MAY 28, 2009

Rethinking How We Eat

Like a lot of kids, I grew up in a convenience-oriented culinary environment: Pop-Tarts for breakfast, PB&J for lunch and hot dogs, macaroni and cheese, and a hated, tiny portion of canned vegetables for dinner. My mom’s a good cook, but because my dad usually worked late when I was a kid, she was responsible for most of the after-school hours. Between shuttling me and my sister around to all of our activities, it was a rare night when she was able to invest any serious time in cooking dinner. And since I was a pretty lazy kid, all things considered, it’s not a mystery why, upon high school graduation, I weighed around 250 lbs. Now, I’m a pretty tall guy, so it’s not like that’s morbidly obese or anything, but it’s still significantly overweight.  And so, when I moved out, I started to rethink my relationship with food. I came to the conclusion that it was probably best to avoid foods that couldn’t be replicated in a standard kitchen. So - no more Wendy’s (I don’t have a deep fryer, nor a square mold for hamburgers), no more soda, no more hot dogs and no more Pop-Tarts. It’s not a perfect rule - most kitchens don’t have a pasta maker, for instance, and I do use protein supplements - but as a rule of thumb, it’s not too bad.

My decision came at about the same time writer Michael Pollan wrote this brilliant essay summarizing his dietary advice in seven words: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The first clause, while seemingly the most banal, is actually the most revolutionary. Pollan does not consider many American staples as “food” as such, instead categorizing them as food-like substances, packed with exotic chemicals that do a lot to improve the efficiency of the supply chain but not much to improve our health. Not only that, he believes that many American diets are fraught with ethically-questionable foods, from beef (cows are a non-trivial source of greenhouse gases) to coffee (often grown under exploitative circumstances in developing countries).

There seems to be some evidence that people are agreeing with Pollan.  For example, stores like Whole Foods, which sells predominantly organic ingredients, are outperforming the recession, and Food Network’s viewership is way up, especially among young people. Anecdotally, the number of my friends interested in cooking serious meals at home has skyrocketed.

One wonders, though, when our government will catch up to this groundswell. We have two easily-fixable food problems in the United States: first, our existing food system is heavily biased towards corn, and subsidies provided by the federal government are what make things like high-fructose corn syrup - a calorie-dense sweetener added to thousands of foods - economically viable. And, as recounted in this great piece in The Washington Post, countless urban neighborhoods have no easy access to full-service grocery stores and are forced to eat the kinds of chemically-loaded “foods” Michael Pollan wrote about in his essay. Ultimately, we will pay for what we eat (and do not eat) in the form of increased medical costs and higher taxes to pay for healthcare - it’s time we addressed these kinds of problems head-on.