Hummusgirl's Blog

Food staples are probably not something we all think about every day, but we might know what we like to eat and pick out according to our children, or family members.  Now, staples are things (to me anyway) that are miscellaneous and small, but I went to one website that said sweets, bread, sugary drinks, chicken, pizza, and snacks are the staples America is known for today.  I think that’s kind of out of whack.  Now I read a book years ago that said when a country’s food declines, the country declines.  If we are known to produce and eat all the foods I just said, does this mean our country is collapsing?

I know from reading food books and watching food docs that when we go to a grocery store, we’re supposed to shop along the outer edges where the milk, produce, meat, and bread are.  But if we have websites that say our staples are snacks and sweets, then what is the answer to what staples we SHOULD buy?

Times are tough, and we can’t buy what we should eat all the time.  I can kind of understand why people buy desserts (because they have eggs, milk/butter, flour, and sometimes nuts in them),  chicken (because it’s a protein), pizza (because it could have all four food groups), and sugary drinks (because it’s kind of like water and it can very satisfying when you’re parched).

If corn, wheat, and rice are the main staples in the world and they make up 90 percent of the world’s energy intake, and if corn is used in a lot of other products, does that make corn syrup a staple as well?  And wheat is more popular than corn in this country (according to Michael Pollan) so the fact that sweets like cakes and cupcakes, bread, pizza, and snacks, contain wheat they would add to that 90 percent.

See when we say that something is a food staple, maybe it shouldn’t be, maybe food staples should mean different things.  Like roots and tubers are available in the US and a staple for hundreds of millions of people in tropical regions.

Maybe everything is a food staple to a lot of different people.  Because something as mundane as graham crackers or skittles, could be someone’s dinner that night.  Should we really judge what people eat when it could be could enough for them?