(no subject)

[winterbadger]

Fascinating (IMO) colour photos from 1940s America. Thanks to my friend Justin for the link.

It's interesting how the landscape, especially the commercial landscape, of America has changed in 60-70 years. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, I would see places that didn't look much different to some of these places when we would go out in the country or go to what passed for downtown in our small city. But I imagine that to younger people, this look likes something out of a movie, not reality.

The other thing that strikes me is the slenderness of the people, especially the poor people. For all that we talk today about how unhealthy choices of diet forced on people by their economic circumstances can cause obesity, there wasn't much of that in the 1930s. To get fat, you have to consume calories in some form, and if you were poor, that just didn't happen. :-\

Comments

[zoefruitcake.livejournal.com]

they are fascinating pictures, I wonder what the people then would make of our world now. There were one or two that looked as if they could have been taken now rather than 70 years ago

[watervole.livejournal.com]

What I notice most is how many of the children lack shoes and how many of the men wear hats.

In the 30s, people were still mostly growing their own food. The modern poor tend not to have that option. That's a big part of the obesity problem. The cheap calories tend to be the less healthy now. Veg have gone from being cheap (or grown at home) to being the luxury.

(I'm lucky to have an allotment.)

[winterbadger]

In the 30s, people were still mostly growing their own food.

Actually, I doubt that. Sometime early in the 1900s, the US population tipped over from majority rural to majority urban. Yes, some of them may have had allotments, but I seriously doubt that most of them were growing their food, or growing enough to feed their entire families. And in my experience, not even everyone who lives in rural areas knows how to grow fruits and veg.

Vegetables are by *far* the cheapest thing to be found in any American supermarket. We don't, IMO, have an epidemic of obesity because healthy food is not cheap enough, but because we have a culture that drives us to make unhealthy choices, to prefer mass-produced, pre-prepared food that has minimal nutrition content over food we cook ourselves, and to drink vast quantities hypersweetened soft drinks.

I heard one mother on a news program about low-income food choices I heard recently say that she would like to give her kids milk whenever they were thirsty but soda was cheaper, so she gave them Coke instead.

OK, first of all, what does it say about our national socio-economic choices that it's cheaper for people who are receiving government food aid (which her family did) to buy soft drinks than to buy milk? To me that suggests we need to look at building discounts for healthy eating (and disincentives for unhealthy choices) into the WIC voucher program. And it suggests to me that we need to look at milk price supports.

But, second. W-A-T-E-R. I almost never drank soda when I was growing up. It was a luxury. So was fruit juice, frankly. We could afford a bottle of cranberry juice, my mum's favourite, once every month or two. If we were thirsty, we drank water or tea (which is very cheap to make) without sugar. Even if we had soda, it wasn't what you drank with your meal, which it seems to be in most American households these days.

All of which is a roundabout way of getting back to my main point. People today aren't fat just because they make unhealthy choices (although that's part of it); they also consume far more calories than people did 60-70 years ago.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I was about to say *water* before you beat me to it. I drink loads of it every day. Never drink soda at all.

Supermarket veg isn't that cheap when compared with a burger.

[winterbadger]

I was about to say *water* before you beat me to it. I drink loads of it every day. Never drink soda at all.

One of my co-workers felt he was getting a bit overweight, so started adjusting his diet. The first 5-10 pounds he lost came from just not drinking 2 liters of Coke EVERY DAY. Sadly, since I almost never drink soda...

Supermarket veg isn't that cheap when compared with a burger.

I could make a (vegetarian) stew for six or eight with produce I get at the market for the price of a single McDonald's meal.