In his new book, the Japanese American peach farmer unearths his family’s painful, hidden history and explores its impact on his identity.
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January 13, 2011
Working with people as a nutritionist, I’m often met with resistance. I try to explain making healthful food choices without using trigger words like organic, sustainable, or even local. “When I hear the word organic I think of Birkenstock-wearing hippies in Cambridge, Massachusetts or Berkeley, California,” one of my clients told me recently. Other clients have referred to whole, organic foods as “yuppie food.” There’s no doubt that food choice and diet is an indicator of class and culture, but what perplexes me is this notion that eating a diet of processed, sugary junk foods is what the “real” Americans eat.
According to food historian Felipe Fernandez-Arsmesto, food has always been a marker of class and rank in any particular society. He writes that, “Food became a social differentiator at a remote, undocumented moment when some people started to command more food resources than others.” He goes on to write that, “Class differentiation starts with the crudities of basic economics. People eat the best food they can afford: the preferred food of the rich therefore becomes a signifier of social aspirations.”
But this isn’t true in modern day America. The preferred food of the rich is now considered elitist and scoffed at by many Americans. In fact, there is data to suggest that even though many Americans can afford higher quality foods, they chose to eat cheaper and less nutritious foods. Jane Black and Brent Cunningham recently wrote about this in the Washington Post: “Many in this country who have access to good food and can afford it simply don’t think it’s important. To them, food has become a front in America’s culture wars, and the crusade against fast and processed food is an obsession of ‘elites,’ not ‘real Americans.’”
I would argue that the advertising agencies that work hand-in-hand with the big players of industrial food should take much of the blame for this change. Within the span of three short generations, Americans have come to accept industrial food as their mainstay—not only have they accepted it, they defend it like they’d defend the American flag as a symbol of their patriotism and allegiance with “real” America.
But there’s some perverse logic at work here and it strikes me as vaguely similar to the Stockholm syndrome—a paradoxical psychological phenomenon in which hostages express adulation and positive feelings towards their captors. While Americans are not experiencing a physical captivity, they are deeply mired in a psychological condition in which they’re captive to industrial food products and the corresponding ideologies that are ultimately harming them. Call it the American Fast Food Syndrome.
Part of the problem is that most Americans lack the knowledge that industrial food is a recent development in the history of agriculture. While human beings have been cultivating food for more than 10,000 years, industrial agriculture, as we know it today, has only been around for about 60 years. To many Americans, industrial food is simply food and they assume this is the way it has always been—Americans have all but forgotten that food might be the product of a farm and not a factory. I think it’s safe to say we’ve reached peak indoctrination: two out of three Americans is obese or overweight and one out of five 4-year-olds is obese. This is more than just a coincidence as we embrace our American industrial food diet wholeheartedly.
The fact that food advertising is a completely unregulated force doesn’t help. Advertisers spend billions of dollars on campaigns to make us want to buy their products. In her book Diet for a Hot Planet, Anna Lappé writes of a sly technique advertisers often use, “The food industry…is skilled at inoculation messaging, and part of its success comes from the ‘we’re one of you’ pitch.” She adds later, “The message, whether from Perdue, Nestle, or Cargill, is that these companies are like us; they care about the same things we do. It’s a message that forms another strand of the inoculation strategy.”
This “we’re one of you” ideology coupled with the food product’s corresponding affordability is slick marketing at its best.
You may remember a similar strategy used by Sarah Palin and John McCain in their 2008 Presidential campaign. Palin’s constant invocation of Joe the Plumber, Joe Six Pack, and soccer moms was the same “we’re one of you” rhetoric. Palin worked this angle again recently when she came running to the defense of the “real” Americans as she personally gave out cookies to elementary school students in her effort to stop the food police from depriving children of their god-given right to eat sugar-laden, processed foods.
These messages, from advertisers and politicians alike, are drowning out a sensible approach to healthy eating and improved quality of life for many Americans. I know that when people stop eating processed foods and start cooking whole foods, it’s nothing short of a revelation. My clients experience a transformation when they cut out junk foods—they lose weight, improve chronic health conditions, and feel better than they ever have before. Unfortunately, many Americans who really need guidance on healthy eating and cooking don’t have it. What they do have is a constant barrage of advertising for cheap industrial foods paired with the all-American rhetoric of Sarah Palin and her ilk.
Until all Americans see industrial food for what it really is, educating on healthier food options will remain a cultural battle. We can blame specific ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup or trans-fats indefinitely, but for a large portion of Americans their cultural identity is tied up in Big Macs, fries, and Cokes. As long as the food industry continues to succeed at imbuing their products with a particular sense of American authenticity, and as long as Americans continue to buy this image, while rejecting the organic, sustainable, and local food movement as part of some liberal agenda, we will remain a country in the midst of a dire health and food crisis.
This article is part of a regular column by nutrition expert Kristin Wartman, in which she examines food, nutrition, and the way the industrial food industry affects our food system and our health.
March 23, 2023
In his new book, the Japanese American peach farmer unearths his family’s painful, hidden history and explores its impact on his identity.
March 20, 2023
March 9, 2023
I am a low-to-middle income woman with two children. Between us, my husband and I make around $40K a year to support our family of 4. I live in New England, where the small and local movement is huge. My husband and I have chosen to eat as locally and organic as possible, even though it is more expensive. Despite the expense, nothing will ever get me to believe that strawberries sprayed with pesticide or processed food is somehow OK to eat. I know better, and I am not an elite academic from Cambridge (although, I DO wear Birkenstock, but that is because I am German!).
Rather, we feel a deep value is added to our lives by consuming food grown by our neighbors. It builds community and a sense of place -- things I never felt when buying Frito chips or GMO tomatoes at the mega grocery store.
Come on over to this side, people! The food tastes better!
It's the weirdest thing to return to my urban life, where there are four year-round farmers' markets within 30 minutes of me. In one week I speak to more people who actually work in the fields than any of my friends back in "the heartland" do! I don't understand how things got so strange.
"Traditional" ways of eating? Old-fashioned? Wholesome? Healthy? Non-corporate? Anybody have any good ideas?
By the way, there's an interesting related piece by Jane Black in the WAshington Post called "The new front in culture wars: food"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/26/AR2010112603494.html
Imagine if the Birkenstock crowd stops using the word "sustainable" and started using the word "profitable". I know, I know, it goes against your hippie programming, but hey, "sustainable" cues all sorts of images for a lot of farmers, for better or for worse. Everyone loved Joel Salatin in Food Inc., but they failed to mention that aside from healing the land and producing good food, he's also a millionaire.
Here's what's been irking me:
When it's my turn to host "treat day" at work, I usually have my bag from Whole Foods filled with stuff (now, mind you, it's usually the processed stuff from Whole Foods because I've already tried bringing in local cheese from the market and cherry tomatoes from my backyard - was not a hit). The comment I get is "Whole Foods is so expensive"... Yet, these people are driving Escalades and carrying Iphones?!?
That, or scoffs from a former friend who insists her weekly manicure is really important yet thinks it's riduculous to even consider buying fresh produce because it's so expensive and she doesn't know how to cook it.
So, as I see it, the question is - how do we get people to see that learning to cook and buy good food is a priority, worthy of extra expense? In other words, what makes people spend so much more on a car, or on a cell phone, when cheaper options are available? It's either a perception about quality or aspirations towards something better.
Ever since I came to that revelation, I quit talking about the importance of eating whole ingredients and not using pesticides when people ask about my food buying habits. Instead, I say things like: I can't believe how much better cilantro tastes when it's right out of my back yard. Or fresh food from the farmers market really does taste a lot better than the grocery store's produce. All of those things are true but rarely the main talking points.
but out in the real world, if we really want to get things done and change minds we must begin to detach ourselves from that identity of sustainable food only being a trendy,liberal, elitist, yuppy concern.
A lot of people eat food that isn't very healthy -- and a lot of them are on whatever side of a political spectrum you may be interested in. Unless you're saying that all communists eat only free-range-cruelty-free-organic fern tips and all monarchists eat nothing but canned fat with sugar sauce? Seems to me that a lot of people who voted for Obama eat a lot of unhealthy food. I sprout seeds, make my own 100% whole grain breads, do lacto-fermentation of vegetables, eat sustainable small fish (sardines, mackerel), and loads of leafy green cruciferous vegetables, so according to your thesis I must be of the same political persuasion as you are, right? Uhm... maybe you shouldn't bet any scared money on that.
I encourage people to eat healthy food and save a lot of money while doing so. I assert that eating healthy is cheaper than eating unhealthy. I buy organic chickens and wheat berries. I advocate for healthy eating. What I do NOT advocate for is making it illegal for people to choose to live differently from how I live.