Village on a Diet, and a rant about foodie elitism

I like to watch TV that reflects what I'm going through with this fitness thing. I won't lie, a big part of it is watching overweight people work out. I love it! I love watching them push past their limits and accept themselves as the athletes they can be. Also, yes, sometimes they fall off treadmills and that's pretty good, too.

In addition to The Biggest Loser, Chris and I have been watching Village on a Diet, a Canadian show about a small rural town in BC with a weight problem. 60% of its residents are overweight or obese, and many residents in the town are now working with a team of experts (a psychologist, two personal trainers, a dietitian, a doctor, and a chef) to try to lose a ton of weight in ten weeks.

Citizens of Taylor, BC, from Village on a Diet.

All in all, it's a great show. Unlike on TBL, you get to see people in their natural environment, making changes and having success, struggling with spousal indifference, and talking with a psychologist, trainer, or doctor about their struggles with their weight. The last episode cast light on issues people struggle with like childcare hassles and an unsupportive husband, a parent putting too much pressure on his overweight kid to lose weight, and adjusting expectations about the pace of weight loss. You trade the drama of competition and huge numbers for something a bit more real, if a bit less satisfying (where's my 100 lbs lost in ten weeks?).

The show has a serious weak point, though, and I'd like to see if you can find it. Here's a hint: it's in the picture below:

Who gives horrible cooking advice and plays
the invisible accordion? This guy.

What's my problem with him, besides the apron making him look like an old timey railroad conductor? He makes it all way too hard. For a majority of townspeople, dinner before the Village on a Diet crew showed up was eaten out, ordered in, or something moved from the freezer to the oven, like fries or chicken fingers. How does ol' stripey try to break the villagers into healthy eating? With wild rice with mushrooms, leeks, almonds and apple cider vinaigrette. I'm sure it's lovely. But by serving it right off the bat, along with other dishes like mango salsa, tofu kebabs, and bean and quinoa salad, Chef Jonathan Chovancek presents this all or nothing view of eating healthily that just isn't true.

You know how people who always buy prepackaged food feel about touching the raw ingredients that make up real meals?

• Fearful. What if I get salmonella from touching this?
  
• Frustrated. Why do I have to go to all this trouble when I could just open a box or a can and have a meal in just a couple minutes?
• Like failures before they even begin. I'm not a cook, why am I even trying something this out of my league? This is going to go so wrong, just like all the other times I've tried recipes.
  

I know this. I used to be scared of cooking. I can't tell you why, only that I was, and the more distance I could put between myself and the actual ingredients in my meals, the better. I congratulated myself for cooking a homemade meal when I made Hamburger Helper, and I sometimes ate fast food three times a day. I was really grossed out the first time I made anything with raw chicken in it, because it was so cold and slick and full of horrible diseases that, if not cooked the hell out of it, would kill me, or at least leave me with explosive diarrhea, right?

Here's what the chef should do:

1. Teach the citizens of Taylor about basic ways to prepare lots of veggies. Steaming, roasting, and pan-frying. Instead of presenting a few recipes with very specific ingredients and proportions, show these people, many of whom have never cooked a whole meal by themselves, a handful of ways to cook almost everything. Give them the basics to succeed.
   
2. Show them the leanest cuts of meat and how to prepare them. Again, building blocks. They don't need 23 ways to dress a Cornish game hen, just the basics about grilling, broiling, baking, and pan-frying meat.
   
3. Advise the villagers how to construct a meal. Instead of saying, "You're only supposed to have four ounces of meat on your plate!" and skipping off into the sunset, show us a balanced and filling meal and explain why it is so. Point out what has fiber, what has healthy fat (and what that even means), and why that would make you full, even without an entire rack of ribs.
   
4. Teach a lesson on herbs and spices. At this point, the people of Taylor will have basic cooking techniques down. Show them how to dress up a meal. When to add salt, how to change an entire dish with just a couple spices. Show them how easy it is to start an herb garden, but that for a lot of things, dried works well, too.
   
5. Before presenting them with the Top Five Healthiest Foods You Absolutely Must Cook Now (And if You Don't Eat Them, You're Going to Die from Obesity or at Least Vengeful Meteors), ask what they like to eat. Use their existing food preferences to guide what is presented. You'll have a lot more success that way.

I know, I know. I'm ranting. But it's stuff like this, this finicky foodie slow foods forced vegetarian antioxidant good cholesterol kale and barley and fiddlehead crap that makes it all seem so inaccessible to the average person. If you see that most residents can't make the room in their budget or schedule to go to the market, try to organize a car pool or something to get people there. Showing up with truckloads of veggies ONE TIME is a classic case of giving a man a fish, you know what I'm saying?

A huge part of getting healthier for me has involved cooking. I started from nothing. No knowledge at all. So what I'm going to do in my humble, non-foodblogger way, is present some simple recipes that will help anyone interested in cooking but freaking terrified of it jump in with simple things. I'm not a great cook! I haven't been doing this long! But I like to try new things, and as much as I've experimented, I haven't yet made anything yet that was inedible or lead to food poisoning.

I really believe that if you want to lose weight and you don't make an ungodly amount of money, you need to learn some basic cooking. In the days and weeks to come, I'll share what I know, and from there we can keep on learning, together.

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