March 27, 2012
The Age
The Australian diet is changing – and it’s the fast-food giants that are the winners, writes Tim Elliot.
YEAH, yeah, I know – two serves of fruit and six serves of veg; three serves of lean meat and six (six!) serves of grains. Two-and-a-half of dairy; and beer, vodka and triple-choc mud cake ”only sometimes and in small amounts”.
The daily diet guidelines are spelt out in detail by the Department of Health and Ageing in an effort to save us from ourselves.
But I don’t eat like that and chances are you don’t either. The gap between what Australians should be eating and what we actually eat is, it seems, as wide as ever. ”The last national nutrition survey was in 1995,” Aloysa Hourigan, senior nutritionist at Nutrition Australia, says. ”Since then, we know that the Australian diet has undergone some significant changes.”
We are eating fewer potatoes but more cheese; fewer carrots but more yoghurt. We drink double the number of coffees than in 2004, while continuing to binge on hot chips and hamburgers. Aussie teenagers ate more than 30 million hamburgers last year – and 15.2 million doughnuts. But contrary to myth, 77 per cent of Australian families still eat dinner together five or six times weekly. But 60 per cent ”always or often” eat in front of the television.
When we went out to dinner in 2002, it was most probably to Italian. Now, Chinese and Thai restaurants are our favourites. And what used to be regarded as ”party foods” – lollies, chips, soft drinks – have somehow become ”everyday foods”.
According to Hourigan, protein and carbohydrate intakes are both up. ”But it’s not that we’re eating more bread – it’s the packaged snack-food bars that have become very popular, and they contain starches and sugars.”
Likewise, we are getting more grains, but not in the form we might recognise. ”Longer work hours means we are eating more processed foods and frozen meals, where the meats, like chicken, are often buffed up with gluten, flour and other grains that you might not associate with the food on the plate.”
When we cook, a Westfield survey found more than half of all Australians rotate between a repertoire of five meals or fewer.
Above all, we are eating much more than we think we are.
People under-report what they eat because eating is an unconscious activity and because we tend to snack between meals. But it is also due to, of all things, plate size, which has grown over the years.
”It’s true,” Hourigan says. ”Look at crockery from generations ago and you’ll notice that it’s a lot smaller. Culturally, things like that have an impact.”
Dining out
EATING out has become a way of life for Australians in the past decade. ”We are not like the French and Italians – we eat more junk food than them – but we are going in that direction,” Sissel Rosengren, head of food service at BIS Shrapnel, says.
”Dining out is not seen as so much of a treat as it was in 2000. We go out in the middle of the week now and take the kids, or see friends. It’s not just urban either. It’s in regional centres, too.”
Rosengren puts it down to various factors: climate (it’s easy to get out) and national psyche (we’re friendly and willing to try things). ”It’s got nothing to do with the cooking shows; it started happening before.”
Most important, perhaps, is cost. ”Eating out is fairly cheap in Australia, certainly compared with other Western economies, so it’s seen as an affordable way to socialise and relax.”
We are also blessed with a wide range of offerings. ”Thanks to our immigration, Australia has a huge range, from Asian to Middle Eastern foods, that we now consider part of the national cuisine,” Rosengren says. ”The US has a similar immigration history but their food service market has not developed in the same way … eating out is all about chains or fast food, and it’s a very limited service.”
We more resemble Swedes or Norwegians than Americans, she says. ”In Australia, during the downturn, like in Sweden and Norway, we continued to eat out but we traded down – the big winners since 2009 have been fast- food chains.”
Source: Epicure
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