What is really "healthy"?

Spaghetti Recipe

Serves 4-5

Time: about 45-50minutes

a box of Mantia’s Italiano Spaghetti

a jar of Mantia’s Italiano Pasta Sauce, flavored with meat

Mantia’s Italiano Parmesan cheese (optional)

1/2 lb. of ground beef cooked and seasoned to taste (optional)

1 teaspoon of salt

1 teaspoon of italian season

1 teaspoon of parsley flakes

1. Put a pot of water on the stove and bring it to a boil. Once the water is boiling, pour you salt into the water. Break your spaghetti and then carefully put the spaghetti into the boiling water without letting the water splash.
2. Make sure the spaghetti don’t stick by stirring it for a few seconds with a fork and let the water come to a boil again. Once boiling, turn the heat down, low to medium, to allow the spaghetti to cook. Occasionally stir the spaghetti and allow the spaghetti to get soft. Taste the a piece of the spaghetti (taste test) to see if the spaghetti is done.
3. Turn of the burner once the spaghetti is done and strain it with a strainer. Put the spaghetti back in the pot. DON’T put the pot back on the burner it was on.
4. While the spaghetti is cooking, put the pasta sauce in another pan and let it come to a boil. If you’re using ground beef, this is the time to add it. Cut off the sauce immediately after boiling.
5. Pour your pasta sauce in with your spaghetti along with the italian season and parsley flakes and mix. Put spaghetti on separate plates

Analysis

Even though the dish isn’t all healthy it surely is good. My meal is 100% processed. In this meal there is about 10 grams of sugar, 4.5 grams fat, 11 grams of protein. By eating this meal, the body will balance the amount of sugar in your body making sure your body stays healthy. And depending on the body, it will turn the sugar in the food into glycogen or glucose. However, eating this meal everyday wouldn’t be a good thing to do because you don’t get the nutrition your body needs and it’s not a healthy meal. 

Since the entire dish is process, that means that none of it is organically grown. The tomatoes in the pasta sauce can be assumed to be commercially grown because that’s how most of foods are grown now. Now a days people want to grow huge vegetables, this isn’t healthy for us or the environment because a lot of chemicals go into commercially grown foods. This can kill many animals who might eat it and it’s not healthy for other plants. 

This dish as a whole cost about $5 which means it about the same price as something a person will get from a fast food restaurant. I’m not one hundred percent sure on how my meal is regulated but I’m sure that there are some kind of regulations for the food because since the ingredients are processed, that means that we shouldn’t be consuming so much of it. The CEOs of Mantia’s Italiano makes money off my meal because even thought I get the food for my meal at Shoprite or Save a Lot, the company is still making a profit off of it.

Since the ingredients in this dish isn’t made in Philadelphia, people have to actually ship the products around causing pollution to go up because of the amount of gas that has to be used to get the food from one place to another. Also eating a lot of this can cause a person to be a little lazy because if you add ground beef to it, it can be a little greasy. This dish could be a little more healthy if I had made my own pasta sauce with fresh ingredients. Same with the pasta, making homemade pasta would be a better choice than buying it because I would know what’s actually in my food. 

Personal Reflection

For this unit, I found out many things that I didn’t know in the past. The biggest problems I think with our food system is that most of our food is made out of one kind of food which is corn. This is a problem because for one our body can’t digest corn and we don’t get enough nutrition from corn. Also if most of our food is made from corn or soybeans it means that most of our food is processed. And the food we eat aren’t organic, the farmers use so many chemicals that it might not be healthy for us. Also the video we looked at about nutrition showed another problem we have in our food system which is the fact that the animals to which we get our food from are getting fed corn. The changes I could make to my food choices is trying to eat more foods that are organic or foods that are made out of organic food. Also not buying as much processed food than before. If I change the way I can for one have a more healthy diet because I would be getting the nutrition. These changes is something I am willing to make but it will also be difficult because getting organic food isn’t easy. The prices are high and you don’t really see a lot of organic food in many supermarkets.

Food Rule Slide