Food in Land of Plenty – a Holiday Essay on the (Un-Holy) Trinity

Being a lifelong fatso I find the subject of food is endlessly fascinating, and certainly no one can doubt that America (like me) has a somewhat warped relationship with food. Half the population is obsessed with the subject and study food labels like they were Holy Scriptures and the other half doesn’t give a shit and will eat anything put in front of them. Several weeks ago Lisa Miller wrote a fascinating piece in Newsweek examining the class divide around food called “Divided We Eat.” Ms. Miller examined 3 Brooklyn families and their approach to food and diet. One of her starting points was the fact that one of her subject families, obsessed with bestselling author Michael Pollan and his thesis regarding eating local and organic foods (the so called “locavore” movement), lived just 5 miles from families whose children went hungry. One of the more telling passages;


Adam Drewnowski, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, has spent his career showing that Americans’ food choices correlate to social class. He argues that the most nutritious diet—lots of fruits and vegetables, lean meats, fish, and grains—is beyond the reach of the poorest Americans, and it is economic elitism for nutritionists to uphold it as an ideal without broadly addressing issues of affordability. Lower-income families don’t subsist on junk food and fast food because they lack nutritional education, as some have argued. And though many poor neighborhoods are, indeed, food deserts—meaning that the people who live there don’t have access to a well-stocked supermarket—many are not. Lower-income families choose sugary, fat, and processed foods because they’re cheaper—and because they taste good. In a paper published last spring, Drewnowski showed how the prices of specific foods changed between 2004 and 2008 based on data from Seattle-area supermarkets. While food prices overall rose about 25 percent, the most nutritious foods (red peppers, raw oysters, spinach, mustard greens, romaine lettuce) rose 29 percent, while the least nutritious foods (white sugar, hard candy, jelly beans, and cola) rose just 16 percent.


This statement highlights the way cheap, unhealthy processed food has become blight on American culture, health and waistline. Another author, Dr. David Kessler has written brilliantly about the way food is carefully designed and processed in this country to make it inherently unhealthy and fattening. Kessler’s book “The End of Overeating” is a dazzling account of how the food industry carefully manufactures food that essentially promotes and exacerbates overeating. The use, by the food industry, of its unholy trinity of fat, sugar and salt has made Americans fatter by design. His interview with the creator of the Dorito is stunning. I actually went out a bought a small bag to experience the almost delicate pattern of unfolding flavors and textures and to understand how scientifically calculated they all were. While much of Dr. Kessler work centers around the fast food industry (an easy target) it is important to realize that these problems exist across the full spectrum of products found in the American grocery store.

I am certainly not trying to underplay individual responsibility in Americas obesity problem, but as anyone will tell you the abundance of cheap, fattening and unhealthy foods certainly makes healthy eating and dieting very difficult for millions of American fatsos, and the fact that the very thing that makes the quest for healthy eating so difficult is actually meticulously designed into the food we encounter every day is somewhat shocking.

Much was made of personal choices during the healthcare debate and how the American diet adds to the cost of medical care in this country, and I could not agree more, but let’s add a little corporate responsibility to that equation. Maybe as part of our healthcare system American needs to examine how food is processed, marketed and sold in this county, especially to children and the poor. This might do as much to elevate the health of our country as anything any insurance company or government agency is going to do.

Wishing you all a (reasonably) healthy holiday this year!