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Live on a Farm, Eat All the Oreos You Want
by
Gregory J. Rummo
What do last
year’s drought, farming, Oreo cookies and the
latest numbers on obesity reported
by a study in the journal “Health Affairs” have in
common?
They all prove how much healthier as a nation we
were when we grew our own food instead of
sitting at desks from 9-5 becoming fat slobs in the
process.
The May 15 edition of the Wall Street Journal
reported the results of the “Health Affairs”
study. “Obesity and related illnesses cost as much
as $78.5 billion in U.S. medical bills in 1998, or
9.1
percent of total health spending.”
That’s so depressing it makes me want to saunter
off to the kitchen and make myself a cold
chicken, stuffing and cranberry sauce sandwich
followed by a sleeve of Oreo cookies (Double Stuff,
of
course) chased with a large glass of cold whole
milk.
What could be even more depressing is that I might
be forced to give up eating Oreos altogether
if the California lawyer suing Kraft Foods for
making the dangerous dark-brown, crème filled
delights
gets his way in court.
He has now voluntarily dropped his lawsuit, saying
the only reason he did it was to create an
awareness of the dangers of trans-fatty acids in
foods.
Initially, Mr. Joseph had claimed the hydrogenated
oil used in the baking of Oreos was
unhealthy. CNN reported Joseph said, “I am probably
full of hydrogenated fat because until two years
ago I didn't know about it. I resent the fact that
I have been eating that stuff all my life.”
Some may think Mr. Joseph is full of something
else, which creates a natural segue to the topic
of life on the farm and last year’s drought in the
north east.
If you were a good, law-abiding citizen like I was,
instead of watering your lawn, you obeyed the
restrictions and watched helplessly as the grass
slowly turned from green to yellow to brown until
finally
disappearing altogether in a cloud of dry dust.
When spring finally arrived this year—many of us
are still waiting for its arrival here in northern
NJ—you realized your lawn wasn’t going to recover
because the roots had died in the ground.
At least this is what happened at our homestead.
You can’t simply re-grow a lawn by throwing a bag
of seed on the hard ground. Only weeds
seem to find a way to propagate that way. They even
manage to germinate in the cracks on our
macadam driveway.
If you want to do it right, you have to take a
metal rake and engage in some real hard
work—like I did on a miserable, drizzly day earlier
this month.
I spent several hours clawing at the thatch from
what grass managed to survive the ravages of
last year’s hot, dry summer. But almost half of our spacious front yard had simply been transformed
into
hard-packed ground approaching the composition of
metamorphic rock.
That translated into several additional hours of
back-breaking, blister making, muscle-aching,
sweat-drenching labor to break up the dirt and then
to work in almost a ton of topsoil before
re-seeding
and applying starter fertilizer.
About an hour into this project, I stopped to catch
my breath. As I inspected several blisters on
my sissified hands while feeling sorry for myself
and guzzling a flagon of water all at the same time
I
suddenly realized my heart rate was almost 140,
about where it hovers during my daily, 48-minute
workout on the elliptical machine in the gym.
And then like an epiphany it dawned on me.
No wonder a century ago nobody worried about eating
things like butter and eggs and heavy
cream and Oreo cookies. When America was largely an
agrarian society, the normal activities of the day
were enough to keep most of us in decent aerobic
condition. “Health Affairs” would have been
reporting
on the health-associated costs to the U.S. economy
of things like stepping on a rake or infections
caused
as a result of blisters.
And with more farmers, I’ll bet we had a lot less
lawyers, too.
Gregory J. Rummo is a syndicated columnist. Visit
his website at
www.GregRummo.com
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