The Infantilization of Taste

There is a trend in American food that seems innocuous enough, but I find highly disturbing. It's the latest step the food industry is taking to keep American tastes infantalized so they will continue to be addicted to the fatty, sugary, salty, highly processed food commodities that is so very profitable to the industry.

These foods require little in the way of whole foods to make. They are composed of commodities which are traded by the ton in the food industry. Let's take the latest trend to put Fritos- a snacky junk food- on top of pizza- also junk food. Fritos is made of seed corn crushed, mixed with water and a few conditioning chemicals, then extruded and fried in oil (corn oil or soybean oil, most likely). And what is pizza made of? wheat, water, a little yeast, processed cheese and tomato sauce.

These are highly processed, commodified foods which cost very little for the industry to produce per unit. They can be combined in myriad ways to provide the illusion of diversity and choice. You can practically see the corn fatcats sitting down with the wheat and dairy fatcats and insisting they need a bigger piece of the pie. They want to expand into new markets: pizza and subs, for instance. What better way to ensure increased profits than take a staple of many people's childhoods, a snack like Fritos, for instance, and turn it into an ingredient that could appear not only with, but in a staple lunch and dinner food of the average consumer?

I can understand why people flock to burgers. Modern life is not easy. There's less and less time to handle the basics of living. Market pressures on business and social pressures on government are constant. Everyone lives in with a chronic low-level anxiety all the time, with intermittent periods of high anxiety. This takes a toll on our minds and bodies. We feel exhausted at lunch or when we leave for the day. The body needs refueling- it's unavoidable, right? And it is so easy to take refuge in the simple foods of childhood. It makes us feel loved by our moms; or, like we truly are masters of our time. It's fast and cheap, fitting into our busy adult lifestyles. Perhaps the most mechanical reason is the addictive substances produce an opiate-like high, leading to a temporary feeling of contentment. But this is exactly the wrong sort of food we need to be eating in times of constant stress. We need high quality fuel. The food industry is more than happy to tempt us with a constant stream of exactly the wrong fuel in the form of this comfort food because their profits are so massive. How it affects people does not enter into their thinking for a moment except for how it will empty their wallets and the fact we can't help but buy it. They realize all to well that carbs, fat and sugar are as addictive as heroin. Talk about a captive audience!

 This is a moral failure on the part of our society. We should be able to trust our food and our instincts, but we absolutely cannot. Whether you feel tempted to or not, we need to be eating whole foods, as close to literally taking it out the environment and eating it as possible. Personally I do not eat meat, but this issue transcends this fact. Whether you are a carnivore, omnivore, vegetarian or vegan, you need to eat foods as nature provided them to maximize their nutritional benefits. Our brains need sugar, but the slow-release kind that is found in fruits and vegetables. The proteins and carbs need to be complex and unprocessed. The fact of the matter is science doesn't exactly know why certain foods are beneficial- it is the synergy of many complex molecules found naturally in food working together to provide a benefit far beyond the sum of their parts. (This is why whole foods are better than supplements as well.)

Take a moment to consider what you truly like about your favorite foods and see if you can't get those buttons pushed somehow by a natural food. Instead of fries, have a potato. Instead of a burger, have the vegetables that come with a burger with a small amount of quality protein. Instead of fast food chili, have homemade veggie chili that tastes practically the same.

The funny thing you may notice is the more you try to do this, the more your meals will resemble what you grandparents ate. They grew up in an era without easy, fast junk lunches and dinners. You'd do well to simply emulate what they ate, if you are unsure of how to start. Gradually, this will become your new normal, and you will feel better than you have felt in years. Along the way, you'll encounter new flavors and textures that you love. You'll find yourself wondering why you wanted to eat like a kid to begin with.

Eat what your Grandmother ate

Studies now prove what we have probably suspected anyway: The rise of obesity correlates exactly with our adoption of processed foods. Starting in 1899, the amount of processed foods in the average American diet was near zero. There was a bump in the fifties with the advent of "time-saving" foods for busy housewives and the apparent adoption of the teen malt shop as the blueprint for the future average American restaurant. Obesity and processed food use really began to take off in 1980. It would really be interesting to take a close look at that decade to see what exactly happened, but one possibility is the switch to HFCS in sodas, which occurred at the beginning of the 1980s. HFCS  has been demonstrated to be more fattening that the equivalent amount of sugar.

So, the percentage of foods in the American diet that comes from junk food and fast food is within shouting range of 50% nowadays. The problem is, our bodies respond in completely different ways to junk food than it does to ordinary whole foods. This study demonstrates foods high in salt, fat and sugar screw up the pleasure center of the brain most closely tied to our instinct to survive. For ordinary foods, the body judges the nutritive  value of a new food, and makes us like it even more if it likes what nutrients it packs. It also has a limited ability to alter these messages to our brains depending on seasonal body needs. In winter, it will makes us crave more dense, fatty foods to help us conserve heat; in summer, it makes us crave light and wet foods to cope with hot weather.

Unfortunately, we live in a time when seasonality can be defeated- we spend most of our time indoors in a sort of eternal early summer. So what small amount of seasonal regulation the pleasure centers can manage is short circuited. Furthermore, our systems are not geared to like  anthocyanins and isoflavones. What it wants is what is most likely to help the organism survive until the next big kill: fast energy sources like sugar, slow-burning energy sources like fat, electrolite feeders like salt, and, in any event, high caloric content. Once our bodies have had a taste of foods that exemplify this in the extreme- by and large, high-calorie, low-nutrient creations such as soda, Death by Chocolate, Doritos and Chicken McNuggets- our bodies trick us into liking these items more and more, and craving them with increasing intensity, to the point that the pleasure center can no longer make useful decisions- it just craps out.

We are driven to crave foods for a lifestyle cycle of feast and famine. Few of us live life like that anymore (though it's become fashionable in some circles to adopt an extreme paleolithic diet consisting of just that). But excepting these extremists, the rest of us are left to fight our desires with reason. One way to out-smart a broken pleasure center is to avoid these trigger foods entirely. The circuitry of the brain returns to normal and after a while we stop relying on trigger foods to get us through the rough patch until the next elk is killed. Yes, studies seem to indicate that we are addicted to junk food- but the way out is simply to stop eating them. Heh, easy, right? Ok, not so much.

 But, actually, there is a blueprint for eating like this all around us: what people ate like before the advent of instant potatoes. Imagine what your parents, grandparents or great-grandparents (depending on how old you are or where you live) might have made for their meals. My own grandparents, like many Americans of their generation and region, were agriculturalists. They always had a huge vegetable garden and eggs from their own hens. They killed chickens and had a butcher process one of their animals every once in a while for more serious meat needs. Their cattle wandered open grassy fields, so their beef provided natural omega 3s. Except in a few special cases, they grew, cooked and ate their own food. Dinner might consist of  two salads, sliced tomatoes, green beans and extremely fresh chicken. For those of you with no agricultural past, just find a cookbook from 1930s or 1940s. There will be plenty of ideas. Alternately, explore the traditional, regional cuisines of other countries. There are traces of a long agricultural past in all such recipes.

Taking this idea to the grocery store is pretty simple. If it has a list of more than a couple of ingredients, there's a good chance it's not natural. It's definitely true if there are things on the list you don't recognize. Try to eat the outer part of the grocery store- the least processed foods you can find.

I know it's not the easiest thing to do. All of us need to succumb to the call of pizza delivery and takeout Chinese now and then. But find a pattern of cooking foods for the week to come. Prep everything on Sundays. Recycle items from one meal into several subsequent meals. The Internet is full of tips about how to do it. And here is a good article about how to avoid non-natural foods that may be lurking in your diet. With these tools in hand, maybe we can spark a revolution in the American diet that brings us back from the brink of a Wall-E-style future and restore our bodies to a normal, healthy state. At least I'd like to think it's possible.