremely stupid and know almost nothing. That said, I doubt there is worse nutrition education in modern America since the 50's, or compared to what the average person knows in Thailand