Army Diet

This morning on CBS Sunday morning they did a feature on the Army trying to update their mess halls’ food to make it healthier.  First I should correct myself, they no longer call the places where soldiers eat Mess Halls, but dining rooms.

The scene was a dining room at Fort Bragg, not too far from us in North Carolina.  It was soul food day and the food serving line was full of macaroni and cheese, corn bread, fried chicken and ribs, they did have collard greens, but I think they were cooked in fat back.  Come on, it was soul food day of course it was all fattening.

Anyway, the army has brought in chefs from the CIA, that’s the good CIA-Culinary Institute of America to sneak healthy food into the army diets.  They also put little signs on the food to show which were the best offerings, green for good, yellow for OK and red for you-better-just-eat-a-little-of–this.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  The second you start telling people that they should not have macaroni and cheese often that is all they can think about.

Now the army is in better shape than the rest of America, literally.  Only ten percent of them are overweight since working out is a big part of their job, and most of them are young men who still have fabulous metabolisms.  It will be better for all of them to eat a healthy diet, but just don’t tell young men that you have snuck quinoa into their apple cobbler, just do it.  It is the same thing mothers have been doing for years.  Carrots shreds in spaghetti sauce are never noticed and therefore never complained about.

Since our tax dollars are going to these CIA chefs creating recipes I would like them to share them with the rest of America who are something like fifty percent being over weight.

When I was a kid the first exercise book I ever saw was a little paperback my father had that was the Canadian Air force exercise program.  I don’t think my Dad knew any Canadians and I certainly had never heard they had an air force of any kind, who were they protecting, polar bears?   But they had a great work out routine complete with pictures of how to do lunges, way ahead of its time in 1968.

I guess that if I had a job where I would probably stay alive longer if I were able to run faster while carrying a heavy gun I would be in better shape.  Since my hobby job at Durham Magazine and my passion job of head of the board at the Food Bank require only heavy mental lifting I don’t have the needed job requirements for working out.  Perhaps the Canadian Air Force could use me as a consultant of some kind.  I always liked looking at that little book with cute guys doing push ups.