Like I said before- fast food chains, and now sit-down quick dining chains along with ready-to-eat areas in supermarkets, didn’t start out to destroy our health with overly processed, nutritionally lame food.

(Foods I incidentally believe are playing a larger role than we want to believe in all the allergies we’re seeing today, but that’s another post)

They progressed as time savers and entrepreneurs, opening a business like anyone else would.

At first the food actually was real and fresh, simply because the technology didn’t exist for any other option.

Here emerges the massive linchpin in all of this: Our parents and grandparents starting going to these restaurants and using these supermarket shortcuts when the food was fresh and decent for you.

The food in question has changed somewhat drastically in content over the last 50 years, but those changes weren’t announced to the general public (before you get ruffled at Big Food, they weren’t required to be at the time and most still aren’t).

However, the lesson that these foods are still a good, nutritional alternative to real food cooked at home is subconsciously being passed down from generation to generation through our actions, choices, and acceptance of them.

Food education in the home is still happening, but it has changed it’s content to the message above. The truth of the matter is, these processed foods are now not in any way the same as what you’d cook (fresh and real) at home, even if it looks the same on the outside.

Is this our parents’ fault? Nope. Like I said, food production practices in the industry have changed over the years, and most of those changes took place without the general public’s knowledge.

Many of our mothers championed women’s rights and pursued careers outside the home, setting great examples of possibilities for their daughters. These ready-to-eat foods played a very large but silent role in making that a reality.

Chain Breaker by BetaOri is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

But now the information is available; and as inconvenient as it is to all the advances, social and technological, that we’ve made, we can’t ignore that knowledge.

We have to break the current food education cycle we’re passing down.

And the only way to do that is by selectively choosing the message we want to send to our young children. I say young because the programing of what’s “good and safe” food-wise starts very, very early and will be ingrained for life.

It’s too late for us (my generation).  Oh we “know” fast food and such is not a great choice now, but in our heart of hearts we still don’t believe it. If fast food is our only option we’re not disgusted like we should be.. and why should we be?

We spent our learning years with playlands and hearing/seeing the opposite.

Do you need to go crazy and slander all fast/quick food/ Sysco restaurant chains to your children? No, that’s silly and impractical. But do educate children the best you know how on the differences so they can make informed decisions later on.

Teach them to ask questions. Teach them to read labels. If they see you do it, they’ll learn how- you don’t necessarily even need to talk about it if you don’t want to.

This is how we alter the education we’re passing down from generation to generation; by showing them, just like it was done 100 years ago.

The method hasn’t changed, just the message. We’re fortunate enough to be at a crossroads where we have enough knowledge available to determine exactly what that message is going to be for each family.

For your family.