by Bryan Salvage, editor
Isn't it funny how our priorities change as we grow older-particularly when it comes to choosing the foods we eat?
Thirty years ago when I was a teen-ager, my friends and I lived for the day. We were active, care-free, skinny little kids who never thought about eating healthy, growing old or dying.
We were always enjoying life at its fullest, on the move and eating. I remember participating in numerous Whopper-eating contests; consuming 1-pound bars of Nestle Crunch in one sitting; eating huge sirloin steaks that sometimes had more fat than meat; wolfing down slabs of my grandmother's homemade, four-layer birthday cakes, which contained gobs of burnt-sugar frosting and inches of coconut; single-handedly eating a large pizza and a 16-ounce Pepsi in one sitting; and putting so much sugar on my Cheerios that the entire contents of my bowl would turn into a gray mass.
While I lacked in proper nutrition and dining etiquette, I certainly had a surplus of energy. And I wasn't alone. Millions of other teen-agers had similar diets.
Times have changed
As we grew older-and as the issue of diet and health became more publicized and important-many of us began to voluntarily change our eating habits and lifestyles. Some of us were forced to change because of health reasons.
Consumers in the 1960s had few options to choose from when it came to healthier food alternatives. Healthy alternatives were pretty much limited to diet cookies, canned liquid and powdered diet drink mixes, and diet soda containing saccharin. Back in the '60s, the idea of creating a good-tasting, low-fat meat product seemed as far-fetched as Ralph Cramden's low-calorie pizza idea from the 1950s. (Too bad Ralph and Alice didn't stick with that "get-rich-quick" scheme, he would have become a millionaire.)
As new research on the relationship between diet and health (much of it factual; some of it bunk) started flooding the media during the 1970s and 1980s, our aging and overweight population began to sit up and take more notice on the importance of proper nutrition. Some people, however, panicked to the point of severely limiting-or totally eliminating-their meat intake. While some of these people still consider meat a dietary taboo, many others have since returned to consuming meat on a somewhat regular basis
Today's consumers are lucky. They have an increasing number of healthier alternative food products to choose from-especially regarding types of meat. (See page 28 for healthy product introductions.) These new products specifically address growing consumer demand for good-tasting, affordable, healthier alternative meat products. But as we already know, creating healthier alternative meat products that taste like their traditional counterparts is not an easy task, and the end product could be too expensive for many consumers' tastes. And while we wrestle with these challenges, vegetarian alternatives to traditional meat products are increasing in number.
Joining forces
In the past 19 months, MM&T has reported on the trend of meat chain segments joining forces to create a better, healthier meat product. Producers, meat associations, and university and industry meat scientists continue their experiments in genetic engineering to create leaner animals; packers continue to carve away excess fat from meat carcasses that are much leaner today than they were just several years ago; and ingredient suppliers and meat processors are finally beginning to work together on a true "partnership" basis in the quest to produce acceptable, affordable, healthier prepared meat alternatives.