TW: Discussion of eating disorders, and dieting
“The koala bear certainly doesn’t worry about what’s for dinner; if it looks and smells like a eucalyptus leaf, then it is dinner. His culinary preferences are hard-wired. But for omnivores like us, a vast amount of brain space and time must be devoted to figuring out which of all the many potential dishes nature offers are safe to eat.” (Pollan, 2004)
This week I read “Our National Eating Disorder” by Micheal Pollan, one of my favorite authors. This piece is from 2004 yet I think its relevance has only grown over the last 19 or so years. Pollan covered a few important themes and ideas in this writing, I am going to cover a couple of them that I feel are most relevant to my topic of food and feeling.
One of my ILC questions is about how digital reading affects the way we consume texts and food, but I would like to pose this as a secondary question deriving from the first. How do digital advertisements of food change our sensory experiences with it? How does seeing a food advertised on the internet affect the wants and cravings we have around food, as well as the social-emotional reactions we have in our grocery stores and kitchens? Pollan touches on this, highlighting the ways in which having a cycle of trending diets and ideas of health continues to spin the wheel that funds the food industry. By overproducing processed foods, manufacturers can quickly adapt to the newest fad by changing the fat, sugar, carb, or calorie content to reflect the newest fad. Pollan multiple times reference the food marketing industry, and it seems almost an industry of its own, separate from the sales in the way the public perceives the food and the brand. Food marketing is closer to running public relations with people’s perceptions of their own health and bodies.
This article in particular, published by the New York Times (I did not intend to do so many NYT articles in a row it’s just how the chips fell in the end), was amid the anti-carbs craze. Cutting carbs was my introduction to eating disorders, joining my dad on a no-carb diet which my mother encouraged and even showed me carb-free recipes that she would make us for breakfast. I was about 12 at the time. And I really don’t think they knew what they were doing, I was a fat kid who had finally expressed some interest in losing weight, but the fact is that these diet trends spread so far, they are unavoidable even for children. Disordered eating has been glamorized, advertised, and now monetized. These cycles have not improved since 2004, with major celebrities making marketing with juice companies for surgery payouts and the rise in social media, they have in fact been pushed further into every corner of our lives. The addition of digital advertising in food marketing has been a setback for facing the disordered eating epidemic.
Pollan also discusses the ways in which Americans perceive food and health concepts as opposed to those in France. He mentions “the french paradox” and the following passage stood out to me.
“The “French paradox” is the most famous such case, though it’s worth keeping in mind the French don’t regard the matter as a paradox at all; we Americans resort to that word simply because the French experience—a population of wine-swilling cheese eaters with lower rates of heart disease and obesity?!—confounds our orthodoxy about food. Maybe what we should be talking about is an American paradox: that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.”
He goes on to talk about a study done, another passage I think is worth reading for context:
“A few years ago, Paul Rozin, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, and Claude Fischler, a French sociologist, began collaborating on a series of cross-cultural surveys of food attitudes. They found that of the four populations surveyed (the U.S., France, Flemish Belgium and Japan), Americans associated food with health the most and pleasure the least. Asked what comes to mind upon hearing the phrase “chocolate cake,” Americans were more apt to say “guilt,” while the French said “celebration”; “heavy cream” elicited “unhealthy” from Americans, “whipped” from the French. The researchers found that Americans worry more about food and derive less pleasure from eating than people in any other nation they surveyed”
And then a few paragraphs later:
“The French eat all sorts of “unhealthy” foods, but they do it according to a strict and stable set of rules: they eat small portions and don’t go back for seconds; they don’t snack; they seldom eat alone, and communal meals are long, leisurely affairs.”
While we could argue all day about whether the food itself is better in Europe, I feel as though the biggest difference is the culture around food. Would we have such a need for easily adaptable, fad-following, highly processed foods if we had built a culture around food focused on meals as a social and celebratory time, food not as a reward for exercising but as something that adds joy to our lives for being alive. We have created a society where we crave highly processed unhealthy foods often due to the stress of our daily lives, shame ourselves for overconsuming or eating the “wrong thing”, and then get sucked in by digital marketing campaigns that offer you your ideal body in a cardboard box labeled “low fat”.
I am going to invite all my roommates to sit down and have a long, tasty home-cooked meal this weekend. I am still teaching myself to live to eat, as much as I love food, and putting my community behind me while I do it is as simple as sharing a meal with my loved ones. We could put this on a bigger, more culturally expected scale and all lean to live to eat.
Next week I will be reading about obesity guidelines in kids, and reading a photo essay on farmworker suicide. In week 6 I will be taking a break from new material for my mental health as these topics have been rather heavy and personal, and working exclusively on drafting my writing piece. Take care if yourself and eat dinner on time tonight 🙂