Junk Foods through the Generations

Junk Foods through the Generations

by E. Ofori Akyea

I have no reason to doubt the news that I just heard from a respectable radio station well known for its impartiality and balance. In fact, the station is my main source of news and general information. The station reports that a professor in one of the respectable Universities of the country has come up with an astonishing discovery. He and his team of highly qualified researchers after a lot of hard work have discovered that pregnant mothers whose diets consist mainly of junk foods are likely to give birth to babies that would grow up to make junk foods their staple.

Colloquially, junk means a useless or worthless stuff, trash, rubbish. In the drug world it is used when one refers to heroin.

Before proceeding let me make a confession. I am not a nutritionist. In fact, I am no medical person. All I know about the medical world I have peripatetically picked up as the years have rolled by. One of my teachers was and still is my roommate who was a medical student then and is now referred to by the appellation “Professor” before his name. He has done well and I am immensely proud of him.

Now to the junk problem we have been talking about. What really is junk food? The term came into being as a derisive one in the wake of the rise of the phenomenon of Fast Foods. Someone made a lot of money when he created the kind of restaurant where you did not have to wait for your food. Everything sold in the restaurant would be handed to you literally by the time you finished placing the order.

The junk description was given by nutritionists in the United States. In terms of what you get regarding food value it has been shown time and time again in studies that regular eaters of the products of the fast Foods set up were ingesting nothing but junk or rubbish from a nutritional perspective. A few years back a Youngman who had become obese sued one of the companies producing fast foods for being responsible for his obesity and its attendant medical problems with which he was bedevilled. He was placing the blame for his condition squarely at the feet of the food company.

Fast foods came about as part of the American quest for efficiency in all that they do. Many people could not afford to wait for their food to be prepared. They wanted to drive up to the food joint, get whatever it is they wanted pay for it and collect it as you drive away. The concept has been replicated all over the world. One of the companies even has a University to train their personnel. It certainly is impressive to drive up to the window of a fast food establishment and order your meal while sitting in your car. You are told the price. You drop your money into a bin and drive around to the pick up point. Your food will be waiting for you all neatly wrapped.

The concept of fast food has spread to cover a whole range of foods not only in America but throughout the world. I was astonished to find in Southern Africa that Fast Food places are so pervasive throughout the region. The march of fast foods got to Moscow and Beijing long before there was any let up in the political systems in those locations among others.

The original fast food was a bun with minced meat encrusted with cheese and aside dish of French Fries or potato chips. The whole thing was usually drenched in ketchup and or mustard and mayonnaise. The interesting thing about the particular sandwich was the fact that the whole thing was standardized. It looked the same, tasted the same and weighed the same worldwide.

Now for almost any kind of food there is the fast variety. The fried chicken of KFC is being put out as the product of the secret formula of the Colonel from Kentucky dripping fat and all. Pizza, as it rolls out, is full of cheese and the toppings which kill the hunger pangs of ever hungry students, the youth and indulgent adults for a good price.

Almost all airports have an array of fast food places with the traditional restaurant almost gone. In fact the regular restaurant seems to be endangered species since the microwave oven made its appearance. All that the waiters and cooks do these days is to pop half cooked stuff into the oven and in no time, presto, you have your food, or something near to what you wanted.

I notice that there is a proliferation of eateries in our towns and villages. All one needs is a portable ice chest. Cook some fried rice, fry some chicken and fish. Display these in a wooden box and cover them with a sieve; let the dust that is being raised around beat them a bit. Set these up by a gutter and in insalubrious surrounding then sit and wait for the clients to come by. I understand that these eateries are called “check check”. One is not sure how old the fried chicken and fish are. One is not also sure that the kitchen from where the food originated is the kind that one would want to eat from.

The one thing I still need to come to terms with is the situation where people carry about bread, the local doughnut popularly called “toogbee”, “sweet bad”, and other cooked and or fried foods without covering them. It looks like we have a pact with disease to be infected as much as possible.

I hesitate to report that I went to have my vehicle taken care of by a mechanic. His workshop faced a public place of convenience. While waiting for the work to be completed I watched many people in the neighbourhood go in to attend to nature’s call. The attendant gave them pieces of newspaper cut into particular sizes after they had paid their entrance fee. Some of the people who went in there were sellers of all manner of fruits and foods as well as other items. They would set their wares on the ground in front of the toilet, go in and after a while come out and pick up their wares and walk nonchalantly away. There was no facility for hand washing. I have never gotten over the experience.

This is where I go back to the junk food experiment. The good professor need not worry about genes and DNAs passed on to unborn children that will determine the love of junk food or not later in life. There are other lines of research that I wish to suggest to the professor. Working on these problems will help us be a part of the global village.

In our country some people have to eat fufu everyday or their marriages will face many difficulties. Fufu is cooked plantain or cassava or cocoyam or yam that is pounded in a mortar to pulp. The consistency of the final product depends on the taste of the eater. The pounding is done by the young people in the house. Sometimes the women also pound the fufu for their husbands. When the couple returns from the farm the woman gets water wish which the husband takes his bath. After his bath he goes out to sit and chat with his friends.

In the meantime the woman sets about to prepare the soup, cook the food and in the absence of the young ones pounds the fufu herself. Usually the soup is what is called light soup or soup made with vegetables. She then sends one of the children to call the father to eat. He eats alone or with other men. The children eat with mother.

On occasion the soup is made with palm nuts or with groundnuts. There is so much oil floating on the surface that it can drown a ship. The oil also carries the elements of cholesterol that provoke heart disease and stroke.

In our country some of our people have determined that pregnant women should not eat eggs or their offspring will grow up to become thieves. They also say that it is a bad omen for a pregnant woman to eat the choice parts of meat. These are for men only. In one country it is forbidden for pregnant women to eat monkey meat. It is believed that their offspring’s face will look very much like a monkey’s face. Enough of these prohibitions for now.

In our country junk food is the kind of food that we usually grab on the street and eat on the run. My list of such food includes fried rice, koliko, roasted corn, roasted plantain, agbeli klaklo and the like. We need to be careful of what we eat and where we eat them. That way we are assured of having a nutritionally balanced meal.