Obesity And…The Joy of Cooking?

GrubGirl did a bad bad thing last week. She finally started reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” Yes, she had read Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle“, and “Fast Food Nation,” and undaunted, she kept cooking those ribeye steaks on the stovetop. (Heck, they weren’t those terrible ground beef patties.)

Her eyes are being a bit further opened and she’s wondering what percentage of her is literally corn-fed.

We’ll save the gory details of the Omnivore’s Dilemma for another post (and, so, far, The Jungle’s probably got the highest ick factor), but we noticed over at the Food Politics blog that Marion Nestle has a document for download where one has analyzed the increasing serving size in the classic cookbook, “The Joy of Cooking.”

“My former doctoral student, Lisa Young, looked at how portion sizes began to balloon in the early 1980s in parallel with increasing calories in the food supply (from 3,200 to 3,900 per day per capita) and with rising rates of obesity.  She showed how readers using identical recipes were instructed to make far fewer cookies in newer editions of the Joy of Cooking…”

Serving sizes in this cookbook, dear readers, have increased by 35%! And we wonder why America is getting a bit more roly poly.

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