december_solstice | The epitome of getting your dreams crushed.

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The epitome of getting your dreams crushed.

Well sort of.

Can you believe there was a time when you could actually WORK your way through college? Now, students are spending the cost of a house in less than 4 years.

College is an investment. One that isn't easy to make if you're poor.

The worst is that overwhelming excitement you feel after finding out you got in -- then realizing you can't even afford the tuition deposit, or any other fee thrown at you that is required to even register for your classes.

My spirit? Crushed. My dreams? In ruins.

Yeah, I'll get over it, sure, eventually I will move along and carve a new path for myself.

But there is something else I've realized. It's all nonsensical. Higher education is a profitable business -- it does NOT have the student's best interest in mind.

Here is my story:

I recently completed my Bachelor's and graduated with a 3.5 GPA. This Spring, I applied for an MFA program, with the same university, and got in! This summer, I took my final 2 credits I needed to graduate and start my MFA program in the Fall.

By the time I was nearly done with my short 7 week summer course, I discovered that I would not qualify for any financial aid. For me to qualify, I would need to take 6 credits or more. Why would I take 6 credits, when I only need 2 to graduate? Why would I waste upwards 10,000 in federal grants, scholarships and student loans, that I simply do not need to spend? Why on earth would I do that? That funding could be applied to another deserving student.

This problem has only presented itself because I wanted to graduate this summer, instead of in the Fall. It was the most logical solution to complete my final credit in the summer, therefore being able to attend graduate school in the Fall. Logical. Common sense, even.

In order to start the MFA program, I needed to first fork out nearly $1500 in a matter of days. They did not offer me a payment plan even when I tried to explain to them-- Hey man, there isn't $1500 lying around under my mattress. Hey man, I'm living in it (rent). Which I can barely pay. I'm just trying to get ahead here. I am a working young person with little to no credit. I can't get a private student loan when I have no cosigner. Nor could I get a personal loan.

When I finally exhausted all of my options, I surrendered to the fate...that I kind of already saw coming.

That wasn't even the nail in the coffin, though.

Can I take a semester off to pay this off?

Admissions requires $500 for a 12 month deferment. BY MONDAY. Let me just go pick money from my money tree out back. Not only do I have to wait an entire school year, but I need to pay a tuition deposit for the f'ing tuition I am not even f'ing paying.

So tell me, does colleges have the student's best interest in mind? Because, excuse my french but, all I smell coming out of this university is bullshit.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hopefully my comment isn't too unrelated!

I went abroad for my university studies. $400 a year for tuition to go to school in Iceland, and you don't have to be a citizen or anything, they have relatively a lot of majors taught in English too. You have to pay for your own books (the cost of which depend on what exactly you're studying - mine were $20-60 each), and then find housing (mine were all about $550 a month which I do NOT recommend as it means living in total, complete, very shitty poverty - take something that's $800+ a month) and food of course (maybe $200 a month, I don't remember and it depends on if you eat traditional food or not).

So, in the end I was paying around $12,000 a year to both get an education and live there in general. Norway seems to be the same, and frankly I'd tell people who are interested to go to Norway instead of Iceland for various reasons (including that the local language is much easier). But, you can't find any kind of financial aid for this because apparently no American financial aid, scholarships, whathaveyou covers you when you want to go abroad, or at least nothing did a few years ago when I was looking.

The EU countries have laws where non-EU citizens, who are living in the country on a student permit, have to pay some kind of fee to go to school. I'm now living in Sweden but on a spouse permit (Iceland was a student permit) and spouse permits and work permits in EU countries don't have to pay tuition fees, so all of my university classes here in Sweden are 100% free, I only have to buy the textbooks. But if I were in Sweden on a student permit then I would have to pay some thousands of dollars, I don't know how much but I assume it's still less than in the US. (Iceland and Norway aren't in the EU.)

Where I lived in the US, the tuition of my local university which I never went to was something like $10,000 a year (not including housing/food/books). The community college I went to was around $500 per normal class (for one semester) but since I did most of that while still in high school they waived my fees. Iceland was $400 or so per year no matter which classes I was taking, Sweden not only has no tuition fee ($0 per year) for me but the government is actually paying me money to go to school (not because I'm an immigrant - they pay all Swedes the same).

Before I thought of looking to go abroad and applying to a foreign school directly, I had been looking at exchange programs. Guess what? If you were to go on exchange to this Icelandic university that I went to, by way of your American university, you'd have to pay that $10,000 American fee - that the Icelandic school never receives. Not only do they not receive it but the people at the school in Iceland don't even know that America is charging its students this. It's literally the American school charging you for zero reason just because they can.

When you tell people about the costs of American school they go "What?! But that's the cost of a house or a car! You're joking right?" And then you get to tell them the funnest part - guess what, barring certain very specific subjects (like cartoon animation) your Icelandic or Swedish university is either just as good or better than the American university that charged that much! For example, in Sweden I'm taking a Japanese class, using the same exact textbook as one that I took at school in the USA, except the Swedish class goes almost twice as fast AND they teach better. (But again, there's some kind of myth floating around in America about how the US has the best universities and the best education, and how a degree from another first-world country isn't worth anything if you then want to work in the US.)

Ahhh well it has to change some day. If anything, the US will just collapse due to everyone being in debt and uneducated, or people will start snapping and murdering all the heads of various departments : /

Loved your insight on American higher ed in comparison to other countries -- EU especially.

We're quite behind the times when it comes to higher ed, aren't we?

Our values in terms of higher ed are very different. We don't have a universal idea that everyone deserves an education. We don't see access to college as a right. Instead, we still understand it as a privileged. Why though? An educated populace is overall good for the economy as well as the social and political aspects of society. Not only is tuition not affordable, the interest rates on federal student loans are high.

Studying abroad is something I wish I considered for my undergraduate studies. I went to a VERY expensive private institute in NYC -- BUT, I got through the entire thing with financial aid (combination of grants, scholarships, and loans.)

That bit about exchange programs though...I had no clue.

I don't doubt that Icelandic or Swedish universities are just as good or even better than what we can get here. Frankly, I'd feel a little better receiving an education from an institution that does not profit greatly from it's students -- an institution that values learning and is passionate about leading a thoughtful generation.

Americans thinking they have the best schools (IVY LEAGUE) is not unheard of either. But Americans also believe they have the best of everything and they are the best at everything :P Yet, there are countries who got their shit together, with much happier, healthier citizens. Aw yes, blind patriotism. LOL

Oops, up there I wrote the school was "almost twice as fast". Actually, in the US we took one full semester to get to chapter 5 of the textbook. Here in Sweden we got to chapter 6 in HALF a semester, and we were learning extra things not taught in the book on the side, and the class and textbook isn't even in these people's native language (we were also expected to do things like write a mini essay at the end of the class, our homework wasn't just stuff like filling out worksheets).

Yeah, America suffers from 1. Capitalism (which by nature, is a system where you only think about yourself), 2. A good life is only for the elite or the lucky, 3. Political and informational isolationism. If you keep your people ignorant, if you don't teach them certain things, censor other things, don't show certain things on TV etc, they don't realize how bad they have it and they won't fight against you.

My wife says that "From what I know, American schools and parents don't teach. They babysit."

Do you know what Swedish kids learn in elementary school (or at least the school ensures that they know how to do it)? How to make campfires, carve wood, swim, bicycle, ski, on top of that they do stuff like take nature walks to identify plants. At some point, I think junior high, they learn basic woodworking, cooking and sewing. They sometimes do things like try out how to make yarn from sheep's wool. Stuff that started disappearing in the US in at least the 80's (I certainly did none of those activities in my school and I graduated high school in 2009). By the way, to the campfires the kids bring food that they've prepared at home (ex. hotdogs, or cinnamon-bun dough) that they then cook.

In high school you're required to take physics and chemistry (I took neither!) and you'll have studied at least two different foreign languages for many years. English words and phrases starting in your first years but English classes starting in earnest in about fifth grade, continuing on for all your years, and then you'll get five or seven or so years of a language like German, and then you can pick another - my wife chose Japanese.

In Iceland, English starts in low amounts in something like second grade, Danish in fourth or fifth, another language (French or German usually) in seventh or eighth, it's that kind of system. In English class they even end up reading things like Shakespeare. My Swedish wife's read more classic English novels than I have! So ex. when my wife hears about someone who can't swim, her immediate thought is always "What?! But that means they failed elementary school!".

My wife was doing woodcarvings in after-school daycare when she was like seven years old, and "they gave us normal knives". She didn't know safety scissors even existed, they don't use them in schools. Meanwhile in America we have kids who aren't allowed to use matches or the stove until they're sixteen.

It's not just the general education either. There's no school busses, the kids take the normal city bus or walk/bike to school. In Swedish gradeschools, food is free for all students, and you can go back for seconds as much as you want. They always have stuff like vegan options, and have things like a small vegetable "buffet". You get more than 40 minutes to eat lunch. At least in her elementary school, the food was mostly local (so local that sometimes there were pebbles in the potatoes). Because the food is free, no one brings lunches to school "unless they're really weird". There's no chocolate milk, soda or dessert, you get plain milk and it's never frozen. You don't get chips.

(She notes that when she was on exchange for a while in Germany for her German class, all the German mothers packed in candy and "shit food" for their kids' lunches, and the milk was "synthetic", and the Swedes were shocked. In Sweden, stuff like candy and chips is basically only for Fridays/Saturdays thanks to a very successful campaign some decades ago to reduce the amount of cavities in the population.)

She says "Our junior highs and high schools are just like your universities. You have a class schedule that varies, you can get hours in-between classes sometimes. Theoretically you can have days in junior high where you only have a single class."

The best part though is how they treat you like you're actually a responsible person. You are always allowed to, say, go off-campus for lunch. Starting in high school, if you're skipping too much class or getting bad grades, they don't call your parents, they come talk to YOU. Your parents never have to sign off on any papers (ex. your report card) stating that they've seen them. If you're in university and something is going wrong or you're doing badly, the teacher doesn't come bug you about it (as has happened to me in the US many times), they simply wait for you to come to them and if you never come, too bad, you fail and you didn't ask for help so it's your own fault. I hear that in the US if you take too long to get your degree they sort of cancel out some of your credits - here that doesn't happen, you can take 20 years to get a degree in French if you want.

In university you can turn in your work basically as late as you want as long as the course is going on and they don't mark off points (or don't mark off much - depends on the class and teacher). In general in all their years of school there's extremely little homework compared to American schools. Usually it's stated outright that you can skip a certain percentage or amount of lectures before failing the course (again, percentage depends on the class/teacher), for example in my classes in Iceland I could skip something like 30%, in my Japanese classes here I can skip 3 out of 15 lectures, but sometimes it's more, sometimes less.

Then there's the degrees themselves. Other countries are different, but here you don't really have a set route that you follow. You generally don't just choose to get an "International Communications" degree for example. Instead you amass a bunch of courses and go talk to the councellors and together you figure out what kind of degree you can get. I can mix Japanese with nutrition if I want to and as long as I have enough points in the same general categories, I can get a degree with it all together.

As for "being the best", sadly it's propaganda that they hear in other countries too. All the Swedes think America is (or "must be") better than Sweden, unless they've been there themselves! People think that America is technologically advanced everywhere, ex. super high-speed wireless, public transportation everywhere, electronic medicine prescriptions, (not the reality which is "full of small towns that are straight out of the 50's"). They think it's extremely multicultural everywhere (not "my town has only white people and the occasional mexican"), they think that "you pay less taxes so it must be easier to get rich" (not realizing that in America, school and healthcare isn't basically free like it is here, and that you aren't guarenteed a pension).

Even just the general medical care is worse - things that legally, only nurses are allowed to do here, in America the hospitals have you do it yourself at home. Or things that here, are side effects "that only come if you had a bad surgeon", there are the most normal side effects of a surgery. There's even just stuff like, I have a very rare eye disorder and in the US I had to go to a specialist (no one else had ever heard of what I had) but here even just the random people who work at the glasses shop know about it.

When I was first living abroad I didn't at all expect that it would be so different, as all the differences were so tiny, "we're both first-world countries!", but over the years they've really added up into the bigger picture. All the years that I heard "They're so strange in Japan! They're so strange in France! They're backwards!" I now know is actually "America is the strange one out of all the first-world countries in the world".

It's no exaggeration that public school here is terrible. And, surely it has a huge impact on the populous.

I mentioned that I recently relocated to NYC, but I didn't mention where. I actually grew up in Hawaii. Hawaii is very simple, very laid-back. Majority of it's citizens have no interest in health, education, in science, in sustainability -- anything of that sort. They value tradition, culture, and family (which is great, to a point). Due to a low graduation rate, a terrible education system, the population is...not very bright. Poverty is an issue. Though a melting plot, due to the early 40's and 50's plantation villages, there is a lot of racism and hate crimes. They are not fond out foreigners or tourists (for good reason though). There is some interesting content regarding native Hawaiians and sovereignty. For anyone not from Hawaii, it's simply a vacation destination -- a tourist trap.

The public education I received, as well as the food I grew up with left me basically unhealthy, overweight, and stupid. I never took math. I literally did not take math. How the hell do you go to college without knowing math? I didn't really take any science courses either. Or History. I took an English class every year (reading & writing), and a bunch of electives. P.E for the first year. As a freshman and a sophomore, I did fairly OK in my classes, but I stopped going to school all together by the time I reached my senior year. I graduated. All I had under my belt was a few years of English and the slop they served for lunch. Spam and rice was a norm. Playing catch up wasn't easy. I had to learn everything by myself to even compete in a college classroom.

When I moved to NYC, my perception of Americans and my perception of the world changed. People from all over the world live here. Aside from Time Square, small businesses run the show. Neighborhoods are littered with coffee shops and bodegas. NYC, like Hawaii, has a false view. It is very forward thinking, very liberal, and very activism-driven. City parks and museums are well protected. Entrance is free or have a pay-what-you-want option for most of them. The education is better. The food is great. The people are great. Perhaps this is why people from all over the world come to visit in live in NYC, but no where else in the US.

Anywho -- the Swedes got it right by prioritizing education. (And, healthcare!) These are basic human rights, that we all should have access to -- good quality healthcare and education. These are the foundation for a successful society. I 100% agree with you that if that were the true intentions of our politicians, as well as the wealthy and elite members (though it should not matter, but it does, because money talks and money sways politics).

Americans need to be sick and stupid to be controlled. Sounds borderline conspiracy-theorists don't it?

Like you mentioned, you pick up these things when you travel and talk to different people. Not everyone is going to pick up a book or conduct research on this issues if there is no motivation to do so. The US is very good at preventing this and instead encouraging and feeding complacency and dependence. Think of our current presidential candidates for ex. Can you believe TRUMP is actually ahead on votes? It's because Americans feel he is "real", honest, blunt, bold and saying what the others won't say. Problem is -- he ain't really saying anything worth hearing. He LITERALLY represents the ignorant, racist, hateful America. He is the populous. He is what the populous wants to hear. He is what Americans want to be -- rich.

Holy Jesus! I knew they were lax in some places but I didn't know it could be THAT lax! I grew up near Seattle. I had a friend for a while who went to a Catholic school and the education she got seemed to be closer to on par with "Europe's" - as in, a foreign language starting in seventh grade among other things. My dad said he would have sent me to a school like that if they hadn't had religious education in it... But why aren't there any schools like that that don't, then?

Yeah, living abroad as I have been, it happens over and over that people think I'm really stupid. They have no clue what we learn and don't learn in school, or what society is like. They can't fathom a parent who believes that foreign languages like Japanese are useless, or a world where "cooking" means warming up pre-made mashed potatoes or putting two pre-made mixes you bought at the store together. They don't understand that I didn't learn anything about English grammar in school (and neither does anyone else, that's why no one knows what an adverb is - though learning Esperanto fixed all that for me). So if I don't know something that every elementary schooler knows, they chalk it up to my individual stupidity and not due to culture etc. It's actually even cost me friendships before because my "friends" got sick of how little I knew : l

They only see the America that they see on TV (which is mainly action movies and shows like How I Met Your Mother), and even when they see something that shows the truth (crazy obese cocaine-addict cat lady, super-religious nut) they think "that's just this one person" or "of course at least part of that is fake for TV". They don't realize "that's the entire country". Though they immediately notice some other things, ex. certain things about certain presidents. To my wife, "America is movie-land. To us no one really lives like that, those things like school busses don't really exist, they're just props and plot points. It's difficult to understand because it's so different from here."

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I assume you don't know Swedish, but here's a video link anyway in case you have a friend: (I can make subtitles for it if you're interested enough but it will take a while)

http://www.veoh.com/watch/v84868605CyxHcgk2

This video shows that throughout all kinds of research and observations from 100+ years ago to today, everything proves without a doubt that processed, edited food causes the vast majority of cancer, cavities, Alzheimer's, stomach problems, diabetes and many more problems that America (and other countries, especially ones that think American research is good) likes to claim are hereditary or random. It also may not directly cause, but greatly increases, problems when you have, say, depression or joint pain. The "research data" varies from normal modern research to simply just doctor's logs from doctors who worked in different countries 100 years ago (ex. "I moved to India and during my 20 years of work here never saw a single case of cancer, indigestion....").

The point is that when you take something like wheat or rice and remove the shell in order to get white flour/rice, or when you boil something down to get an extreme concentrate, or when you extract vitamins and minerals and eat them by themselves or add them to something else, or when you ultra-pasteurize and homogenize your milk, you're then eating it very unnaturally, which your body can't handle properly. This actually becomes a poison to your body, but because we've grown up with eating it for all our lives and because human bodies are so sturdy in general, we don't realize the effects because we think it's normal.

If you stop eating, say, white flour and all forms of table sugar (white/brown sugar, molasses, syrup that isn't 100% just tree sap) completely for two or three weeks, you'll notice that you get very sick when you do eat it again even if it's just a super tiny bit. You'll also notice that your taste buds will have drastically changed by the end of those weeks - plain yoghurt that you found incredibly sour before, is totally edible. Suddenly you can taste the sweetness even in vegetables. This is why your grandma says "you don't need dessert, fruit is dessert enough!".

The idea is that when you eat a sugar cube, you're actually eating the same amount of sugar as you'd get from, let's pretend, 19 apples. You wouldn't normally eat that many apples in one sitting, so naturally your body can't handle that amount of sugar properly and starts working in "overdrive mode", even if you don't notice it. Due to the missing ingredients that are supposed to work together (the entire rest of the apple), the sugar can also be processed in your body in a different way than normally.

Yet when you look in your food that you've bought from the store, you'll see that there's this same added sugar in stuff like ketchup, sausages, chips, sandwich spread, bread, lunchmeat, cereal, fruit juice... When you look out for white flour, you'll see that it's in stuff like soy sauce, sometimes hotdogs... White rice flour, and they use it in gluten-free breads. And you'll be lucky if they haven't also bleached this flour (in the US, they're apparently allowed to bleach white flour with chlorine...?). If it doesn't have plain added sugar, it has aspartame (an even worse poison), or other things that are just as edited (ex. stevia that you buy at the store is apparently just as edited as normal sugar is).

And did you know, stuff like non-natural food colourings can cause things like ADD symptoms? One lady I read about in America, found food colouring even in frozen french fries.

So this "poison" is in almost literally everything you buy pre-made at the store or eat at a restaurant, and if you're unlucky you're also eating pesticides or arsenic due to how and where they grew the food. It's no wonder that people feel so lethargic and sluggish and have memory problems (or "brain-fog"), and why they get so sick, and why the rate of cancer and diabetes is clearly growing.

But, look at what they tell you. "The cancer rate isn't growing, we just have better detection methods now". "It's just hereditary". "You need this extra sugar, it's good for you, it's for energy". No, it's just what they say so they can keep selling this stuff.

Or, look at all these studies. "If you drink green tea, you have a lower rate of cancer", "If you eat rye flour, you have a lower rate of cancer". The answer is clear. If you're constantly drinking green tea, you're constantly not drinking as much soda or coffee/black tea/fruit juice (with added sugar). If you're eating rye flour, you're not eating as much white flour. They even sometimes have added sugar in empty pill capsules.

But if you say "I don't eat sugar/white flour" people go "oh you're allergic?", you explain the problem, then they think you're crazy, or they refuse to watch the research video for no reason, etc. Despite that everyone knows that "eating chocolate makes you happy" "poor people tend to be really sick" "candy causes cavities", "alcohol/drugs dull your brain", despite that we all know that things like asbestos used to be commonplace, they don't realize that we're all still dumb enough to have the same problems but just with different subjects today... "Milk is healthy!" but 100 years ago, milk was fresh from the cow and now it's not.

Food companies aren't out there for your health. At this point, doctors and researchers aren't necessarily out there for your health either, because they've either been "bought" by companies or the research they read has been. It's the same as the education system, they're not there to educate you. And the education system makes the same excuses.

"Kids in foreign countries do better in school because they're in school for longer hours" (= Not true, Finland's the best in Europe and they're in school for many less hours). "We'd do better if we had more money" (= My wife's elementary school literally used one of those metal triangles to call in kids from recess). "Other countries can do it that way because they're smaller" (America would be smaller too if every state acted like a separate country).

What miffs me is that my parents and grandparents apparently aren't out there to help me either. They taught me nothing. Clearly they know more than me about some things, so why isn't the information being passed down?

The refusal to look at research is a huge problem here. People want to stay ignorant. It feels better. Who wants to hear this? You know what I mean? It's hard to swallow and ignorance is easier.

I'd like to think I discuss a lot of thought-provoking topics on my social media platforms. And, I'd say less than 2% of those on my friends list engage. On the other hand, my BS posts, I get a lot of engagement.

Yeah, even people who claim to be health-conscious or whatever tend to not want to read about health. I'll read stuff if someone links me but I don't exactly always go look up info on my own... Sometimes when I bring up serious topics (just random stuff I read) people are like "You're talking about such weird things, I don't know how to reply".

I'm totally on board with you. I think the huge problem here is the capitalistic nature of the food and pharmaceutical industries. It's all about selling products and making money. Healthy isn't very profitable, I guess. Less doctor visits, less medicine to prescribe, less junk to sell. Throw in poor, biased research, and an overall shit education system...oh boy.

What are your thoughts on the organic and gmo-free movement?

From all that I've heard, it's good. The food might still end up getting some chemicals or something in them but it's at least going to be a lot less than otherwise, and the more people buy organic stuff the easier it is for the farmers to grow it. If you live near a farm you can even just go talk to them in person and pay them differently from what they would get paid if they delivered their stuff to the grocery store, if you have the money - from looking it up, milk is way cheaper here if you get it directly than if you buy it at the store, and there's been studies saying stuff like if a kid grows up on unprocessed milk then they have less allergies later in life... Well why not for food too?

Contrary to what some people might say, eating stuff like meat or milk from animals that were fed chemicals, the chemicals DO get into your body and in the very long run (just like with sugar etc.) they DO affect you. For example, the studies about white flour and sugar all pointed out the fact that the people who started eating them tended to get the illnesses associated with eating them, after about 20 years from first starting. But that's when they had lived their whole life not eating them. What about when your mom eats tons of it when you're already in the womb, and it's also the only food you ever have even as a baby?

Someone wrote somewhere that they looked at their friend's baby food - "ground rice" - and it had like 16 different ingredients in it. Your baby is only supposed to be eating plain ground rice, which you can very well just make yourself at home if you buy a grinder.

People just seriously have to remember that we had mercury even in stuff like kid's toys for a long time... ~~and the generations growing up with that were seemingly healthier than our current generation.~~

They actually even had a commercial here where they got a family who didn't eat organic food, to get themselves tested for how many chemicals they had in their bodies, and then gave them all-organic food to eat for two weeks. By the end of the two weeks they tested them again and they had almost no chemicals, so the family was convinced and switched to eating organic.

Some food you can even just grow in a pot on your kitchen table (like leeks and onions) if you really want to. You can watch the commercial, it's pretty self-evident, they just have before/after charts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnfrJLlZ5LI

The guy at the end basically says "We don't know what long-term effects eating all these chemicals will have, but we also know that you can't just look at the fact that you're eating chemicals as if it's individually. Chemicals when mixed together can be incredibly more dangerous than when taken in alone."

There's another documentary that was actually made in Sweden that I wish I could show you, but it has no English subs. This guy went to get himself tested to figure out exactly what all the chemicals and everything were in his body, to see if the hype was true. Due to the food that we eat that is being grown non-organically, and on ground that's had different pesticides and stuff in it, among other things he had chemicals in his body that have actually been illegal to use for decades and that simply can't ever leave his body.

There was another documentary about allergies around the world, which was done partially in France and Japan. In France they eat tons of "synthetic foods" among other things (as in literally everything is fake and has sugar in it, so complains my Danish friend who lives there), and in Japan they've replaced huge amounts of traditional wooden stuff with modern western, concrete buildings.

Apparently once you replace dirt roads with concrete, the pollen can't dissolve into the ground and get diffused - so where does it go? Into your body, or just sitting there on the ground and in the air, in amounts way more than normal even if you can't see it. When you stop using traditional, wooden houses that are made for the air to pass through, you live in a house with stuffy air where all the possible chemicals/everything just get trapped. Your body can't handle this as well, so you end up with a higher population of people who have health problems, asthma, allergies. (I read that it's similar with asthma - when you live in a dusty, moldy, cramped house or whatever your kids are more likely to get it, and the longer they live there the more likely they are to be stuck with asthma all their lives).

Then there's plastic. You know how plastic melts really easily? You know how it's porous? This means it's the worst material to put food, especially warm food, into because the plastic "gets into" your food. Apparently this can happen even if the food is cold but it's increased when it's warm. So why the hell are we using it for all our food packaging and storage containers? Most fabrics have plastic in them these days too. Oh look, our toothbrushes and baby toys are made of plastic.

So, everything that I see points to that we can only deviate from nature to a certain extent and past that we're completely ruining both our health and the environment. All my common sense and knowlege of 80's and 90's scifi (; D) points to that if even mere condensing and extracting of foods is too non-natural for our bodies, then genetically modified foods are going to end up being even worse. I heard that GMO corn is much worse for you than normal corn (though I haven't gone looking it up), so why would it be any different for ex. GMO grapes or chickens?

And why genetically modify food anyway? We've existed for thousands of years on what we have. We don't actually need stuff like bananas that don't have seeds in them. We don't actually need tomatoes that don't rot for five months. We don't even need MORE food because we (apparently??) already produce more than enough food - it's just that the food we have isn't used efficiently.

The only reason why I support GMOs is because it grows easier/faster and lasts longer. Which can be very worthwhile for countries that suffer from food shortages. Fight global famine, sure, but we don't really need it for...convenience or aesthetic reasons (easy peel, seedless fruits), or extra bright apples. But why on earth would any organization create such a product to fight world hunger when you can instead profit greatly off of it by destroying soil and making people sick.

It would make sense to supply 3rd world countries with seeds. But that will never happen. You are right, we do produce enough food to feed everyone, we just throw it away. There shouldn't be a single apple wasted. They should all end up in food banks or even distributed/offered for free (ugly, bruised, produce and near expired/expired pantry items).

There is a whole community to dumpster divers that show how much food is throw out by supermarkets.

I really don't get why we do things like export our own local food and then import food from foreign countries, huge amounts of money going to waste here...

There are clear pros and cons but I think it does more harm than good when lead by Monsanto. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to notice how corrupt of an organization they are. Just look at how many countries don't want anything to do with them. I know Neil DeGrass Tyson openly supports gmos but I haven't heard much of his argument.

I think it is impossible for the mass majority of Americans to switch completely to organic and it's silly for anyone even suggest it. (For example, I care about people's health, but I wouldn't tell anyone what to eat. Ever. I think public schools should provide healthier lunches, but I also believe there shouldn't be a ban on how much soda a person can buy -- which our Mayor is trying to do. This could be a good idea for minors though. No 2L sodas to those under 18.)

Poor people, especially those living in places where organic items are less available, don't even have access to it, even if they had an interest. I also recognize, for me, and for other low income families, every single penny matters. It's all about stretching that penny till it can't be stretched anymore. When we were REALLY struggling, my diet consists of probably 60-70% chicken, rice and beans. Because that the most bang for my buck. (At least here it is.) I could do 5lb bag of rice $3, a few packs of chicken $5-7 and a bag of dried beans $1. Maybe some plantains $1. 1-2 bags of oranges $2-3. Oats $1. Eggs $2-3 Bread $1 Half gal Milk $2 And that would be our grocery list for the week. And, it worked! We have totally lived off $20 a week and didn't kill myself with processed foods.

In some cases there is little difference between the gmo product and the organic product. According to the FDA, it is some 35-40% less gmos required to gain that organic label. Also, it's important to note that the 'organic', 'free-range' and 'GMO-free' label is becoming quite a marketing ploy. Especially now that there is so much news and controversy about the topic. The FDA is handing out certifications left and right, and everyone wants to get on board. Unless the FDA tightens the qualifications for these labels, this can do some serious farm. Not only are Americans being misguided by food corps, their "nature" of being awfully uninterested in research, complacent, and overall indifferent, will hurt them.

Like you mentioned briefly, buying directly from farms, supporting Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), buying farm shares, is overall the BEST way to go. Not only are you probably getting a 'true' organic product, but you're also supporting local/small farms which are seriously hurting now. This is, more or less, the last bit of connection we have to what we eat. This is the last of bit of us knowing WHERE EXACTLY our food comes from.

I think anyone can make huge strides by just being more conscious about what they're eating and where it comes from. I eat some organic items, but only if it economically makes sense and I can fit it in my budget. It's all about balance.

A lot of people say it's too expensive, and though it is more expensive, assuming you even have the access, I usually suggest others to swap out a few items. For example, if you buy canned regular beans, I suggest buying canned organic beans because it's often not much of a difference in price. Even better, buy a bag of dried organic beans and soak them yourself. Cheaper vegetables such as carrots are not much more expensive organic. Watch for sales, do it when you can, don't beat yourself up about it.

If you put in the effort, it's possible, but it is time consuming and a commitment.

If you buy local milk at the store here, it costs let's say, 10 crowns (that's like a dollar and a half or so) for a litre. Of this, the farmer gets maybe 4-5 crowns. If you go to the farmer directly and get milk from them, you'll most likely pay 3-5 crowns, with the possibility to pay them more, and if the farmer is willing to do things illegally then you can even buy 100% fresh milk that hasn't been edited in any way. So not only are you getting the milk cheaper and possibly healthier, but if you just went ahead and paid the normal store price directly to the farmer, you'd be paying them double.

There's a big cultural difference in what takes "time". Here, spending 20-30 minutes on a meal basically means "instant", and soaking something overnight doesn't even count as time spent. Spending an hour is normal. You can make yoghurt or soft butter overnight and depending on where you live, it saves both your health and money (apparently here it's not any cheaper to make butter at home but "it tastes heavenly". Obviously if you could buy milk/cream directly it would be cheaper).

Over time you figure out better and faster recipes, you realize that if you spend one day just making tons of dough then you can freeze it all for those times when you do want to make pizza quick, then suddenly making a nice, cheap meal that's also fast takes no time at all.

You can make flavoured drinks and candy even just from boiling certain flowers (violets, elderflowers) and likewise there's tons of edible plants that we don't eat anymore - in the old days they even made flour from tree bark. You can make normal bread at home - when lazy, just make pancake-style bread and use that for sandwiches instead. If you save the root-end of a leek or onion after cutting one up, you can regrow them and it doesn't take long at all.

If you buy full stalks of celery, you can dry the leaves (takes like 10 minutes in the oven but 3 days with pure normal air) yourself then add them to anything you want as spices. I doubt making meatballs at home is much cheaper (you "fill out" the meat with milk/cream and oats and onion and stuff) but they certainly taste better.

Making a serving of french fries takes like what, 15 minutes to chop and prepare it all, from full potatoes to in the oven? Making pasta doesn't take much time once you get used to it or once you get a machine. I mean, how much TV do people watch every day, how many blogs do they surf, how much time do they completely waste while at work? How much time does it even take to walk into that convenience store and buy that soda, or sit in that drive-through line?

And in all these cases you can make the food a lot healthier. When I make french fries I put on spinach or celery leaves, then when they dry from being baked in the oven the vegetables don't actually taste like anything - so you can put a whole bag of spinach on even if you hate spinach. When making pasta, you can put tomato paste or fish meat in or whatever and likewise, the taste isn't so strong, so you can do it even if you hate it. Instead of pasta with cheese I make pasta with egg sauce (not sure how to explain the end result but it DOESN'T taste like omlette and it's more like just having the texture of cheese).

But it works if you save money in other ways too. When your pillow goes flat, don't toss it, open it up and combine the insides with a second pillow and sew it back up. Buy whole kernels for popcorn instead of microwave bags, pop it on the stove in a pot. Buy plain cocoa powder and milk instead of Swiss Miss. Heat up drinks using a candle. Get rid of the electric coffee maker, use a hand-mixer (http://img.tradera.net/images/949/211033949_90141cc0-1e16-4e50-8e11-601b55ff05cf.jpg). If you own a house or a balcony, in the wintertime just put your food outside in the cold and unplug your fridge/freezer (food that shouldn't freeze goes inside the house in an icebox like a cooler, using snow or ice taken from outside for the cold).

Make potato chips at home, or use another vegetable that's not even potatoes but is cheaper. Nowadays you can even do stuff like buy phone chargers and flashlights that use "human power" instead of electricity to work, and you can make or buy "sun ovens" that don't use electricity, for the summertime.

Hmm, so maybe after that your electric bill is a little lower? Or maybe you realize that you have some habit-food (like coffee and chips) that's actually sucking away half your money, that you can stop eating or reduce costs on?

Buying tea loose-leaf in bulk is cheaper than in bags. If you learn to sew and repair or make your own clothes, so you can at least turn the old clothes into new ones when something happens to them, they'll last longer and then - Wow! You have a little more money for food sometimes too! If you're really poor, once the fabric of your shoes breaks, re-use the soles and sew new fabric on. If you buy fish that hasn't pre-gutted, you save a little more money. If you get a machine you can even make sausages at home and again you can put "filling" in that makes the meat stretch. If you realize that hearts taste just like normal stew meat after you cook them enough, if you save bones and shrimp shells and whatnot and make soup stock, there you go.

Right now I'm making leather/fabric from fish skin, and thinking about all the times I've eaten fish and didn't know that you could actually use the skin. Maybe it wont go anywhere, but people are selling these fish skins for like ten dollars each on Etsy - I could potentially fix up the skin and sell it for nearly the same cost as actually buying the fish cost in the first place.

I mean, if we were all REALLY poor, we'd be making sandles for ourselves by weaving together grass or free plastic straws we picked up at the mall, and our clothing would from melted plastic bags that we picked up off the street... We'd all have rainwater collection buckets and we'd be picking up pieces of wood out of dumpsters or from forest floors and carving our butter knives and spoons from them. We'd make oilcloth ourselves at home, no one would ever use dryers, and we'd all be turning dog hair into yarn LOL.

I also see "people should have common sense already - you should know not to drink soda with every meal" sorts of comments come up a lot. Anyone who looks around them should realize that most people do not have common sense. People are feeding soda to babies and deep-frying pasta. (If you haven't seen "Big Meets Bigger" I recommend it, it's probably on Youtube.)

I think that people should be able to poison themselves however much they want once they're an adult but there needs to be some sort of regulated system about it. You should be able to buy alcohol, but you have to use a card every time, and when the card racks up too many purchases/visits within a certain time period you then get tested to see if you're an alcoholic.

Your celery leaves idea is pretty neat. I'm quite a fan of celery salt.

As for time, I think most Americans would prefer not to prep cook and cook for more than...30-40 minutes total. They're all about fast and convenience, in all aspects of society, not just food. I think majority processed foods are more or less geared towards saving time. Whether it's minute rice of kitchen appliances.

The entire diet and food culture is about the quickness. I want good food without taking the time to cook it. I want to be healthy and fit without putting the time in. That is also why there are so many dangerous and ineffective weight loss gimmicks. (Late night infomercials.)

Yep. And yet what do they do with all this saved time? (The most common reason why people give up learning a language is also "I don't have time") And doesn't it make you more unable to handle waits and things when you're so used to fast fast now? It seems to me that rather than having tons of saved time, these people feel like they have even less time...

If it takes more time to do or make something (yourself) then you'll probably value it more, and if it takes more time to cook you'll probably eat less lol

Hey, that's a terrible friend! Not a friend at all, I'd say.

I've had those who grew up elsewhere think I was stupid. Ironically, I was kind of the "smart" kid or "nerd" in high school LOL Now I'm the know-it-all :P As always, the more you know, the more you realize you don't know shit.

I'm curious on what your thoughts are on the correlation between diet and obesity. I wager that heart disease, high blood pressure, which is often correlated with obesity (in America), is not so much a result of being fat, as much as it is a result of your diet (regardless of your weight). Americans are #1 in heart related diseases because no other population on earth consumes sodium and sugar at such high volumes as we do (as you mentioned). No one. No one else consumes this much processed foods. We have these health problems because we don't eat real food (like you mentioned :P). If you take a look at other nations and compare their food consumption to ours, and how it correlate with their overall health, you'll notice it's much different. For example, did you know that Greece has a 70% obesity rate? 70% of their population is obese. Yet, they have much much better health than Americans, and a lot of other not-as-fat nations.

There've been studies saying that if you eat, say, a McDonald's hamburger that your reactions to stress are a lot worse. (Now when I Googled, apparently caffeine does too. I stopped with my occasional caffeine because I was having a surgery and found out it makes you heal slower.) I don't know if that has to do with blood pressure. This lady who talked about the wheat/sugar said that high blood pressure is one of the things that those processed foods affect, but I don't remember exactly what she said about it (it was just a brief mention I think). Her notes ranged from being about cultures that eat mostly (whole-wheat) bread and vegetables, to the inuits who eat entirely just animal meat and fat... After I finish the books I already have I'm going to check out her book from the library and then I can see if she talks about it any more.

...And now I Googled a bit. People are saying, for high blood pressure, to do stuff like lower your salt intake - "except you literally (when in America) cannot lower your intake to be within the recommended daily limit if you eat any kind of pre-made food. Look at Subway's sandwiches, look at a can of soup, just one of those will put you nearly at or past the daily limit". They add to this derisive comments about how "no one in today's busy world can cook all their own meals every day" which is absolute nonsense. Cook in large amounts, freeze them in meal-sized packages, learn to realize that 30 minutes spent on a meal isn't a long time and that your health (and the health of your kids) is worth more than anything else.

When I look at some Swedish pages about how to lower your blood pressure naturally, it's all "Eat nuts, fish, meat, vegetables and fruits; exercise more; eat brown bread and brown rice, not French bread". They mention dark chocolate helping - plain cocoa powder is just a vegetable, dark chocolate simply has more cocoa and less other stuff. What are people eating if they're not eating all the things listed there? There's not many options.

Then there's the difference in the food itself between countries. Here, all bread is much more likely to have a higher amount of whole-grain or rye in it because Swedes just think white bread is "tasteless" - at the Swedish fast-food chain, the hamburger buns are (mostly) whole-wheat, and you normally bread fish (strömming, forgot the name) using rye flour. Their cakes have marzipan (mashed almonds + sugar), not frosting (sugar + sugar), and instead of whipped cream with sugar they might have "egg cream" in pastries (I think it's egg + whipped cream, without sugar), or plain jam, etc. They have much lower quantities of salt, sugar and spices in general in their food (my wife claims America must put so much in "in order to cover up the taste of the poison"). They might eat cookies, but there's less sugar and more butter and they're not covered in frosting.

And there's zero culture of dessert. Especially not dessert after every meal. I even have a friend who literally never had "dessert" until when at age 20 his dad was trying to suck up to him. So if they get fat, it's probably on different foods. It's like comparing the rate of lung cancer between the US and Japan - I'm pretty sure Japan's cigarettes aren't the same.

Here (and this seems to be more unique to the Nordic countries), instant food and eating out is extremely expensive compared to making the food yourself at home. The cheapest hamburger you can find might actually be $15. Pizzas are definitely more expensive. Even just buying a small pre-made sandwich at the grocery store is like $8. Definitely most of the time, a person who is fat or obese here actually has some serious health problem preventing them from exercise, and/or they're ex. seriously depressed and overeat as a coping mechanism.

Then I find advice saying "exercise to lower blood pressure!". Here you CAN'T do stuff like drive everywhere and park right next to the building, it's simply not possible. There aren't parking spaces everywhere. There aren't those little motorized carts that you can sit in and ride around the grocery store in. The cashiers don't pack your bags for you at the grocery store. So you can still be pretty lazy but you can't be AS lazy. Cars and gas prices are really expensive so in a lot of places you might not even own one. If even that small difference affects blood pressure...

In Europe in general, there's different laws so they can't legally put as much shit in the food as the US can, so maybe that also affects the health a bit less. For example, blue food colouring (I think it was) was banned in Finland for the longest time because they knew it caused cancer. They import American food here but it basically all comes from strange brands I've never heard of that are specially-made for export. I once read that Hershey's and all those big companies literally changed their recipe specifically for Europe to comply with European laws, and then aren't feeding the Americans the same recipe.

My wife's mom has dangerously high blood pressure, and she is fat/obese with depression and tons of health problems (some from birth, some not), but she also constantly eats things like white-flour bread, potato chips (that have sugar in them), pizza etc. She basically doesn't eat vegetables aside from potatoes, never eats fruit, she refuses to try stuff like the pasta we eat (made from corn or whole-wheat flour) instead of white-flour pasta. She claims white flour "tastes the best" and she thinks that we've stopped eating it because we don't like the taste, no matter how many times we tell her it's for our health. On that note, there's not many chips you can buy without sugar, but I eat chips made out of different vegetables (beets, carrots, potatoes, parsnips) for example and if I weren't so lazy I'd try making my own at home (I have an awesome french fry recipe btw).

She is REALLY REALLY mean all the time, but especially in the mornings, gets huge cravings for chips/sugary stuff basically every day (especially in the evenings), and then she's really tired basically anytime after three in the afternoon. She has sleeping problems and also takes at least one nap a day (btw white flour/sugar affects sleep too, depending on the person). The doctor told her over a year ago that her blood pressure is so high that even just a headache could be the sign of a stroke or heart attack, and she's already had two strokes in her life apparently. Despite this she skips taking her blood pressure medicine, doesn't exercise, refuses to change her diet, lies to doctors and/or simply doesn't go to the doctor when she needs to. Then she talks about "thank god I never started smoking!" as if smoking is any worse, and she claims that being fat is "just in the family".

Being fat isn't in the family. Eating habits and exercise habits, things you teach your children, DO run in the family. Her mom is diabetic, still eats candy every day, is heavily depressed and never exercises past the little she needs to for daily life.

My wife's cousin, who's only 25 years old, recently had a brain cancer surgery. Why'd she get brain cancer? She constantly drinks aspartame-filled soda, she won't listen to anyone telling her that it's poison, and literally the first thing she asked for after she woke up from the tumour surgery was for a diet (aspartame) soda : l

I mean, part of me thinks "fine, let them suffer and die if they're going to be like that". But I know it's only all about education in the long run. If you learn from a young age how to not be so stubborn and to re-examine things based on new evidence... If they only imposed a big tax on all items with added sugar (just like tobacco has a big tax), and then sent that tax money towards making dentists cheaper...

I feel you. My parents are going down that same road. My mom, who is barely breaking 50 is having all these health problems, and I'm worried. On top of that, she also skips her high blood pressure medication! I tell her -- little at a time, one step at a time. Start by simply bringing fruits for snacking on, you know what I mean? Slow and steady. So you don't notice it.

My dad, recently had a bad accident. Then surgeries. He fell out of a tree for god's sake! He hurt his back and broke his leg. (He's a landscaper.) Now my mom has to take care of him and herself, and I'm a little panicky about it. The reason why I'm feeling nervous about their situation is because, like you mentioned, diet greatly effects the healing process and I am worried that his diet isn't very good, and he won't heal properly or promptly.

I've been heavy my entire life, well, since probably age 8 or so LOL so my whole life LOL

When I left the nest, I started making lifestyle changes. Because of my weight, also with hereditary reproductive issues (my mom's uterus collapsed after she had me and she stillborn-ed twice), I haven't been ovulating for...years. In short, I'm infertile. Hence my ovulation posts. Studies have shown that changes in weight can give your lady parts a little kick, so I started doing yoga and lost some weight. I ovulated. Once.

This has been difficult on me, and I try not to be resentful towards my parents for not taking me to a doctor as a kid. My father WAS quite a conservative, so I took birth control without him knowing. He was also quite bigoted and ignorant at the time, and didn't think I needed to go to an OBGYN because "that's where girls go to get BC because they had sex blah blah", so now I'm suffering from his stupidity. My chances of having kids naturally decreases greatly in my 30's. I got about 5 years to get my body to do what it' suppose to so I can have spawn.

Otherwise, I actually have incredibly good health! I know that you mentioned that Americans often eat out. That's true. My diet is SO much better today simply because I cook my meals. I actually really enjoy it. I take pride is feeding my husband wholesome foods, and building healthy habits -- habits I will NEED if I want to have a family one day. I don't understand why people even eat out. It's expensive. You can make the same thing at home that is either the same or better. Too tired? Lazy? Probably. Keep in mind Americans also work a lot. People working 2-3 jobs, especially young people, is very common. Americans work a lot. They get home after an 8 hour shift, sit on the couch, stuff their face while watching American Idol Lol

I can tell you right now that New Yorkers eat A SHIT TON OF TAKE OUT. I did when we first moved here. I loved it (still do). But, I realize this isn't something I can do more than 2-3 times a month. But the average New Yorker probably orders take out every day. Yes, every day.

I realize food access is a big factor in all of this, and I am particularly lucky in that retrospect. Here, we have farmers markets and fruit/vegetable stands everywhere. Very affordable. Everything is accessible. I mean it's New York. Everything you can think of is down the block. If you live in butt-fuck Alabama or bible-belt Mississippi (where my bffs live) -- forget about it. There isn't even a culture or interest in that part of the states for health food.

My grandparents have been on a similar "no sugar, no white flour" diet as me for about five years now (they take it a step further and don't eat things like potatoes either) and apparently they feel healthier than they've felt in decades - but everyone around them just scoffs at it. My dad eats fairly healthy, and I'd say very healthy compared to most Americans, but he too hasn't exactly tried that kind of diet.

Yeah, a few years ago someone I knew had basically the same surgery as me. Except he didn't even quit smoking before he had the surgery - claiming he didn't have to. Then he actually had to spend 2-3 weeks in the hospital afterwards because he was healing so slowly. I left the hospital in two DAYS.

Ahh. My wife's cousin actually recently got some kind of weird problems from taking birth control that are probably going to stay with her for life. Now she suddenly can't eat certain foods, I don't remember what happened. As for me, I would never have kids (with my own genes) halfway just because any kid would have a high chance of having eyesight as bad as or worse than mine. Either way I'd rather just adopt and spare some kid an abusive home or orphanage lol.

As for parents... well, nowadays I don't talk to anyone in my family, they more or less disowned me when I moved abroad and got married. But a few years ago my dad told me that everyone in the family thinks I'm really weird and that I have something wrong in my head, and that they've thought so for a long time. And I was like, if you thought that, why did none of you ever take me to get psychological testing? (BTW I have taken it and I'm perfectly normal except for that I have slightly above-average intelligence and adaptation skills, and that I like to fantasize. Pretty sure fantasizing is a skill I taught myself through fandom).

And also, no one in my family really treated me differently despite that I'm almost blind. Sometimes this is perfectly fine, but a lot of the time it's unfair. My pupils don't contract and don't change in light, yet I never had prescription sunglasses (just like, clip-on sunglasses that are awful and super heavy). I never had any kind of reading help (no magnifying glasses, no large-print books - which btw I didn't even know existed until like five years ago). My dad would expect me to find things in two seconds despite that when you have ex. a pile of clothes, my eyes can't distinguish the separate pieces so well. And since I was TAUGHT to not use any help like that, I became someone who doesn't get help even when I really need it, and I probably missed out on a lot of stuff (if it were easier to read I would read more books).

Like I want to do arts and crafts, but every time I try I realize the reason why I get so frustrated is because I can't see shit, or I try to read a book and realize I never read books (that aren't on the computer) anymore because it's so difficult, so I really need some kind of magnifying glass thingy : / I do want to go out and be active but I feel like shit when I realize I can't do some stuff. Like, someone even just shows you a photo on their smartphone or your potential employer points to a paper and you smile and go "mmhm" and pretend you can see it....

Interesting. It's good to read labels really carefully because you know the FDA is sloppy as hell. Well, not sloppy, but I'm sure food companies have a lot of say in that. Think of Monsanto. Banned everywhere! But here, of course.

Personally, the only thing I really eat that is processed is probably pasta, and we don't even really like pasta so we don't eat it often Lol I'm a pretty big fan of stews and chili, so we make a lot of them. (It's almost chowder every single week season!) LOL I also keep things simple. I don't try to be fancy in the kitchen. Lol I kind of take after a toddler. I like finger foods. Simple stuff. We make our own chicken nuggets, for example :P

Cooking is really easy, but one of the problems is that English-speakers are really really REALLY awful at writing and making lessons, and even at video tutorials. It's not just with cooking, it's with all handicrafts and even just stuff like math and foreign languages. We were a lot better at teaching most things 100 years ago, so I don't get why it happens. But anyway, it means it's their fault for making it seem hard and then you feel really stupid for not getting it. Meanwhile if I go find instructions in Swedish for the same thing they're usually really clear.

Here's "simple recipes" from the main Swedish grocery chain, if you click around and find a picture (or a few pictures) you think looks good I can translate them and you can try them out:

http://www.ica.se/recept/enkel/vardag/

you can also google "enkelt mat" (simple food) "lättlagade mat" (easily-made food), "student mat recept" (student food recipe) or "snabb mat recept" (quick food recipe) and just choose a picture and i can find/translate a recipe for you!

"korvstroganoff" (sausage stroganoff - sausages in a sort of tomato-ish sauce) and "kladdkaka" (gooey cake - it's like brownies) are two things that even people who can't cook can cook really fast, as well stuff like broccoli-potato soup, and that's all classic, cheap (here at least) Swedish food ; D I've never made pea soup myself but maybe that too...

I've actually noticed that to. A lot of how-to instructions are terrible.

Food culture is hugely a part of the problem. But culture was encouraged by the food industry, is it not? I mean -- what *is* American food? Burgers? Hotdogs? Lol Shit, I don't even really know. Pot roast I guess. Unlike other countries, where people eat their native foods (foods native to the ethnic backgrounds of those who live there), people don't really do that very much in the U.S.

I'm bi-racial, but I grew up in a predominately pacific islander household (Filipino and native Hawaiian -- my mother's family). My father has unknown European ancestry. Lol. He is white. Thing is, even my grandparents LOVE American food. They LOVE McDonalds :/ And, that has greatly impacted their health. As they introduce processed foods into their diet, their native cooking also changes. Filipino food, for one, is very salty as is. Hawaiian food is too. Lots of steamed pork and Hawaiian sea salt. Most of the Filipino dishes I grew up with include a kind of extremely salty fermented fish paste. Over the years, my grandma has been adding a lot more to her food, to increase the saltiness. Sometimes she adds a nice bit of table salt (which is unheard of), to her food.

When my grandpa relocated to Hawaii from the Philippines, he suddenly developed a sweet tooth. I grew up eating a lot of fresh milked coconut for sweet rice dishes (dessert -- (literally rice and coconut milk, that's it.), but eventually this wasn't sweet enough, so my Grandma added heaps of white sugar to appease his sweet tooth.

What I'm trying to say is, I believe that their exposure to processed sugars and salt has overall altered their taste buds, as well as their native dishes.

Think of Chinese take out and how Chinese food is altered to appease the mouths of the average American. MSG is added, and so is sugar. Ginger is taken out and a thick savory sauce is replaced.

Marzipan sounds amazing by the way! I am quite a fan of nut butters.

What Swedes and Icelanders seem to think is American food, or what's advertised as American (got some input from my wife too, which is in quotes):

Cereal "not plain cornflakes or oatmeal but definitely any chocolate or rainbow-coloured cereal, flavoured oatmeal, any cereal that is actually candy", hamburgers "and layer-hamburgers" (double-deckers), chocolate-chip cookies "in sweden when you say 'cookies' you mean chocolate chip cookies because we think you don't have any other cookies", "chicken in a bucket", popcorn, "hotdogs with ketchup on and the ketchup is a zigzag".

Turkey, BBQ, marshmallows, s'mores, jello, jelly, french fries, pulled pork/chicken/beef, Coca Cola, root beer, cream soda, and all other sodas that aren't simply fruit or malt flavour.

Cupcakes, doughnuts, hoagies "sandwiches that are like tall or long and have layers and are a really big sandwich like in cartoons or at subway", bagels, melted cheese on most things but especially macaroni and cheese. BTW American cheese itself is very unique and so is the butter, the amount of fat in it is different from here in Europe and America's also allowed to put food dye in stuff like cheese if it wants. So "orange" food and cheese doesn't exist here, neither is the cheese really spongy or stringy.

"Eating take-out food that comes in a box is very American, even if Chinese food isn't American the fact that it comes in a box is. For us this is only in cartoons, we go to the Chinese restaurant to pick up the food ourselves, there's no take-out". "When I heard about macaroni and cheese I thought it was just macaroni with a simple cheese sauce (with other things like onion and ham in it), I didn't realize it was literally just macaroni and cheese."

"We don't eat peanut butter. you have like peanut butter cake with peanut butter chocolate frosting."

Anything deep fried or BBQ, pumpkin, peanut butter, or maple-flavoured (though maple syrup also traditionally exists here, they just don't eat it). Basically ALL instant food and "microwave food" (ex. mug cakes) but also instant mixes (ex. cake mix). They also don't have frosting here, if anything they have glaze instead or use egg-cream or plain whipped cream. Their cakes are always just like whipped cream with fruit and maybe marzipan, nuts or chocolate. That or what they call cake is just like bread with fruit in it. There's no "cakes" that are like entirely white bread and sugar with nothing else (which is the most typical American cake).

Basically all desserts and pastries that are sold in America are "American". For example, we have muffins but they're never poppyseed and if they're "blueberry" that means they have blueberry jam on the bottom-inside, not that they have full blueberries mixed in with the dough. Thin-crust pizza isn't seen as American but definitely pepperoni and deep-dish pizza is. I also saw "American BBQ chicken pizza" being sold once.

Ants on a log, tunafish sandwiches, pancakes with fruit or chocolate in them. Corn dogs, elephant ears and other fair food is stuff no one's ever even heard of here. Apple-cinnamon-clove ("pumpkin spice") flavour isn't really used here, instead they use ex. just clove and orange, and then they call it "Christmas spice". Here there's no grape, cherry, lime, pizza or jalapeno flavoured anything (unless it's an American import or copy of some American food), instead Swedes have elderflower, pear, onion, dill, chili pepper flavours. Ranch flavour for chips is American, it sometimes even gets called "Cool American".

All sorts of taco, nacho, tortilla, tortilla chip things are seen as American. Generally speaking, spicy sauces are "American" and generally speaking, so is ketchup. Pork and beans is American though I don't know how many people know about it (here they have pork-and-pea-soup instead).

I asked "What about chowder and relish?" and she said "I didn't know what they were, I've never seen/had it in real life so I don't know what it is."

Here, somehow Swedes have gotten the mistaken impression that in order to be a hardcore videogamer you have to eat American junk food, and so they sell that kind of stuff at the videogame store : l

Here's what the Swedish big grocery store chain thinks is American food:
http://www.ica.se/recept/amerikansk/

Yeah, seriously, I've been eating American food for basically all my life and MY taste buds changed extremely fast as soon as I just quit eating sugar/white flour. American recipes literally do stuff like use three times as much sugar as a Swede would use. So I can really see how someone would change into needing more and more... JUST LIKE DRUGS : Þ

It basically is! A dime bag is cheaper than your coke and oreos lmfao

Oops, forgot to note, on the page I linked click "visa fler recept" once you get to the bottom of the list of recipes in order to see more.

"Pulled pork with apple cider and coleslaw"

"Roasted corn with chili"

"Barbeque Sauce With Coffee"

"Bacon-wrapped (meats of various kinds"

The best ones though, are the "classic American chocolate chip cookies" which is actually a CAKE MADE IN A FRYING PAN THEN COOKED OVER A CAMPFIRE, and then the "American favourite pumpkin pie" which is a "food pie" not a "dessert pie" (as in, pumpkin + onion, salt, chili etc. not... sugar). They also seem to think that we do stuff like make our own marshmallows and flavour them with raspberries.

Have you had Mexican roasted "street" corn?!? So good. Sort of a summer thing. I've only seen it here though. Probably see it near Mexico/NM too.

The let's wrap everything in bacon fad is soooooo grossly American!!

That pie and berry marshmallows sound terrible Lol Actually most of it does. LOL

Nope I never have!

Swedish food is basically always more fancy or detailed than American food, unless it's traditional food, and sometimes even then. It's ALWAYS much healthier (and even if they have cinnamon rolls, they don't put frosting on top, that's seen as an abomination).

What they often seem to do is actually just look at a picture of food or hear the name of it and "figure out" how to make it (often from memory) without looking up any recipes. So they see some picture on Tumblr or in a movie and try to make it at home without help, for example. It's the only explanation for how they can get some stuff so wrong despite them all knowing English...

Some similarities to other EU countries is, NY has free childcare (gasp), and very easy access to free healthcare (TONS OF CLINICS!)

The state also offers really good financial aid, great community colleges, and very cheap city college (Bachelor's and above) -- which you can qualify for after living here for 1 year. Had I known all of this information 5 years ago, I probably would be much better off.

There is also very good public assistance programs, but like other places in the US, it is very difficult to qualify unless under very specific circumstances. Need to have 6 kids MINIMUM and be missing all of your limbs. :P

"Free" healthcare is a godsend. I just had a surgery that costs tens of thousands of dollars in the US - you know what they charged me here? Something like $60. And that was only because I ate meals there for two days. Once we had to call the ambulance, and the cost of that was like $50 while the actual stay in the emergency room was free. I just wish it would cover the cost of glasses too....

Yeah, no one would help me (and I didn't qualify for scholarships) because appaaaarently you only get help if you have like 10% or less of your sight in BOTH eyes. I have something like 4% in one and 40% in the other, and am missing 30% or so of my peripheral vision among other things, but even so I'm ruled out. But what's worse is the education factor again!

In the US, among other things, I had teachers who claimed that since I couldn't see well that meant I didn't have to learn how to write (in elementary school). So, uh, my handwriting is still awful today >.>

I had a teacher in university who taught an online class, who didn't believe that I couldn't see well enough to drive. She literally thought I was just plain lying, and wouldn't let me get out of a meeting (at a place that was in the middle of the day, two hours away from my house, and there was no form of public transportation). BTW she was also breaking the rules in that it said it was a 100% online class but then she stated that the meeting was mandatory or I'd fail. I called her on the phone to explain things and she said "well then you'll just have to fail, too bad", I was even crying at that since failing that class would mean I wouldn't be able to graduate by the end of that term, and I really wanted to get out of the place I was living in.

I had to go take things up with the school councellor who then passed the problem onto her bosses, eventually it came down to "I'll let you skip it if you give me proof". And the school, which should have immediately called the teacher out on the fact that she was breaking the rules, said "we'll make sure it doesn't happen again" but not y'know "we'll cancel this requirement in her current class for everybody". I wasn't the only person who couldn't make it to that meeting!

SOO many people believe that it's impossible to just see "badly", like you're either totally blind or that you see completely perfectly. I've heard of people doing stuff like being presented with a deaf person and then asking if that person can read Braille, which I thought was just a joke until someone told me it had actually happened to them. You don't have to know what it's like to be disabled but you certainly ought to know that different levels and forms of disability exist... And there's by far more people out there who need help than who can get it. I mean, I can't go to McDonald's and read the menu at the wall, I see too badly - So it definitely affects my life, but it's like it doesn't count unless you literally can't do anything on your own.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The epitome of getting your dreams crushed.

found you from the LJ home page

RE: found you from the LJ home page

extremely long again 1/2

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hopefully my last long ramble orz

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finally done >.>

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i'm always going off-topic

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