Let's make healthy food palatable!

Lentils, garbanzo beans, yerba mate, kale. These are foods which are generally identified as tools of the health food revolution, but not ones regularly found in the average American's kitchen. If everyone ate them, the American obesity crisis would be solved. However, the rising number of diet-related diseases shows that cheeseburgers continue to outsell garden burgers.

To many, healthy food has come to mean something different from the food we eat on a day-to-day basis. A 'normal' meal can't be healthy anymore, as the healthy food movement is increasingly identified by specific foods and the demographic promoting them. It has become synonymous with the American counterculture. Eating healthy means eating like hippies, yogis and Prius-driving environmentalists.

This is why, despite growing passion and increasing action, the food movement has yet to significantly alter what Americans eat. Living in a town full of cowboys, I know firsthand that many refuse to eat healthy as a tactic to preserve their masculinity.

We've created this idea that only special foods count as healthy, and everything else is bad for you. This is one of the primary obstacles to improving America's diet, and the greatest weakness of the healthy food movement.

We need to stop promoting these 'alternative' foods and instead look at how we can improve the quality of the meals we're eating today. Out here in eastern Montana, I can tell you that a lentil burger would not be greeted with enthusiasm (except maybe enthusiastic laughter). Why haven't we taught people that healthy food doesn't need to be foreign? Americans would be a lot more cheerful about eating healthy if they knew they could eat a plain-old hamburger instead of a vegetable stir-fry. Let's take an organic beef patty and stick it on a whole wheat bun with some fresh pickles, onions and tomatoes. Voila- healthy hamburger! I'd choose that any day over a quinoa salad. Maybe not the food movement we've been dreaming of, but a significant improvement over the status quo.

I think we've learned by now that radical change in the American diet is not happening. We're just too attached to our meat, pasta and things drizzled with cheese. But we can make small changes every day. So instead of cutting kids off from pizza, let's teach them how to make their own! Rather than going vegetarian, let's eat identifiable cuts of organic meat. We've overcomplicated the whole situation by trying to add seaweed and polenta, when we really need to be plugging for asparagus and brown rice. These healthy foods are great- don't get me wrong, but they're poor advertising for a french-fry eating audience. Convincing a non-believer to eat oatmeal will be a whole lote easier than selling them on kamut. Do you really expect me to believe out of all the passionate food advocates out there, no one has a healthy version of macaroni and cheese? Let's work on making traditional meals healthy again, and save the garbanzo beans for the quiet of our own kitchens. I promise, more people will get on board if we keep the wheat grass to ourselves.