Some of what I've been reading lately goes against "conventional wisdom" regarding nutrition and health--books like Gary Taubes' Why We Get Fat and Sally Fallon and Mary D. Enig's Nourishing Traditions have given me food for thought about what's eating most of us, health-wise. It's made me more aware of how many things we can find in stores and our own kitchens that just wouldn't have been recognized as "food" to our great-grandparents, let alone our distant ancestors. And once we get down to analyzing labels--it gets a little hard for us to see them as food, either.
A lot of the hard-to pronounce ingredients we find on labels are things like preservatives, and make edibles more shelf-stable so that they can hang around the supermarket, or your cabinets, longer without going stale. But others are color and flavor enhancers to make cheap ingredients more palatable, and still more additives are to put nutrients into food that has lost it somewhere in processing. It seems like a lot of trouble is being gone to to convince us that some packaged assemblage of fillers, preservatives, starches, sugars, colors, etc. are food--it might just be a better idea to, well, go ahead and eat real food! Fruit. Vegetables. Meat and fish. Things where you can point to the actual article you're eating and say what it is, without needing a label.
(Here's a random thing you can do--read the label off of a NutriGrain bar. Find the nutri. Then find the grain. You will find a few different sugars.)
Also, I've been thinking about meals. That was a way people traditionally ate food for a long time. It's pretty much how most of us were brought up thinking about eating: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Dessert was a "sometimes" food--a special treat if something significant happened. Birthday cake. Pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. Christmas cookies. Halloween candy. But meals started losing their boundaries. It seems like there's an awful lot more snack-related fare out there: trail mix packs, and "100-calorie" snack bags, and granola bars. (And by the way, if your trail mix has M&M's in, you've just eaten a modest 100 calories of cookies, or your granola bar was drizzled with chocolate--you really have to admit it was basically dessert. Just like doughnuts are breakfast cake. And muffins are vaguely healthier-seeming breakfast cake with fruit and/or whole grains.) And then there's "meal replacements." Shakes. It used to be "drinking one's meals" was a thing hardened boozers did. Now shakes are someting people drink instead of eating food--and not because they can't chew or manage to eat--but because food? It's....hard?
It must sound like I'm a terrible curmudgeon all of a sudden on the subject, and definitely, this phenomena of snacking and pre-packaged foods and all fill a need with the time-pressed, or for people who might not have the wherewithal to go to the trouble of fixing a more involved meal--but it seems like this "need" is partially created. Why do people snack--because they are hungry! And why are they hungry? Because we need to eat food--to live! It provides us with the nutrients our bodies need, and hunger is how our body asks for more nutrients. If we're eating fillers and colorings and preservatives and all that--we could be eating a lot of stuff and basically be starving for food. And why would we want food that can just sit on a shelf, anyway? Isn't it supposed to be eaten?
What bothers me about writing about food is that access to good, healthy, whole foods has begun to be discussed as a kind of privilege. We have places that are called "food deserts", where people just don't have a supermarket nearby, and have to make do with convenience stores and dollars stores, and the convenience foods and cheaper ingredients that go with them. We have hungry people in this country. Use of food stamps is at an all-time high. Many children depend on their school-provided lunches, because it is sometimes the best meal they will get.
That's a lot to think about. Food shouldn't be a privilege. Food is a basic need. We have tons and tons of ingredients and dollars for marketing foods that aren't....necessary! Just plain junk foods! And yet the idea that a fridge brimming with healthy milk, butter, eggs, fresh fruits and vegetables and a freezer full of options for main courses, is a luxury some don't have, makes me think there is something broken in how our society looks at food. We fetishize it and demean it--something like the way we do with bodies. We have "death by chocolate" desserts and ketchup as a vegetable.
I don't know how to handle the broader issue of distribution and cost and how one goes about fixing the inequality of food being both scarce and too much with us (although urban farming is something I think is awesome--and recall the old huckster trucks carrying fuits and veg from my youth, and CSA's and farmer's markets are things that point at ways of getting good food to consumers), but I do have ideas about how the culture has to change--just like there is a "slow food" movement in response to fast food culture, I think there has to be a "food" food movement. It means paying attention to how food is grown and delivered, as well as how it is prepared. It means eating things you recognize, at times when you can enjoy them (and demanding that time! Good cooks know time is also an ingredient!)
It's a thought, anyway.
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