Two Stories about American Food

Toast or cereal? Pop-Tarts or fruit? Every day starts with a decision. For a few at the crossroads of history, like Rosa Parks, a single action is defining. For the rest of us, life is comprised of numerous little decisions that add up to something significant. Culture is constituted both by rare, big choices and common, ordinary activities. Either way, we all play a part in constructing society. And for that reason, the way we start each day matters.

Each meal is a moral statement. What other elemental, biological act involves such a public expression about our-selves and our relationship with the world? What we put in our mouths literally shapes who we are. We are what we eat. But we are also how we eat: the content and process of our consumption help define us.

Eating recklessly has consequences. But consuming consciously is no simple matter. Issues of health, nutrition, sustainability, labor, politics, profits, availability, affordability, taste, and religious observance together constitute a kind of culinary maze that has become known as The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The title of Michael Pollan’s excellent book highlights one part of the problem.

We members of a species that can eat many different plants and animals have enormous flexibility that constitutes an internal dilemma. But the external context is highly varied for humans: some who live in abundance have too many choices; some who live in scarcity have too few.

With that in mind, there are two stories about food worth pondering: one ugly and one beautiful. The ugly story is old, familiar, and powerful. The beautiful one is new, fresh, and inconclusive. For a lot of us, these two stories are in tension. But we must decide which will guide us through the moral maze of eating.

The Ugly Story

First, the ugly one. The logic of the capitalist market has pushed beyond the appropriate boundaries of the economic sphere to every part of society. There is little time when Americans are not thinking about their jobs, paychecks, portfolios, shopping, or consumption. The result for some is abundance, which leads to other kinds of less acknowledged problems, including workaholism, overscheduling, anxiety, stress, marital disruption, narcissism, and waste. For others, this expansive market culture results in familiar problems of scarcity, which ripple throughout their lives. Recent research suggests that material scarcity involves such a heavy psychological burden that it generally leads to intellectual and emotional scarcity. Ironically, in the most prosperous country in human history—one that produces and consumes more calories than we collectively need—some 49 million Americans do not have a reliable source of healthy food, let alone abundant options.

The ugly story is constantly polished for our consumption. We are inundated by the efforts of savvy advertisers who know that reaching young people is a winning strategy. American children annually view some 40,000 advertisements, Juliet Schor estimates in Born to Buy, and the average first grader can identify 200 brands. It works. “I love Pillsbury!” my daughter exclaimed when she was seven. Although generally a healthy eater, this bright kid, who is now twelve, remains a devoted disciple of the doughboy.

Hermann Dittrich / Arif Qazi

Children in low-income families face the same consumer pressures as affluent kids. In the absence of fresh produce or sound medical care, however, the effects of such pressures related to food are inordinately damaging—not least because the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, commonly described as “food stamps”) was reduced by some $8 billion through the Agricultural Act of 2014. This same Farm Bill continues the longstanding corn subsidies that brought us high-fructose corn syrup and other processed foods that contribute to our nation’s obesity epidemic.

In the ugly story, the value of food is based on whether you can get people to buy it, not whether it serves a human need for nutrition, or even taste. “Those on the left backed by NGOs will say that access to air is a human right,” Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck declared in a moment of candor. “However, oxygen is just like anything else...