Talking to husband about his all American diet

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I grew up eating a "typical all-American diet". Some typical meals at our house:
Grilled steak, baked potato, steamed broccoli
Pot roast, salad
Roast chicken, steamed green beans, dinner rolls
Spaghetti, meatballs, salad
Salmon, asparagus, rice
Pork chops, sweet potatoes, spinach

In other words, protein/vegetable/carb in varying combinations. We had a lot of things roasted or grilled with minimal added fat/oil. We went to Chinatown for dinner a couple times a year, and ate at the local Tex-Mex restaurant a few times a year. Also went out for sushi, Thai, Indian, Italian, and anything else we could find, but no more than 1-2 times a month total. Our dinners out, regardless of cuisine, were generally FAR less healthy than the "American" food we ate at home.

OMG...My American diet was like this growing up. So boring, so bland, no fat. The basic starch, vegetable, and meat. Often baked chicken or dry as hell pot roast and the starch was baked potato, baked yams, baked squash. The vegetable was always steamed, steamed broccoli, green beans and God awful steamed cabbage.

Frankly, I would be better off health wise if I had stayed on that diet. It was very healthy, very well rounded and very boring. Food for sustenance, not taste.

I cook very much like this, but I’ve long since added more taste than my very germanic parents like.

+1 This is how my in laws eat. No sauces at all, lots of boiling, baking, steaming, and grilling in the summer. Lots of green beans, cabbage, and white meat chicken and turkey. Lunch is a sandwich and a banana. The most unhealthy thing was probably the holiday baking--pies and chocolate chip cookies, but that was the holidays.

Ugh, Yes! The ubiquitous baked chicken...The only thing I had to look forward to was the skin. And the pies? My mom made them from scratch and did not believe in adding sugar to the our crust.

And we definitely didn't make lasagna...that would be too much sauce and complexity, lol. My guess is the OP's husband is at least part Italian-American...not English, Germanic, or Scandinavian.

Have you been to Italy? If you know anyone born and raised generations back in Italy, they do not serve pasta, they serve other more intricate dishes - and they make it look easy. Definitely not the same old thing over and over again, like here. I think the idea that Italians eat pasta and pizza is purely American. In fact, if you go to the high tourist areas, they will serve pizza and pasta for the American tourists. The English or Scandanavian/Swedes I know can not cook for anything.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My siblings and I grew up eating farm fresh everything. We never ate out or from a can. It was all from scratch 3 times a day. Feeding 6 kids, my mother was like a cooking robot God bless her. I don't know where she got the energy. She kept a very clean home and ran a tight ship. Back in the day my father used to get tons of fresh food from his clients. I remember shucking corn, doing snap beans, cucumbers by the ton, tomatoes cooked down, all kinds of God's goodness. We really ate well. Always plenty yet we were rail thin and active.

That being said, at this point in life it doesn't really matter. When we were inoculated for polio as children, some of us, probably all of us in the US, were given a dose of cancer virus directly through the polio vaccine. Look it up. The CDC may have scrubbed it but it's true. Population control and all that. Most of us will die from some form of cancer, some won't. High fructose corn syrup will clog your arteries, pesticides will eventually build up and kill us too. Heart attack. Liver, kidney, pancreas will fail. Fact.

At this point, if you make it past 50, what you eat, ate, will eat won't doesn't matter. Might as well enjoy life while you can. Moderate everything and hope for the best.

+1

PP here. Yes! Fresh from the farm everything! Amen to that. The idea of Chef Boiardi or frozen dinners is kind of repulsive, but if someone is raised that way, you aren't going to change it now, OP.

PP, I enjoyed your post because it makes us appreciate our hard working mothers even more, doesn't it?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My siblings and I grew up eating farm fresh everything. We never ate out or from a can. It was all from scratch 3 times a day. Feeding 6 kids, my mother was like a cooking robot God bless her. I don't know where she got the energy. She kept a very clean home and ran a tight ship. Back in the day my father used to get tons of fresh food from his clients. I remember shucking corn, doing snap beans, cucumbers by the ton, tomatoes cooked down, all kinds of God's goodness. We really ate well. Always plenty yet we were rail thin and active.

That being said, at this point in life it doesn't really matter. When we were inoculated for polio as children, some of us, probably all of us in the US, were given a dose of cancer virus directly through the polio vaccine. Look it up. The CDC may have scrubbed it but it's true. Population control and all that. Most of us will die from some form of cancer, some won't. High fructose corn syrup will clog your arteries, pesticides will eventually build up and kill us too. Heart attack. Liver, kidney, pancreas will fail. Fact.

At this point, if you make it past 50, what you eat, ate, will eat won't doesn't matter. Might as well enjoy life while you can. Moderate everything and hope for the best.

Imagine! If you didn't take that polio vaccine you could live to infinity!!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My siblings and I grew up eating farm fresh everything. We never ate out or from a can. It was all from scratch 3 times a day. Feeding 6 kids, my mother was like a cooking robot God bless her. I don't know where she got the energy. She kept a very clean home and ran a tight ship. Back in the day my father used to get tons of fresh food from his clients. I remember shucking corn, doing snap beans, cucumbers by the ton, tomatoes cooked down, all kinds of God's goodness. We really ate well. Always plenty yet we were rail thin and active.

That being said, at this point in life it doesn't really matter. When we were inoculated for polio as children, some of us, probably all of us in the US, were given a dose of cancer virus directly through the polio vaccine. Look it up. The CDC may have scrubbed it but it's true. Population control and all that. Most of us will die from some form of cancer, some won't. High fructose corn syrup will clog your arteries, pesticides will eventually build up and kill us too. Heart attack. Liver, kidney, pancreas will fail. Fact.

At this point, if you make it past 50, what you eat, ate, will eat won't doesn't matter. Might as well enjoy life while you can. Moderate everything and hope for the best.

Imagine! If you didn't take that polio vaccine you could live to infinity!!

Whew. And to think all I got was an extra dose of passive-aggressiveness in my MMR shot...

[Anonymous]

If India was so great...you'd be there OP. Drop the anti-American attitude. I'm guessing your DH grew up in a lower income blue collar family in the midwest. So, that would have been the norm for him.

[Anonymous]

Mostly this thread has been a lot of mudslinging about whose cuisine is the most fattening and who is a terrible cook and who knows more about world cuisines than you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If India was so great...you'd be there OP. Drop the anti-American attitude. I'm guessing your DH grew up in a lower income blue collar family in the midwest. So, that would have been the norm for him.

I'm guessing the DH wasn't lower income...lower-income people can't afford to feed their kids at the Olive Garden and Applebee's on the regular. if they were rural, those places are too far.

I'm guessing DH was middle class with two working parents who were too busy to cook but could afford to eat out at those places and DH was a latchkey kid (hence the regular McD's).

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I live in Ashburn...an Indian Mecca. Over the years I've been invited to countless Diwali parties and to neighbors house for dinner cooked from scratch. I've always left so full of carbs and grease. If I ate that food in a daily basis, if have a man sized gut. I love the food, but But OMG, I don't need diabetes!

Except if you're going to parties and special dinners your hosts are serving you special occasion food. No one eats those things on a daily basis in any culture.

You missed it. In addition to Diwali, I go for a regular dinner as well. Same. Super greasy, very carb heavy, and all of the vegetables in a thick heavy sauce. This is not one Indian family, but quite a few.

Don't get me wrong, I love fried bread, but could not tolerate it on the regular and remain a size 6. All of the Indian women I know (with a few exceptions) have pot bellies.

My guess is that they are making "special occasion" food for you to appease your American palate. In a couple pounds of vegetables I use a couple tablespoons of olive oil max. No ghee. But if non-Indians are coming I am more likely o make dishes that Americans like - palak paneer, chicken curries, etc. Maybe it's because I live in California but no one in my family makes oily food and everyone cooks in olive oil.

Also - fried bread - "poori" - is definitely not an every day food. We eat chapatti, which most non-Indians would NEVER order at a restaurant. Whole wheat flour mixed with water, cooked on a dry griddle.

Yep and it's gross. It's like chewing on shoe leather with fiber in it.

That sounds like a gross poori Sorry you haven't had better!

Was talking about roti/chapatti -- the junk we eat day to day at home being gross. What's not to like with a poori -- it's soaked in oil; put enough oil on anything and you can tolerate it.
-an Indian who doesn't get the obsession with Indian food

I wouldn't like chapattis if they tasted like shoe leather! Sorry you haven't had decent chapattis

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I live in Ashburn...an Indian Mecca. Over the years I've been invited to countless Diwali parties and to neighbors house for dinner cooked from scratch. I've always left so full of carbs and grease. If I ate that food in a daily basis, if have a man sized gut. I love the food, but But OMG, I don't need diabetes!

Except if you're going to parties and special dinners your hosts are serving you special occasion food. No one eats those things on a daily basis in any culture.

You missed it. In addition to Diwali, I go for a regular dinner as well. Same. Super greasy, very carb heavy, and all of the vegetables in a thick heavy sauce. This is not one Indian family, but quite a few.

Don't get me wrong, I love fried bread, but could not tolerate it on the regular and remain a size 6. All of the Indian women I know (with a few exceptions) have pot bellies.

My guess is that they are making "special occasion" food for you to appease your American palate. In a couple pounds of vegetables I use a couple tablespoons of olive oil max. No ghee. But if non-Indians are coming I am more likely o make dishes that Americans like - palak paneer, chicken curries, etc. Maybe it's because I live in California but no one in my family makes oily food and everyone cooks in olive oil.

Also - fried bread - "poori" - is definitely not an every day food. We eat chapatti, which most non-Indians would NEVER order at a restaurant. Whole wheat flour mixed with water, cooked on a dry griddle.

Yep and it's gross. It's like chewing on shoe leather with fiber in it.

That sounds like a gross poori Sorry you haven't had better!

Was talking about roti/chapatti -- the junk we eat day to day at home being gross. What's not to like with a poori -- it's soaked in oil; put enough oil on anything and you can tolerate it.
-an Indian who doesn't get the obsession with Indian food

I wouldn't like chapattis if they tasted like shoe leather! Sorry you haven't had decent chapattis

Careful. The Indians are turning on each other. "sorry your mother couldn't make good chapattis OR poori, or couldn't train her cook better "

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I grew up eating a "typical all-American diet". Some typical meals at our house:
Grilled steak, baked potato, steamed broccoli
Pot roast, salad
Roast chicken, steamed green beans, dinner rolls
Spaghetti, meatballs, salad
Salmon, asparagus, rice
Pork chops, sweet potatoes, spinach

In other words, protein/vegetable/carb in varying combinations. We had a lot of things roasted or grilled with minimal added fat/oil. We went to Chinatown for dinner a couple times a year, and ate at the local Tex-Mex restaurant a few times a year. Also went out for sushi, Thai, Indian, Italian, and anything else we could find, but no more than 1-2 times a month total. Our dinners out, regardless of cuisine, were generally FAR less healthy than the "American" food we ate at home.

The protein/1-2 veggie/carb was our basic meal too, although we had a regular rotation of meatloaf with mashed potatoes, lasagna, Swiss steak, cacciatore and tacos - and never really ate fish.

My mother often steamed Brussels sprouts which I couldn't stand (I found out as an adult that I love them roasted).

We often ate grilled chicken basted in bbq sauce with macaroni salad as well.

Desserts were Oreos, peaches with vanilla ice cream, Nilla wafers.

Lunches were almost always sandwiches - deli meat, lettuce, miracle whip and white bread, and potato chips. So that part wasn't healthy.

We almost never ate out at restaurants.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If India was so great...you'd be there OP. Drop the anti-American attitude. I'm guessing your DH grew up in a lower income blue collar family in the midwest. So, that would have been the norm for him.

Don’t diss food from the Midwest. I grew up in Milwaukee in the 70s and 80s and the food was amazing. Sandwiches on hard rolls with spicy mustard and ham, lots of ethnic food (Italian, Mexican, Serbian, German), amazing baked goods and bread, and always lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. Actually, I was spoiled by the good food there, so I found the food in DC very disappointing when I moved here. The Midwest is not a big bland homogeneous place. There is amazing food to be found there. It is not all hotdogs and casseroles.

[Anonymous]

Wow! OP seems to have attracted the thinnest-skinned Americans with her post. Anti-American?!!! I have read and re-read the post and do not see it. Sure she has made a generalization but (a) so do half the people on this board without being told to piss off to their country of origin and (b) there is some pretty crappy food in this country so her comment, while possibly insensitive to the snowflakes among you, was hardly outlandish.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Have you been to Italy? If you know anyone born and raised generations back in Italy, they do not serve pasta, they serve other more intricate dishes - and they make it look easy. Definitely not the same old thing over and over again, like here. I think the idea that Italians eat pasta and pizza is purely American. In fact, if you go to the high tourist areas, they will serve pizza and pasta for the American tourists. The English or Scandanavian/Swedes I know can not cook for anything.

Yes, dear, we know. However, the culture that immigrated over 100 or 150 years ago and then evolved within the US is not what continued to evolve there. I had some German visitors for supper once and they all but guffawed at the way we viewed our version of German cuisine vs. actual German cuisine now.

Also you sound a little like OP with your last sentence. Eesh. I would be embarrassed to sound so bigoted.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Have you been to Italy? If you know anyone born and raised generations back in Italy, they do not serve pasta, they serve other more intricate dishes - and they make it look easy. Definitely not the same old thing over and over again, like here. I think the idea that Italians eat pasta and pizza is purely American. In fact, if you go to the high tourist areas, they will serve pizza and pasta for the American tourists. The English or Scandanavian/Swedes I know can not cook for anything.

Yes, dear, we know. However, the culture that immigrated over 100 or 150 years ago and then evolved within the US is not what continued to evolve there. I had some German visitors for supper once and they all but guffawed at the way we viewed our version of German cuisine vs. actual German cuisine now.

Also you sound a little like OP with your last sentence. Eesh. I would be embarrassed to sound so bigoted.

Why would you serve German visitors "German" food?