Jump to healthy food in the United States ~ Easy Love

Family Olivia Hines is as American "as an apple pie", to use an American colloquialism. The family tree has four branches, each of which addresses one of the territories that traditionally formed UK: England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. And Olivia is purely Anglo-Saxon name: it was an invention of William Shakespeare for a counterpart to Oliver.

In-house Hines near the giant air base Patuxent River , the food was purely American. Olivia recalls the standard menu as a child: "For breakfast, cereal with milk, to eat a sandwich grilled cheese, or pasta with cheese and, for dinner, a stew of precooked, with instant mashed potatoes, or fill, but without using it as filler, just next to the main course. " Olivia, who turns 26 in five weeks, added: "A list of normal home purchase was a collection of precooked". A paradox in a family living next to an Amish community, which, with its rejection of any technology back to the eighteenth century, are the best providers of healthy at prices that are not for food millionaires in the United States.

On Tuesday, the kitchen of Olivia, who lives with her boyfriend in central Washington, was very different from the one in which he grew up just 60 kilometers from the US capital. Although there was something in the Turkish -Chickasaws precooked refrigerator, a frozen cake, Chinese food ordered over the phone, the vast majority of the products was disturbingly healthy: fresh salmon and tuna, chicken breasts, semi-skimmed organic milk, 'prosciutto', sirloin beef, natural yogurt, oranges, bananas, strawberries, grapes, lettuce and fresh carrots, and a surreal detail: 72 bottles of mineral water and 4 bottles of olive oil. Is a compensatory mechanism for someone to age 19 not-only drinking water and Coca-Cola beverages and jacarandas- not use anything other than margarine for frying? "No, it is a mistake from the supermarket where we shop. We brought more than what we asked for," Hines, who works in the administration of a luxury hotel in Washington explains.

Hines case is not extreme. It is just one example of the dramatic change in eating habits in the country that invented junk food: United States. The 'millennials', IE, the generation born between 1980 and 2000, are rejecting fast and precooked Generation X (those who came to the world between 1960 and 1980) and, above all, the baby boomers, who they are now between 55 and 75 years and belonging senior Hines, who remain in Maryland like eating when her daughter lived with them. This is how Hines father has come to have a concentration of 700 units of blood sugar (from the 120 he is diabetic) and weighs 150 kilos.

This change in eating habits is having an impact on all aspects of American society. Starting with two of its most iconic brands. McDonald's and Coca-Cola sales in the US of the hamburger chain fell 4% last year , and today, paradoxically, the market in which the company is having better financial results is in Europe. McDonald's has four CEOs in 10 years, and the last to arrive at the position, Steve Easterbrook , a Briton whose goal is to repeat in the US the formula that has worked for the company in Europe to introduce healthier food.

Meanwhile, Coca-Cola has a division aimed at creating new brands, many of them healthier. The company that for many symbolizes USA entered the coffee market, like McDonald's, and even organic milk.And Heinz, the manufacturer of ketchup, leads with sales standing at 18,000 million dollars for three years. If the company is more profitable now is because their owners -the Berkshire Hathaway and 3G-funds have carried out a wave of layoffs and cost cutting.

All this is part of what the president and CEO of Campbell's famous -the company that processed food Andy Warhol immortalized with his pop-art has described as "a social earthquake" derived from "the explosion of interest in fresh food and a consumer focus on the effects of food on their health. " This change has caused an explosion of distribution companies and specialized in healthy food restaurant. The most famous are the Whole Foods, which are already in Britain and, above all, Chipolata, a chain of organic food Mexican restaurants. But they are not the only ones. Legman's, for example, specializes in giant supermarkets exclusively for healthy eating in the middle of Middle America, in a sign that this trend is not confined to the big cities.

The problem with this food, however, is the price, which is not exactly the most healthy. "My boyfriend and I we spent $ 700 a month on food, it's more than you need my parents and my sister," says Olivia, who detests, for example, Whole Foods, "because they charge a" premium "simply by the name, when your food is as good or bad as Welshman's, whose prices are half ».

In fact, with that $ 700 Olivia's parents "buy food for two months." And it is that healthy food is also much more expensive.

By Jenney