There’s a really good TED talk by Jamie Oliver entitled “Teach every child about food“. His supposition in this presentation revolves around the idea that not knowing how to cook or make food for yourself (a very basic human requirement) is progressively causing each generation of children to live less time than their parents starting with the last four generations of Americans:

We, the adults of the last four generations, have blessed our children with the destiny of a shorter lifespan than their own parents. Your child will live a life ten years younger than you because of the landscape of food that we’ve built around them. Two-thirds of this room, today, in America, are statistically overweight or obese.

Here’s another excerpt from that talk:

I want to show a picture of my friend Brittany. She’s 16 years old. She’s got six years to live because of the food that she’s eaten. She’s the third generation of Americans that hasn’t grown up within a food environment where they’ve been taught to cook at home or in school, or her mom, or her mom’s mom. She has six years to live. She’s eating her liver to death.

After watching this presentation, the idea of living a shorter lifespan than our parents holds true. When I look at my maternal line (the side where most of the relatives are overweight), this is how it looked:

• Maternal great grandmother, never overweight, cooked fresh foods, died at age 83
• Maternal grandmother, overweight most of her life, ate poorly part of her life, died at age 77
• Mother, overweight nearly all of her life, ate poorly most of her life, died at age 65

Each generation died younger rather than living longer. My grandmother and mother both had diabetes. As of 1.5 years ago, I have diabetes. The path I’m seeing forward is dim.

If I, and we as a country, do not begin making changes soon, then many of us will die younger than our parents, and our children will die younger than us.

I’m starting to make a change by buying fresh foods most of the time and eating them raw, or cooking them in a basic fashion. While I do know how to cook, working and cooking aren’t oftentimes easy to do unless what I cook is easy to make and relatively fast. As such, simple recipes with a small number of ingredients are being favored over complex masterpieces. I believe that this can be a sustainable pathway forward out of this quagmire of unhealthiness that I’ve gotten myself.