Questions like these come up every time I give a talk, teach a class, or go out to dinner. For a long time, they puzzled me. I thought: Doesn’t everyone know what a healthy diet is? And why are people so worried about what they eat? I just didn’t get it. For me, food is one of life’s greatest pleasures, and I have been teaching, writing, and talking about the joys of eating as well as the more cultural and scientific aspects of food for nearly thirty years. My work at a university means that I do research as well as teach, and for the past decade or so I have been studying the marketing of food and its effects on health. Everyone eats. This turns the growing, shipping, preparing, and serving of food into a business of titanic proportions, worth close to a trillion dollars a year in the United States alone. I wrote about the health consequences of the business of food -- unintended as those consequences may be -- in two books:
'Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition' and
'Health and Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism.'Since writing them, I have spent much of my professional and social life talking to students, health professionals, academics, government officials, journalists, community organizers, farmers, school officials, and business leaders -- as well as friends and colleagues -- about the social and political aspects of food and nutrition. It hardly matters who I am talking to. Everyone goes right to what affects them. Their questions are personal. Everyone wants to know what the politics of food mean for what they personally should eat. Should they be worried about hormones, pesticides, antibiotics, mercury, or bacteria in foods? Is it acceptable to eat sugars, artificial sweeteners, or trans fats, and, if so, how much? What about foods that are raw, canned, irradiated, or genetically engineered? Do I recommend calcium or any other supplement? Which is the best choice of vegetables, yogurt, meat, or bread?
Eventually I came to realize that, for many people, food feels nothing at all like a source of pleasure; it feels more like a minefield. For one thing, there are far too many choices; about 320,000 food and beverage products are available in the United States, and an average supermarket carries 30,000 to 40,000 of them. As the social theorist Barry Schwartz explains in The Paradox of Choice, this volume of products turns supermarket and other kinds of shopping into "a complex decision in which [you] are forced to invest time, energy, and no small amount of self-doubt, anxiety, and dread." Bombarded with too many choices and conflicting messages, as everyone is, many people long for reassurance that they can ignore the "noise" and just go back to enjoying the food they eat. I began paying closer attention to hints of such longings in what people were telling me. I started asking my friends how they felt about food. Their responses were similar. Eating, they told me, feels nothing less than hazardous. And, they said, you need to do something about this. One after another told me things like this:
• You seem to think we have the information we need, but a lot of us are clueless and have no idea of how to eat.
• When I go into a supermarket, I feel like a deer caught in headlights. Tell me what I need to know so I can make reasonable choices, and quickly.
• I do not feel confident that I know what to eat. It’s all so confusing.
• You tell me how to do this. I don’t believe all those other people. They all seem to have axes to grind.
• Tell us how you eat.
