STORIES & MORE

DISPUTE WITH THE SOUL OF FOOD

DISPUTE #1: If America's Food Supply Were Perfect

I don't know.

What's not to know?

I don't know why it's been so hard.

Aren't you making this more complicated than it is? Most people know which foods are healthy or unhealthy.

Are you sure? If America's food supply were perfect, what would it be? And who would be responsible for perfecting such a food system: we the eaters, the food companies, government, or someone else?

My answer to the first question is too glib to champion, while the second is easier, it should be a shared responsibility.

That makes sense. Imagine what would happen if food companies felt truly responsible for not just the safety and popularity of the food they produce or serve, but also shared equally in the responsibility for any harm caused by their foods to individual health.

That's the answer. It's not like there's a true choice. Everyone must eat and yes, we do love to eat

Got it, how about a craft beer with a healthy bite to eat.

DISPUTE #2: Italian Spaghetti Harvest, Two Big Elevens

I am excited about using April Fools' foolishly and purposely.

Who owns April Fools' Day?

Nobody. It goes back in the Americas at least a few hundred years, possibly even to 1492, when Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Jokes, tricks, untruths, and hoaxes prevail as does calling out "April Fool" to those trickstered.

Nobody owns April Fools' Day?

No, err, yes no one owns it. It's a three-quarter empty holiday vessel that's widely acknowledged yet socially under-celebrated.

Wow, I bet that people would be surprised if we told them that we could collectively put a claim on it.

That's the whole point.

Tell me more.

On average less than one prank per capita occurs although 89 million Americans participate each year. April Fools' Day is also a rarity: an American holiday with minimal association to food along with a dearth of group norms or related social gatherings. That's the "empty space" we'll be filling by recasting April 1^st as "All Fools' 'Food' Day."

All Fools' Food Day?

April Fools' Day is sometimes called "All Fools' Day." In past years' mass media hoaxes have frequently emphasized food. "Fungry" examples included left-handed-only foods, 1950's job openings for an Italian Spaghetti Harvest, and limited-time-offer spoofs like a Burger King Chocolate Whopper.

Much of today's ultra-processed foods are truly "Fools' Food." We just don't acknowledge it.

Last year, Burger King crowdsourced students in a national contest to design it's next April Fools' Day prank or stunt. They're known for marketing pranks and "stunt foods" targeting the student and young male markets.

It won't be easy to compete with Burger King for ownership rights.

We won't have to compete. They'll never try to own any holiday. It's like the food companies are secular folks while we'll be the religious zealots.

I'm wondering if stunt foods involve dangerous stunts with food or what.

It bears repeating, stunt foods include Taco Bell's Dorito Locos Taco (DLT), KFC's Double Down, and Burger Kings' bacon sundae, to name just a few examples from constantly changing fast food offerings in a one-upmanship across the quick-serve foodscape. They're fun to eat.

I get that they're fun food, but I'm thinking there is more to this story.

Stunt foodstuff are often eaten to gain social recognition, street cred, or create shock value. Not surprisingly, stunt foods frequently garner lots of social media attention for their providers even though there is, ahem, little risk of injury yet high risk of disease if a eater overdoses, repeatedly.

Stunt foods: that's a memorable naming.

It is. It's also unfortunately an uncommon term. My friend and past client, Sophie Egan in her book, DEVOURED — How What We Eat Defines Who We Are also further defines it as "absurdly, unabashedly decadent food innovations, typically produced by fast-food chains and available for a limited time only." The catch is, unlike an April Fools' prank or trick no one knows to call out the eater as being stunt foolish or FoodZy Fools.

Is the idea to catch eaters of stunt food and shame them?

No, it's the exact opposite.

I sense that claiming ownership of April Fools' Day and eating stunt foods are a paired couple in our scheme or in this instance, this scheming.

Yes, however, there are two Big Elevens standing in the way.

Two big elevens?

Overcoming the inertia of all those making their living in or serving needs resulting from America's food system is a monumental undertaking.

Spit it out, two big elevens?

Okay. For every hundred American workers, and let's use rounded numbers, one is a farmer, rancher, or commercial fisherman. Another ten people work with food between these food producers and our mouths.

Do they work for Big Food Companies?

Yes, some do. Many more work in small restaurants, farmer's markets, specialty and independent food purveyors, and small grocers. As to big food's corporate impact, that's $1.5 trillion in economic activity from factory farms to food processors to chain groceries and quick serve restaurants. That's the first eleven out of a hundred American workers. It's a well-oiled machine—pun intended.

And the second?

For the same hundred American workers, there are eleven more workers employed in healthcare delivery. This is a $3.65 trillion industry in which non-communicable disease has become the primary growth driver. And 70 to 80% of non-communicable disease is caused by what we eat or said simpler, SAD, the Standard American Diet. We estimate that three to four of every eleven healthcare workers owe their job to the highly health depletive nature of America's food and the health harm that these foods cause.

Isn't that a stretch?

No, it's alarming, but not a stretch. Just think of the super-size rise in diabetes and heart disease across America. Health-depletive foods are the primary cause of these lifestyle diseases. The cost is borne by us all yet in the healthcare field America's poor dietary pattern ironically creates job security for some of these workers.

Tell me more.

Unlike the eleven food system workers the healthcare field rails against our poor food choices and pleads for healthier diets. Ironically, just like most Americans, the average healthcare worker eats mostly like everyone else. There are also another three uncounted workers out of every hundred who work for government in health-related fields including public health and nutrition, health insurers, and in the $66 billion weight loss field.

Altogether that's a lot of food-related jobs?

And we haven't even teased out the food portion of America's workforce for Big Pharma, medical consumables and equipment, transportation, energy, in farm equipment and pickup trucks, and agrochemicals.

The crux of the argument seems to be that America's eating pattern and healthcare needs are co-dependent?

America's uniquely low cost, "unnaturally" delicious food couples with the highest-in-the-world healthcare cost. That's not coincidental. Food and health intertwine yet calling them co-dependent seems unfair to the healthcare and public health establishment. Like a looped recording they're constantly telling American eaters to eat healthier.

My observations are pretty much the same. Healthcare workers—especially in hospitals—eat like most Americans at work. I suspect that there are academic studies on the dietary habits of those who work in healthcare: at work, dining out with their families, and at home. They do not seem to cook any more often than the rest of us. This sounds defensive, doesn't it? It's so tempting to point at the messengers and these caregivers as being hypocritical. Possibly that's because I don't want you to take their dietary advice seriously, unless declining health or chronic disease forces our hand...toward eating healthier fare. I guess our food is as unnaturally delicious to healthcare workers as it is to me. Unnaturally delicious, that implies that something underhanded or unnatural is going on with America's food. I do know that our foods are highly processed.

The food supply system is further complicated by the conviviality and escape eating offers from daily life.

You might want to factor in how "eatertainment" is such an influencer in our food choices, particularly where and how we dine out. I believe that the idea of eatertainment is a food industry endearment.

Endearment, hardly. It's more likely an entrapment.

Whatever it is, it works on our psyche, as does food in general.

As to our food being unnaturally delicious, that's an apt description of processed, ultra-processed, and similarly nutrient-poor edible products marketed as America's food. Our food is delicious, nevertheless, and not as a result of processing, which grinds, rolls, and slushes out natural flavors, rather because of concocted flavorings and additives through the work of food science.

Food science, that's a profession most of us know little about.

At last count, there were only 13,330 U.S. food scientists. earning on average $72,500 annually.

It's hard to believe that so few workers have such an oversized effect. If we could choose to pay them all off what would that cost us as a country?

You mean if the federal government paid them every year to not practice their magic on the avalanche of processed foods introduced every year?

Let's round the numbers up to simply the math: 15 thousand jobs at 75 grand per year couldn't be that much money.

Okay, whether it's practical or not, that would cost $1,125 million or just a bit over a billion bucks annually.

That's an exceedingly small wage factor in terms of the overall American economy, and a miniscule cost in terms of governmental health budgets or U.S. annual healthcare expenditures.

As a point of reference, more than 200 Americans make more than $50 million per year in wages alone. Food scientists, of course, are not the cause Of America's dysfunctional dietary pattern alone. Afterall, you don't have to be expert to add extra salt, sugar, and fat to a dish cooked at home, or in a diner. Also imagine the horrors of marginal tasting processed foods in the absence of these modern-day food scientists.

Then why single them out?

Because they're the point of the spear of "taste trickster" Big Food's eventual lethal thrust into far too many American eater's bellies.

DISPUTE #3: Delish...And Devilish!

Food preferences are learned. As Bee Wilson wrote, in her book, First Bite, and let me read this so I don't miss any of her key points. "Our tastes follow us around like a comforting shadow. They seem to tell us who we are. Maybe this is why we act as if our core attitudes to eating are set in stone. We make frequent attempts—more or less half-hearted—to change what we eat, but almost no effort to change how we feel about food."

Food and feelings seem to stand together more often than not.

Just as we are more acutely aware of the foods we don't like than those that we do like, taste is also an acquired sense. Taste is more malleable than most eaters realize otherwise we would never have learned to eat such a variety of different foods, including health-inducing choices like broccoli and eggplant. When it comes to health and food, there is a virtual law influencing which foods we'll like. When someone thinks that I'm going to like the taste of a particular food, they almost always do. Have you ever seen a chocoholic hesitate to taste an unfamiliar chocolate-laced indulgence?

Not any chocolate lover that we know. But eating chocolate isn't something that Americans need to do more often. Eating healthier food is the hurdle that matters foremost in this dialogue.

While food scientists at Big Food companies work tirelessly to make their processed concoctions more palatable, and thus more likeable, the idea of liking health-promoting foods remains alien to far too many Americans. You, my soul already knows my self-talk. And the many questions I ask of you.

You do ask lots of question to your soul.

Let me say it out loud for emphasis. How can I learn to like this tasteless healthier stuff? What's best for me to eat is likely to be tasteless, right? And obviously I'm not chattering on about flavorful whole foods such as oranges and apples.

Okay B., what else does Bee have to say?

Bee Wilson writes that we have been taught what and how to eat.

Are you going to read her thoughts or am I left to speculate?

Wilson goes on to write, "Our cues about when to eat and what to eat and how much extend beyond such drives as hunger and hormones into the territory of ritual (eggs for breakfast), culture (baseball and hotdogs), and religion (turkey at Christmas, lamb at Eid)...[Healthy eating also revolves around] feeding ourselves as a good parent would: with love, with variety, but also with limits...After all, as omnivores, we are not born knowing what to eat. We all had to learn it, every one of us, as children sitting expectantly, waiting to be fed."

Since you rarely cook, I'm also often sitting expectantly, waiting to be served. Yes, and I AM capable of feeding myself. Like many other eaters your overriding goal—beyond pleasure and taste—when it comes to food is to find practically anyone else to do the cooking. I'm also a stickler for drinking bottled or filtered water, unless you're eating out at a restaurant that doesn't have it on the menu. Purified water makes me feel like we are doing something good for our body. Something protective and healthy.

How long do you think that water stays in our body? If I drink down a 20-ounce Dansani bottle of water how soon is it before I need to urinate? Of course, water flushes out waste products from normal metabolism. While I'm uncertain of the physiological effect, what is certain is that the food that I eat is broken down in the intestines and then absorbed in the bloodstream to provide essential nutrients throughout the body. Then the leftover waste ends up in the toilet in the next one to three days. It seems to me that drinking safe tap water isn't risky at all. Especially compared to stuffing ourselves with processed and ultra-processed foodstuff. Obviously without food and water no one will survive so yes, I applaud you for wanting us to do something protective and healthy. But why do we often emphasize what's easiest to do, like drinking bottled water, rather than eating healthier foods. The longer-term effect of food on health cannot be overstated.

We count our-self as one of those who is a healthy eater, but you are also a person of many moods and they all require chocolate. You do try to stick with dark chocolate since it's deemed the healthier choice.

Yummy, that's delish...and devilish!