Bon Appetit

Lately I’ve been wondering why there’s so much food around.  European friends and I were talking about that recently as we overfilled our trays at an all-you-can-eat buffet. One of us, his plate a veritable Everest of pork products––sausage links and patties, bacon, country ham—noted that, to the best of his well-traveled knowledge, the US was the only place that had all-you-can-eat buffets. I don’t know if this is a fact or not. It seems to me there must be stuff-yourself-to-the-gills restaurants elsewhere, but I haven’t found one.

 

A couple of weeks ago I was at a Home Depot and noticed that right next to the checkout lanes were multiple displays of candy bars and soft drinks. I’m sure they’ve been there all along, but it was the first time I really became aware of this oddity, and I wondered what had prompted the Home Depot powers-that-be to put them there. Well, duh, profit, obviously… I watched a somewhat overweight kid coax his mom into buying a Mars bar. And a pack of gum. And a little bag of cookies and I wondered, are we really hungry all the time in the land of plenty? Do we need to be chewing and swallowing constantly to fulfill our destiny? Is this what the Constitution promises when it says “pursuit of happiness?”

 

There’s food in gas stations, bookstores, Old Navy emporia, hardware stores, computer outlets. There are stacks of candy at my local nursery next to the rhododendrons, at my pharmacy, at the nearby big box store, and even the local dry cleaner has a small display of mints and Korean hard candies on his counter. The shops selling sporting goods also have racks of stuff, but the sales staff will tell you it’s really healthy, vegetarian, gluten free, and not the product of slave labor in Abyssinia. Course, it’s about five times as expensive as stuff found elsewhere

 

Meanwhile, we are facing explosive growth in the number of people diagnosed with type 2 diabetes (I am one), and almost two-thirds of the US population is overweight. America has the second highest percentage of obesity in the world (Mexico out-ate the US in 2013 and took first place.)

 

What’s interesting is the shift in points of view. A century ago, the rich folks were stout–they had more than enough to eat and did so with gusto—and the poorer people were thin, fed on a diet that often lacked essential protein and carbohydrates. This began to change following World War II with the advent of cheaper foods. Now, large segments of our present society subsists on fast foods of doubtful value. We no longer walk and burn calories and we’re inundated with offerings of cheap snacks everywhere.

I wonder where this is going to lead.
According to Forbes, “Almost one fifth of all deaths in the U.S. are associated with being overweight, according to a startling new report from Columbia University and the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation. And the kicker? For each consecutive birth year (in other words, the younger you are) the higher the death rate.
“In a study published in the August issue of the American Journal of Public Health, a team of researchers led by epidemiologist Ryan K. Masters looked at death records and health surveys for all adults for a 20-year period between 1986 and 2006. They found that 18.2 percent of all deaths were associated with carrying excess weight.
“This is three times higher than previous reports, which Ryan says relied on average obesity rates rather than specific data and failed to take into account that those who are obese often decline to take part in public health surveys.
“But the news could actually be even worse because the percentage of the population that’s overweight or obese increases every year, and is already considerably higher today than it was in 2006, the final year of data used in the study.”
Think about all this as you celebrate Thanksgiving, the annual celebration of excess, and tuck into the mounds of food before you.
Bon appétit!  
 
 

 

 

 

Stupid Eating

For the past 48 hours I have indulged in a binge of stupid eating. Let me explain.

Stupid eating is a deep winter affliction, occurring mostly from late January to March, when the days are short, overcast, brutally cold and largely useless.

It snowed here a couple of days ago, just a few inches but enough to render the area spastic. Schools close; the government hunkers down and hibernates like an overfed groundhog. People go a little crazy driving, and they hoard: orange juice, Bounty towels, milk and eggs and toilet paper.  The media screams. A couple of years ago, the Washington area was the victim of a snow-locaust (so clever!) and now every time a flake falls, the headlines holler. Have I mentioned that it is 15° outside, and that with the wind-chill factor, it feels like 14°?  And that I worry constantly that my 20-year-old furnace will die in the middle of the night, causing me to freeze to death in my sleep? All this leads to stupid eating.

I work from home. It’s a very nice, small home, I might add, built in the mid-60s when energy was cheap, and so the windows are single-panned and the doors drafty. In winter, a candle placed on a sill will flicker. I wear too many clothes. My office is my basement, cool in the spring and summer months but frigid otherwise. It’s there I write, I rewrite, I edit, I ponder the next page, create and destroy plot lines and characters, and generally have an excellent time, so excellent, in fact, that on occasion I will neither see nor speak to anyone during the day. Some people find this sad and somewhat alarming.  I do not. I don’t watch daytime TV; this is a morally reprehensible habit that can lead to brain-death. I vacuum and dust and polish and make sure the toilets are Tidy-Bowled. I sweep the kitchen three or four times a day. I do the laundry; I check to see what’s in the fridge, or the pantry, or the cabinet where I no longer keep a collection of one-pound bars of dark chocolate. The latter have been replaced by trail-mix in an utterly useless effort to cut down on calories. I decide a piece of cheese is well-earned and in order, perhaps with a slice of that multi-grained bread which looks much better than its taste, and the tiniest bit of Prosciutto ham. And some mustard, of course, to tie it all together. Stupid eating. It is the only thing to do when one is snowed in and inspiration has either run out, or is threatening to abscond if not given a treat.

Not that being homebound is a prerequisite. One reason for the obesity epidemic in America, or so I have read, is that seven out of 10 hardware stores carry food items. So do all service stations, Office Depots and Staples stores, pharmacies, Walmarts, Autozones, TJ Maxxes, bicycle shops and Toys-R-Us. We are awash in food, and bad-for-us food, at that. And over-eating, like all addictions, is neither a matter of low morality nor of self-control. We are programmed to eat. In times of stress or unhappiness, when we are lonely or frustrated or simply bored, we eat. We crave sugar, fat and salt, and the foods that offer such combinations are almost impossible to resist. Especially in winter.

On top of it all, I am somewhat of a food hoarder. Blame it on being a postwar child in Paris, France, when food was scarce. I believe in having many cans of soup in the cupboard, and at least four pounds of frozen fish-sticks and chicken nuggets in the fridge. It’s important to have enough supplies on hand--potatoes, carrots, vegetable stock--to make six quarts of boeuf bourguignon at a moment’s notice, or maybe a tasty bouillabaisse. This makes me feel safe in a cold and dangerous world. I eat stupidly because I am momentarily uninterested in doing anything else. Yesterday, for example, I spent five hours working on a book I have been commissioned to write, and a couple more hours on two books of my own.  I struggled with the dialog of a play I am writing. I ate another piece of cheese, the last ounces of some excellent home-made beef stew (with a dash of Indian spices, if you please), and two turkey breakfast-sausages from Costco. Also, a chorizo from the Latino deli. And a handful of trail-mix, in lieu of the missing chocolate.

The silliest part of all this is that I go to a gym five or six times a week to get rid of my excess poundage.

Both Aristotle and Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote of man as an essentially rational being. I completely disagree. We are irrational, bombastic, destruction-prone and wasteful. We foul our own nests, are prone to catastrophic miscalculations and have little respect for what we do not understand. And we stuff ourselves at every opportunity. Stupid eaters.

Glorious Food

To eat is a necessity. To eat intelligently is an art.  La Rochefoucauld

There is no love sincerer than the love of food. George Bernard Shaw

Supersize Me. Morgan Spurlock

In America, the best way to become invisible is to be fat.

In 2008, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the obesity rate among men was 32.2 percent and a slightly higher 35.5 percent for women.  The numbers were confirmed, then revised by the Center for Disease Control which, in 2010, estimated the rate had increased to 35.7 percent for adults, and remained at a steady 17 percent for American children.

We eat too much and we eat the wrong foods; we are enamored of salt, sugar and fat, and we don’t exercise nearly enough. We snack. Food is everywhere; it is a religion. There are more restaurants per capita in the United States than anywhere else in the world. In New York State alone, there are 17,461 fast food places and according to the US Department of Agriculture, the Empire State is considered one of the healthier areas, food-wise.  Not so are Vermont, Washington, DC, Maine, Montana and Rhode Island, which have more fast food restaurants per capita than any other states. (You can find out how many fast food restaurants are in your state by going to the USDA’s website, http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-01-28/strategy/30669674_1_fast-food-food-chains-food-restaurants.) The country is dotted with some 160,000 fast food restaurants that serve 50 million Americans daily and make $110 billion annually. Most, though not all, sell high-calorie, high-starch, high-carbohydrate, and low fiber foods made with corn syrup, and refined sugar and flour. The fact is, the way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000 but our desire for more—of everything—has stayed the same.

So here’s a question: Is obesity a disease, or is it a philosophy?

In a way, it’s amusing. In European literature and theater, obesity implied wealth and well-being. A family with abundant food on the table liked to display its affluence and attendant physiques and the fat bourgeois and his wife and children were often the object of ridicule both in print and on stage. Think Molière.

Now, in a similar and strange turn of fate that made rednecks grow their hair long, it is the poor who are fat while the rich eat less. And on the third Thursday of November, we all—wealthy and not—cheerfully celebrate a national day of gluttony.

But the fact is we have labeled obesity in its simplest form: overindulgence. In the Western world, and increasingly everywhere else, this is a trait that characterizes our way of life. We are nations of overindulgent consumers whose tastes for excess are not necessarily limited to food. Our obesity in all forms, far from being limited to the larder, guides our lives.

Perhaps this is the logical culmination of free enterprise. We are taught to never be satisfied with what we have; in many ways the American Dream is one of escaping a life of less for a life of more. We want homes bigger than the ones we grew up in, jobs with more responsibilities than our parents ever had, and salaries that would astound our forefathers.  We want more for less, and with food, this is a realizable ambition.

Orson Wells was right. Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.