Growing our brain size not our waiste lines

Deakin University's Centre for Advanced Sensory Science have completed a study and published it in the Journal of Nutrition that showed that those adults whose mouth is more sensitive to carbohydrates consume more starchy food and also have a larger circumference. The study showed the mouth could sense two common carbohydrates found in bread, rice and pasta.

Now they are doing a study in how to make food taste nice and have the right chew and texture so kids 5-12 will eat it. Sounds like they where trying to sell the formula to big manufacturers.  But I digress .

I wanted to know from this learned team what successful examples they had of institutional kitchens serving healthy nutritious food and making a profit?  No examples.

It got me thinking though.  

Chefs make food so people will like it (tastes great and is Insta Worthy) and most of the time the customers don’t really care if it is good for them in the quantities they are consuming it.

Nutritionists prepare food so it is good for you but they don’t care if it tastes good or not, plus they’ll change the rules about what is good for you every 10 years.

The government creates policies to advise nutritionists and doctors about what healthy food is and what food the big manufacturers want to sell more of to create jobs and growth - in the economy that is, but instead we have have a growth in our waistline. We also know that government is at least 10 years behind the current thinking and trends.

So it is left to the primary carer, the domestic god or goddess or simple home cook to prepare healthy nutritious cheap food that tastes good, has the right texture and keeps the family coming back to the table for more without growing their waistlines.  They must grow great produce in the backyard and to learn to pickle and preserve it for times of scarcity, all while holding down a full time job.- oh and did I mention trying to be plastic free too?

And this person has to remember how to cook based on what their great great grandmother cooked because for the last 80 years we have been outsourcing our domestic food preparation to the industrialised food system.

A recipe for disaster I say.

Can we run a few experiments in the institutional kitchens that are under government control to create a menu whose endpoint is a healthy demographic with increased brain capacity and healthy waistline?  Producing smart, efficient, productive humans that aren’t a drain on our health system.

Now there’s a tasty goal.