Best Food Writing 2012

by Holly Hughes (ed) (epub)

What’s a kid to do?

  Right now, leaders here are trying hard to help. In the past decade, local agencies have been awarded at least $53 million in grants and other funding to combat obesity—most of it in the past year. They’ve enlisted hundreds of partners in this effort, and they’re using some of the most newfangled approaches.

  Within the next year, for example, they’ll have spent at least $1.8 million getting healthy produce into corner stores. In the next two years, another $276,000 will be spent on building school gardens. Money will go to rejigger P.E. curriculums, train cafeteria workers and try to get kids to walk to school.

  Still, all this effort will miss one of the biggest battlegrounds of all: what’s going on inside Nathan’s head.

  “Treat yourself today,” the sign in the cafeteria commands. Just say no, Nathan tries to tell himself. Let’s call this the Temptation Complication.

  It’s a problem for Nathan. It’s a problem for tens of thousands of overweight kids in Washington. And it’s a problem for all of us.

  It’ll take a lot more than school gardens to dig our way out of this one.

  People who work on childhood obesity often talk about how different the world was a generation ago. When she was a kid, University of Washington researcher Donna Johnson told me, soda was a special treat. Now, sugar-sweetened beverages are just a few quarters away, in the school vending machine. In surveys of Washington adolescents, about 40 percent said they drank at least one soda yesterday.

  When he was a kid, former FDA Commissioner David Kessler says, there weren’t coffee shops on every corner selling super-duper, fat-and-sugar, grande frappa-yummies. There wasn’t the cacophony of chips and cookies at every gas station.

  When I was a kid, I recall, we ate pretty much what our parents ate. Now, vast product lines are designed just for youngsters: the Go-Gurts and Lunchables and drink pouches. Experts say more new food products are introduced each year for kids than for adults. And guess what: Studies show kid food has more sugar than the adult version.

  And don’t even get me started on the “fruit leathers” and “fruit snacks” with nary a drop of juice. “When I was a kid,” snickers Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, “they were called jelly beans.”

  This special kid food is sold on special TV stations created just for kids by special advertising execs who study youth culture as if they were researching a doctoral thesis.

  Meanwhile, kids are noshing practically nonstop. “Your product doesn’t have to be for a meal anymore,” says Laurie Demeritt, president of the Bellevue market-research firm the Hartman Group. “Now there are 10 different ‘eating occasions’ throughout the day.”

  What we have here is a supply problem. Food is everywhere. That means temptation is everywhere. If Nathan makes healthy choices half the time, it’s probably not enough.

  But the Temptation Complication has another layer, one that’s older than Go-Gurt and Nickelodeon and Mountain Dew. It has to do with biology.

  Patsy Treece says her daughter, Hannah, has a “face that radiates kindness.” She’s right. Her eyes are a beautiful brown; her smile shines. At age 13,Treece says, Hannah’s the kind of kid who’ll stop to help if someone gets hurt on the playground.

  She also has an appetite that won’t quit.

  At dinner, she’ll ask for seconds, even thirds. “I’m really, really hungry,” she explains.

  Well, maybe not hungry exactly.

  “It’s just that if I see something good,” she sighs, “I automatically pick it up and eat it.” Like a lot of us, she gets pleasure from food. But afterward, she also feels pain.

  Hannah’s twin brother is slim and athletic, but her mom is also overweight. Treece has tried different diets with Hannah. She’s tried sports. Delay. Portion control, using 100-calorie snack packs. “She’ll have a couple of them,” Treece says.

  Don’t even mention Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. “She would kill somebody to get a package of those,” Treece says. “It’s almost like a compulsion.” No kidding. Remember the old ad campaign, “Betcha can’t eat just one”? That was Lay’s Potato Chips. The same company makes Hannah’s Cheetos.

  Some people simply can’t stop. There’s science to prove it, says former FDA Commissioner Kessler.

  Here’s a guy who fought Big Tobacco. He’s a doctor; he knows what’s healthful. Yet until recently, he could come undone over a chocolate-chip cookie. “I have suits in every size,” he says ruefully.

  Our desire to eat doesn’t originate in the stomach, really. We’re wired to crave salt, sugar and fat, Kessler says. You see it in laboratory rats, too. They’ll brave the possibility of electric shocks to keep eating their junk food. Even bacteria swim to sugar.

  There’s more.

  “We used to think people were lazy or it was a question of willpower,” Kessler explains. “I can now show you the (brain) scans. The vast majority of people who have a hard time controlling their eating have excessive activation of the brain’s emotional core.”

  When you eat things like cookies or Cheetos you get an immediate reward. You feel good. Your brain actually changes when you eat that stuff, Kessler explains. The neurocircuitry gets rewired. Stumble across a “food cue”—maybe an ad for cereal, or the smell of French toast—and suddenly, your brain lights up. Your thoughts slip into those newly laid tracks and can’t get off, like the way your skis follow along in a cross-country trail. Your brain, Kessler says, gets “hijacked.” And the new pathway is reinforced further. Scientists say it’s not exactly that we’re addicted to food, but it sure is an awful lot like that.

  Problem is, these food cues are everywhere. “We’re living in a food carnival,” Kessler says.

  So we’re not just fighting temptation like Nathan. We’re battling our very biology, that automatic response that makes Kessler crumble at the thought of cookies and Hannah unshakable in the face of orangey-red salt.

  Let’s call this the Cheeto Compulsion. Betcha can’t eat just one.

  Hilary Bromberg, strategy director at the Seattle brand/communications firm Egg, says they sometimes put clients through a little exercise: Talk about your food history. “They enter almost a trance state,” she says. “They say, my grandmother made me this, or my mother made me this. There’s this visceral attachment.”

  Eating, in other words, isn’t some sort of clinical calculation of calories. Most people aren’t thinking, Gee, I better have carrots instead of cake because I didn’t get my five servings of vegetables today. “Food is a source of sensual pleasure,” Bromberg explains. “The emotions around food are profound.” She’s saying this as a marketing maven. She’s also saying this as someone who studied cognitive neuroscience at Harvard and MIT.

  Nathan’s mother, Susan Stoltzfus, knows this, too. “Food has been that comfort or that source of consolation or that sense of belonging,” she says. It’s immediate, too—unlike losing weight, which requires forgoing that sense of pleasure over and over and over. “How do you live for that delayed gratification?” she wonders.

  Nathan and Hannah might not explain it the same way. But they understand. Food is pleasure. Food is family, culture and tradition. Food is love.

  Let’s call this the Comfort Connection. And I’m willing to bet it’s within arm’s reach right now.

  Marlene Schwartz, a clinical psychologist at Yale University, suggested a little experiment. Ask a roomful of people, Who thinks junk-food marketing works? All the hands will go up.

  Ask, does it work on you? The hands will vanish.

  “I think people decide, once it’s in their pantry, it’s no longer junk food,” she says. Talk about getting inside your head. These marketing guys can put an idea in there and you don’t even know it.

  And it’s growing even more sophisticated. Food producers have long hired experts to survey thousands of consumers at once. But in the past decade or so, the behind-the-scenes work has become even more stunning in its scope and highly
particular in its findings. Some of the topics food marketers have studied recently: mother/daughter baking rituals; parents’ stress level on car trips; the habits of kids at sporting events; how preschoolers are using their parents’ smartphones; the traits of parents who are strict versus parents who are more permissive—and what it all means for their kids’ eating habits. There’s an entirely new genre of marketing and advertising firms, in fact, that focus on youth culture.

  Meanwhile, in the past decade or two, says Demeritt of the Bellevue market-research firm, food-marketing companies also started going directly into people’s homes. Shopping with them. Asking detailed personal questions. It’s called ethnographic research, and it’s being done in many cases by social anthropologists. Hordes of psychologists have been enlisted, as well, to better get inside consumers’ heads.

  The result is that marketers know exactly how families eat, what they eat and why. They know what makes them keep coming back, even when they know it’s probably less nutritious.

  Take Go-Gurt, for instance. It’s one of the most successful kid foods ever. Moms are doling it out for breakfast, yet it’s got more sugar per ounce than Coke. Yoplait sells $129 million worth of this stuff a year. Unnatural-hued goo in a squeezable tube!

  How did Go-Gurt come to be? Really good research. In phone interviews, typical consumers would say breakfast was a sit-down, family affair. But when General Mills hired an anthropologist to spend time with ordinary families, she discovered they were actually eating on the go. A niche was identified: Families could use something portable. And squeezable yogurt was born.

  It appeals to a kid’s taste buds for sure. But the makers of Go-Gurt aren’t selling that, per se. They’re selling fun, coolness. Remember Kessler and the way food activates the emotional core? Bingo.

  The opportunities to hit that emotional core are greater than ever. Advertisers can reach kids on their own cable channels. They can reach them on the Internet—for a lot less money. At the same time, they’ll learn even more about them. Marketers know the search terms consumers enter, the information they put on social-networking sites, the pages they view and countless other metrics. Companies are prohibited from collecting personal data on users less than 13 without parental permission, but a Wall Street Journal investigation found even youngsters’ online activities were being tracked, and in some cases offered for sale to advertisers. “Youth in 2010 will be the first generation in the post-digital economy the retailer will know by name,” one marketing report said last year.

  Check it out. There are Go-Gurt pages on Facebook. Go-Gurt videos on YouTube. There’s even a Go-Gurt game. Betcha can’t quit at one.

  Last December, Demeritt’s firm conducted a nationally representative survey about weight issues. Forty-two percent of people said childhood obesity is a big problem. But among the same people, only 3 percent agreed it was a problem in their family. “It shows you why people don’t really do anything about weight,” she says.

  Other studies have found that most people aren’t driven by a desire to be healthy. Instead, they judge their own weight in relation to their peers. If your peers are heavy, there’s less motivation to reduce. As it turns out, we have a lot of heavy peers.

  And look what we’re up against: the Temptation Complication, the Cheeto Compulsion, the Comfort Connection.

  Then there’s the sheer firepower of food producers. “I remember a honcho at the CDC looked at me and said, ‘They’re way smarter than we are, and they have more money,’“ the UW’s Johnson recalls. She spends a lot of time nowadays thinking about the food environment, how it’s easier to get Cheetos than it is to get an apple. But even if apples were everywhere, I ask her, would Nathan choose them? Would Hannah forgo her Cheetos? That’s a tough one, she says.

  “Most of us,” she says sadly, “are going to choose fat and salt and sugar over foods that don’t have those things in them.” It’s biology. It’s culture.

  Then she thinks, what if apples were made to seem more appealing? “It’s not like Madison Avenue is inherently evil, right?” she muses. “If we could harness that . . . oh, man . . . Think of the potential of what they could sell.”

  PASTORAL ROMANCE

  By Brent Cunningham

  From Lapham’s Quarterly

  Is back-to-the-land agrarianism the answer to American food reform, or just another salvo in the culture wars? Political journalist Brent Cunningham, who is deputy editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, offers some healthy skepticism, based on grassroots research in a struggling Rust Belt city.

  Betty Jo Patton spent her childhood on a 240-acre farm in Mason County, West Virginia, in the 1930s. Her family raised what it ate, from tomatoes to turkeys, pears to pigs. They picked, plucked, slaughtered, butchered, cured, canned, preserved, and rendered. They drew water from a well, cooked on a wood stove, and the bathroom was an outhouse.

  Phoebe Patton Randolph, Betty Jo’s thirty-two-year-old granddaughter, has a dream of returning to the farm, which has been in the family since 1863 and is an hour’s drive from her home in the suburbs of Huntington, a city of nearly fifty thousand people along the Ohio River. Phoebe is an architect and a mother of one (soon to be two) boys, who is deeply involved in efforts to revitalize Huntington, a moribund Rust Belt community unsure of what can replace the defunct factories that drove its economy for a hundred years. She grew up with stories of life on the farm as she watched the empty farmhouse sag into disrepair.

  Recently, over lunch in Betty Jo’s cozy house in a quiet Huntington neighborhood, I listened to them talk about the farm, and I eventually asked Betty Jo what she thought of her granddaughter’s notion of returning to the land. Betty Jo smiled, but was blunt: “Leave it. There’s nothing romantic about it.”

  Leave it? But isn’t Green Acres the place to be? Listening to the conversation about food reform that has unspooled in this country over the last decade, it’s hard to avoid the idea that in terms of food production and consumption, we once had it right—before industrialization and then globalization sullied our Eden. Nostalgia glistens on that conversation like dew on an heirloom tomato: the belief that in a not-so-distant past, families routinely sat down to happy meals whipped up from scratch by mom or grandma. That in the 1950s, housewives had to be tricked by Madison Avenue marketers into abandoning beloved family recipes in favor of new Betty Crocker cake mixes. That the family farm was at the center of an ennobling way of life.

  Evidence of the nostalgia abounds. There is an endless series of books by urban food revolutionaries who flee the professional world for the simple pleasures of rural life, if only for a year or so: Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land; Coop: A Family, a Farm, and the Pursuit of One Good Egg; The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir. A new crop sprouts each year. There’s Michael Pollan’s admonition, in his best-selling book Food Rules, to not “eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” And then there are countless articles about the young and educated putting off grad school to become organic farmers. A March 5 piece in the New York Times is typical. Under the headline, “In New Food Culture, a Young Generation of Farmers Emerges,” it delivers a predictable blend: twenty-somethings who quit engineering jobs to farm in Corvallis, Oregon—microbrews, Subarus, multiple piercings, indie rock, yoga. This back-to-the-landism is of a piece with the nineteenth-century, do-it-yourself fever that has swept certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn, complete with handlebar mustaches, jodhpur boots, classic cocktails, soda shops, and restaurants with wagon wheels on the walls.

  The surest sign that this nostalgia has reached a critical mass, though, is that food companies have begun to board the retro bus. PepsiCo now has throwback cans for Pepsi (the red-white-and-blue one Cindy Crawford famously guzzled in the 1990s) and Mountain Dew (featuring a cartoon hillbilly from the 1960s) in which they’ve replaced “bad” high-fructose corn syrup with “good” cane sugar. Frito-Lay is resurrecting a Doritos
chip from the 1980s (taco-flavored, a sombrero on the package).When nostalgia is co-opted by corporate America and sold back to us, as it invariably is, the backlash can’t be far behind. Consider this the opening salvo.

  It’s unlikely that most serious food reformers think America can or should dismantle our industrial food system and return to an agrarian way of life. But the idea that “Food used to be better” so pervades the rhetoric about what ails our modern food system that it is hard not to conclude that rolling back the clock would provide at least some of the answers. The trouble is, it wouldn’t. And even if it would, the prospect of a return to Green Acres just isn’t very appealing to a lot of people who know what life there is really like.

  I came to Huntington last November with my wife, the food writer Jane Black, to research a book about the effort to build a healthier food culture there. This is where celebrity chef Jamie Oliver last year debuted his reality television show, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, after the Huntington metro area was labeled the nation’s most unhealthy community by a 2008 Centers for Disease Control study. It is a place that has suffered the familiar litany of postindustrial woes: a decimated manufacturing base, a shrinking population, a drug problem. It is also precisely the kind of place where the food-reform movement must take hold if it is to deliver on its promise of large-scale and enduring change.

  How would the messages and assumptions that have powered the movement in the elite enclaves where it took root over the last decade—like Brooklyn, where we live, Berkeley, Washington, DC, etc.—play in communities like Huntington? Places where most people don’t consider Applebee’s and Wal-Mart to be the enemy. Where the familiar and the consistent are valued over the new and the exotic, especially when it comes to what’s for dinner. Where a significant portion of the population lives in poverty or perilously close to it.

  Jane and I suspected that the environmental, social justice, it-just-tastes-better case for eating seasonally and sustainably that our foodie friends consider self-evident would be met with skepticism—or shrugs—by people who have more pressing concerns than the plight of tomato pickers in Florida or the fact that cows are meant to eat grass, not corn. Nostalgia, though, did not immediately register with us as part of the movement’s message problem. Perhaps because we live in the same world as the people who write those My-Year-Doing-X books, foodie nostalgia only seemed an innocuous, if annoying, bit of yuppie indulgence.