In Defense of Food
Page 19
To make the overall recommendation to “pay more, eat less” more palatable, consider that quality itself, besides tending to cost more, may have a direct bearing on the quantity you’ll want to eat. The better the food, the less of it you need to eat in order to feel satisfied. All carrots are not created equal, and the best ones-the ones really worth savoring-are simply more satisfying, bite for bite. To borrow Paul Rozin’s term, exceptional food offers us more “food experience”-per bite, per dish, per meal-and as the French have shown, you don’t need a lot of food to have a rich food experience. Choose quality over quantity, food experience over mere calories.
EAT MEALS. This recommendation sounds almost as ridiculous as “eat food,” but in America at least, it no longer goes without saying. We are snacking more and eating fewer meals together. Indeed, sociologists who study American eating habits no longer organize their results around the increasingly quaint concept of the meal: They now measure “eating occasions” and report that Americans have added to the traditional big three-breakfast, lunch, and dinner-an as-yet-untitled fourth daily eating occasion that lasts all day long: the constant sipping and snacking we do while watching TV, driving, and so on. One study found that among eighteen-to fifty-year-old Americans, roughly a fifth of all eating now takes place in the car.*
That one should feel the need to mount a defense of “the meal” is sad, but then I never would have thought “food” needed defending, either. Most readers will recall the benefits of eating meals without much prompting from me. It is at the dinner table that we socialize and civilize our children, teaching them manners and the art of conversation. At the dinner table parents can determine portion sizes, model eating and drinking behavior, and enforce social norms about greed and gluttony and waste. Shared meals are about much more than fueling bodies; they are uniquely human institutions where our species developed language and this thing we call culture. Do I need to go on?
All this is so well understood that when pollsters ask Americans if they eat together as a family most nights, they offer a resounding-and resoundingly untrue-reply in the affirmative. In fact, most American families today report eating dinner together three to four nights a week, but even those meals bear only the faintest resemblance to the Norman Rockwell ideal. If you install video cameras in the kitchen and dining-room ceilings above typical American families, as marketers for the major food companies have done, you’ll quickly discover that the reality of the family dinner has diverged substantially from our image of it. Mom might still cook something for herself and sit at the table for a while, but she’ll be alone for much of that time. That’s because dad and each of the kids are likely to prepare an entirely different entrйe for themselves, “preparing” in this case being a synonym for microwaving a package. Each family member might then join mom at the table for as long as it takes to eat, but not necessarily all at the same time. Technically, this kind of feeding counts as a family dinner in the survey results, though it’s hard to believe it performs all the customary functions of a shared meal. Kraft or General Mills, for instance, is now determining the portion sizes, not mom, and the social value of sharing food is lost. It looks a lot more like a restaurant meal, where everyone orders his or her own dish. (Though the service isn’t quite as good, because the entrйes don’t arrive at the same time.) Of course, people tend to eat more when they can have exactly what they want-which is precisely why the major food companies approve of this modernized family meal and have done everything in their considerable power to foster it. So they market different kinds of entrйes to each member of the family (low carb for the dieting teenager, low cholesterol for dad, high fat for the eight-year-old, and so on), and engineer these “home meal replacements,” as they’re known in the trade, so that even the eight-year-old can safely microwave them.
But the biggest threat to the meal-as-we-knew-it is surely the snack, and snacking in recent years has colonized whole new parts of our day and places in our lives. Work, for example, used to be a more or less food-free stretch of time between meals, but no longer. Offices now typically have well-stocked kitchens, and it is apparently considered gauche at a business meeting or conference if a spread of bagels, muffins, pastries, and soft drinks is not provided at frequent intervals. Attending a recent conference on nutrition and health, of all things, I was astounded to see that in addition to the copious buffet at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, our hosts wheeled out a copious buffet halfway between breakfast and lunch and then again halfway between lunch and dinner, evidently worried that we would not be able to survive the long crossing from one meal to the next without a between-meal meal.
I may be showing my age, but didn’t there used to be at least a mild social taboo against the between-meal snack? Well, it is gone. Americans today mark time all day long with nibbles of food and sips of soft drinks, which must be constantly at their sides, lest they expire during the haul between breakfast and lunch. (The snack food and beverage industry has surely been the great beneficiary of the new social taboo against smoking, which used to perform much the same time-marking function.) We have reengineered our cars to accommodate our snacks, adding bigger cup holders and even refrigerated glove compartments, and we’ve reengineered foods to be more easily eaten in the car. According to the Harvard economists’ calculations, the bulk of the calories we’ve added to our diet over the past twenty years has come in the form of snacks. I don’t need to point out that these snacks tend not to consist of fruits and vegetables. (Not even at my nutrition conference.) Or that the portion sizes have swelled or that the snacks themselves consist mainly of cleverly flavored and configured arrangements of refined carbohydrates, hydrogenated oils, corn sweeteners, and salt.
To counter the rise of the snack and restore the meal to its rightful place, consider as a start these few rules of thumb:
DO ALL YOUR EATING AT A TABLE. No, a desk is not a table.
DON’T GET YOUR FUEL FROM THE SA M E PL ACE YOUR CAR DOES. American gas stations now make more money selling food (and cigarettes) than gasoline, but consider what kind of food this is: except perhaps for the milk and water, it’s all highly processed nonperishable snack foods and extravagantly sweetened soft drinks in hefty twenty-ounce bottles. Gas stations have become processed-corn stations: ethanol outside for your car and high-fructose corn syrup inside for you.
TRY NOT TO EAT ALONE. Americans are increasingly eating in solitude. Though there is research suggesting that light eaters will eat more when they dine with others (probably because they spend mo
re time at the table), for people prone to overeating, communal meals tend to limit consumption, if only because we’re less likely to stuff ourselves when others are watching. This is precisely why so much food marketing is designed to encourage us to eat in front of the TV or in the car: When we eat mindlessly and alone, we eat more. But regulating appetite is the least of it: The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from mere animal biology to an act of culture.
CONSULT YOUR GUT. As the psychologists have demonstrated, most of us allow external, and mostly visual, cues to determine how much we eat. The larger the portion, the more we eat; the bigger the container, the more we pour; the more conspicuous the vending machine, the more we buy from it; the closer the bowl of M&Ms, the more of them we eat. All of which makes us easy marks for food marketers eager to sell us yet more food.
As in so many areas of modern life, the culture of food has become a culture of the eye. But when it comes to eating, it pays to cultivate the other senses, which often provide more useful and accurate information. Does this peach smell as good as it looks? Does the third bite of that dessert taste anywhere near as good as the first? I could certainly eat more of this, but am I really still hungry?
Supposedly it takes twenty minutes before the brain gets the word that the belly is full; unfortunately most of us take considerably less than twenty minutes to finish a meal, with the result that the sensation of feeling full exerts little if any influence on how much we eat. What this suggests is that eating more slowly, and then consulting our sense of satiety, might help us to eat less. The French are better at this than we are, as Brian Wansink discovered when he asked a group of French people how they knew when to stop eating. “When I feel full,” they replied. (What a novel idea! The Americans said things like “When my plate is clean” or “When I run out.”) Perhaps it is their long, leisurely meals that give the French the opportunity to realize when they’re full.
At least until we learn to eat more slowly and attend more closely to the information of our senses, it might help to work on altering the external clues we rely on in eating on the theory that it’s probably better to manipulate ourselves than to allow marketers to manipulate us. Wansink offers dozens of helpful tips in a recent book called Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, though I warn you they’re all vaguely insulting to your sense of yourself as a creature in possession of free will.
Serve smaller portions on smaller plates; serve food and beverages from small containers (even if this means repackaging things bought in jumbo sizes); leave detritus on the table-empty bottles, bones, and so forth-so you can see how much you’ve eaten or drunk; use glasses that are more vertical than horizontal (people tend to pour more into squat glasses); leave healthy foods in view, unhealthy ones out of view; leave serving bowls in the kitchen rather than on the table to discourage second helpings.
EAT SLOWLY. Not just so you’ll be more likely to know when to stop. I mean “slow” in the sense of deliberate and knowledgeable eating promoted by Slow Food, the Italian-born movement dedicated to the principle that “a firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life.” The organization, which was founded in response to the arrival of American fast food in Rome during the 1980s, seeks to reacquaint (or in some cases acquaint) people with the satisfactions of well-grown and well-prepared food enjoyed at leisurely communal meals. It sounds like an elitist club for foodies (which, alas, it sometimes can be), but at its most thoughtful, Slow Food offers a coherent protest against, and alternative to, the Western diet and way of eating, indeed to the whole ever-more-desperate Western way of life. Slow Food aims to elevate quality over quantity and believes that doing so depends on cultivating our sense of taste as well as rebuilding the relationships between producers and consumers that the industrialization of our food has destroyed. “Food quality depends on consumers who respect the work of farmers and are willing to educate their senses,” Carlo Petrini, Slow Food’s founder, has said. When that happens, “they become precious allies for producers.” Even connoisseurship can have a politics, as when it deepens our appreciation for the work of the people who produce our food and ruins our taste for the superficial pleasures of fast food.
It is no accident that Slow Food has its roots in Italy, a country much less enamored of the “folly of Fast Life” than the United States, and you have to wonder whether it’s realistic to think the American way of eating can be reformed without also reforming the whole American way of life. Fast food is precisely the way you’d expect a people to eat who put success at the center of life, who work long hours (with two careers per household), get only a couple of weeks vacation each year, and who can’t depend on a social safety net to cushion them from life’s blows. But Slow Food’s wager is that making time and slowing down to eat, an activity that happens three times a day and ramifies all through a culture, is precisely the wedge that can begin to crack the whole edifice.
To eat slowly, in the Slow Food sense, is to eat with a fuller knowledge of all that is involved in bringing food out of the earth and to the table. Undeniably, there are pleasures to be had eating that are based on the opposite-on knowing precious little; indeed, they sometimes depend on it. The fast-food hamburger has been brilliantly engineered to offer a succulent and tasty first bite, a bite that in fact would be impossible to enjoy if the eater could accurately picture the feedlot and the slaughterhouse and the workers behind it or knew anything about the “artificial grill flavor” that made that first bite so convincing. This is a hamburger to hurry through, no question. By comparison, eating a grass-fed burger when you can picture the green pastures in which the animal grazed is a pleasure of another order, not a simple one, to be sure, but one based on knowledge rather than ignorance and gratitude rather than indifference.
To eat slowly, then, also means to eat deliberately, in the original sense of that word: “from freedom” instead of compulsion. Many food cultures, particularly those at less of a remove from the land than ours, have rituals to encourage this sort of eating, such as offering a blessing over the food or saying grace before the meal. The point, it seems to me, is to make sure that we don’t eat thoughtlessly or hurriedly, and that knowledge and gratitude will inflect our pleasure at the table. I don’t ordinarily offer any special words before a meal, but I do sometimes recall a couple of sentences written by Wendell Berry, which do a good job of getting me to eat more deliberately:
Eating with the fullest pleasure-ple
asure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance-is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.
Words such as these are one good way to foster a more deliberate kind of eating, but perhaps an even better way (as Berry himself has suggested) is for eaters to involve themselves in food production to whatever extent they can, even if that only means planting a few herbs on a sunny windowsill or foraging for edible greens and wild mushrooms in the park. If much of our carelessness in eating owes to the ease with which the industrial eater can simply forget all that is at stake, both for himself and for the world, then getting reacquainted with how food is grown and prepared can provide a useful reminder. So one last rule:
COOK AND, IF YOU CAN, PLANT A GARDEN. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be fast, cheap, and easy; that food is a product of industry, not nature; that food is fuel, and not a form of communion, with other people as well as with other species-with nature.
So far I am more at home in the garden than the kitchen, though I can appreciate how time spent in either place alters one’s relationship to food and eating. The garden offers a great many solutions, practical as well as philosophical, to the whole problem of eating well. My own vegetable garden is modest in scale-a densely planted patch in the front yard only about twenty feet by ten-but it yields an astonishing cornucopia of produce, so much so that during the summer months we discontinue our CSA box and buy little but fruit from the farmers’ market. And though we live on a postage-stamp city lot, there’s room enough for a couple of fruit trees too: a lemon, a fig, and a persimmon. To the problem of being able to afford high-quality organic produce the garden offers the most straightforward solution: The food you grow yourself is fresher than any you can buy, and it costs nothing but an hour or two of work each week plus the price of a few packets of seed.