03.01.07
Denial, It’s What’s For Dinner!
I’ve been reading, here and there, about various efforts to force restaurants — primarily of the quasi-fast-food inexpensive chain eatery sort, like Pizzeria Uno or TGIFriday’s or The Cheesecake Factory — to identify the calorie counts and other nutritional information of their menu items in their menus. Citing items which contain whopping numbers of calories per restaurant serving, and enough fat to make the ghost of my gallbladder scream like a banshee just reading about it, these dietary watchdogs seem convinced that if only the nutritional information were more readily available, Americans would “make better nutritional choices,” for which we are meant to read “choose not to eat these things.”
The dual bogeymen of obesity and heart disease, natch, are the poster children for these campaigns. Clearly, just as all lung disease is caused by smoking cigarettes (and has nothing to do with, say, industrial or automotive air pollution, toxic chemicals used in household furnishings and surfaces, or even genetic predisposition), all obesity and heart disease are due to crappy, greasy, oversalted, oversugared, deepfried platefuls of Generic USAian Processed Food Substances. And not, say, to some combination of what people eat, how people incorporate their eating lives into the rest of their lives, what sorts of physical activities they engage in and how much, the tastes and other eating sensations they’ve been enculturated to find pleasing, their particular genetics, and simple luck of the draw.
I’m not saying this to defend the TGIRubyAppleUnoCheesecakeTuccis of the world, or dump on the folks who happily eat their food. I’m not even saying this to criticize the aims of the people — many of them with medical affiliations to the billion-dollar bariatrics (obesity) market — who want to improve the availability of nutritional information in these places. I’m all for people knowing what they’re eating, and I am all for people eating whatever the hell they want.
The reason I raise the issue at all is because it strikes me that everyone concerned, restaurant chains, chain-restaurant diners, dietary activists, and all, are both suffering from, and failing to take into account the potency of, sheer willful American-style denial.
You know what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the denial that lets restaurant chain management claim that because they offer salads, they’re in the clear as far as offering “healthy” eating options, even though your average restaurant-chain salad, laden with cheese and/or meat and/or the heavy creamy dressings so beloved of such places, is about as “healthy,” by the standards typically used to assess what constitutes a “healthy” dish, as a Snickers bar and some shredded carrots wrapped in a lettuce leaf.
Yes, this denial is partly willful failure to perceive the distance between genuinely healthy eating and the stuff these restaurants exist to sell. It’s also calculated marketing of things that these restaurants know will sell, the “but we’re only selling the stuff our customers want!” cliche. Handwaving, and the careful use of words like “fresh” on menus and images of crisp, dewy vegetables and fruits on advertisements, go a long way, marketing-wise, to making sure that the people at the customer end, as well as the customers themselves, buy into the corporate management’s assertions that their products are “healthy.”
And as far as the corporate folks are concerned, that’s just fine. The customer ultimately chooses what to eat, or not. They’re just trying to offer choices. It’s not their fault if what the customer seems to enjoy is stuff that isn’t very good for you if you eat too much of it too often.
Which is, of course, the next level of denial. Most Americans — myself sometimes included, although for reasons having partly to do with health issues like allergies and partly to do with economics and partly to do with food snobbery, I have become a lot more aware and careful about this — eat less well than they could.
By “eating well” here I don’t mean being a crazy food Nazi and monitoring your every mouthful for maximal nutrition or minimal calories or carbs or fat grams or whatever the hell it is this week that you’re not supposed to eat. I mean eating good, nutritious, wholesome, tasty food that gives your body all the things it needs and not too much of the stuff it doesn’t, and while that’s different for everyone, for the human animal generally it seems to mean a fairly large amount of vegetable matter and grain food, with some high-protein food in there on a regular basis, and some sweet things now and then for the fun that’s in them. (Now-obligatory shout-out to Michael Pollan’s recent “Unhappy Meals” piece in the NYT Magazine, which if you haven’t read, you should.)
However. We tell ourselves, assisted ably by our national mythos of America as Land of Plenty, by “eat your dinner, children are starving in Bangladesh,” by the reassuring presence of fortified foods on the shelves and governmentally-mandated nutritional information boxes on packages and innumerable articles and books and TV shows about things most of us haven’t got the training to understand like amino acids and vitamins and antioxidants and phytoestrogens, that of course we eat well… we’re Americans. And indeed, we are fortunate that we have the luxury to have this mythos be so operational in our lives. Worrying about whether you have enough of the right kind of antioxidants in your food is a pretty darn cushy problem compared to worrying about whether or not you’ve got enough food so that you don’t starve to death.
Speaking of starving, too, there is that portion of our makeup to contend with. Because we are animals, on some level our brains believe that as long as we have a plentiful supply of food, we are eating well. This is particularly true with high-fat food: if you look at the foods traditionally eaten by peoples living north of the Arctic Circle, you will find that above all, high-fat foods are prized, for the simple reason that calories equal body heat and body heat equals survival. Our lives are, for the most part, nowhere near so physically demanding as those of, say, seal hunters or reindeer herders. Or, indeed, of even our fairly recent ancestors, who did not have nifty modern conveniences like cars, central heating, and household appliances, all of which substantially reduce the caloric burden we require to survive. Thing is, you can’t simply rewire an organism that has for millennia regarded high-fat, high-calorie food as a desirable advantage. Neither my DNA nor yours, neither my backbrain nor yours, give a sweet goddamn that they don’t really have to worry about keeping themselves warm through the body’s own thermogenetic capabilities all winter long. It doesn’t matter to that part of us that thanks to the wonders of the technologies our big sexy monkey brains have come up with, the job of keeping us alive until suppertime can be accomplished quite nicely on a handful of granola and a banana. They’d like a nice juicy cheeseburger, thanks just the same.
And of course, we have also evolved this distinctively American (or so it seems to me) tendency toward buy-now-pay-later eating: we have made eating, in our minds, into a sort of economic activity. If we “overspend” our budget of calories now we can “work it off” later on at the gym, or through some bout of insane (and thus almost inevitably short-lived) crash dieting. Or so we tell ourselves. Whether we do it or not is another matter entirely, and whether it actually works that way, in terms of our biology, is yet one more.
To put it another, shorter way, there are a lot of different forces — biological promptings, social cues, and psychological urges — that tend to make it very easy for many of us to eat less well than we might, and to eat meals that are very imbalanced in the direction of things that are not, in excess, all that good for us. (I’m not even going to get into the economic issues, or the history of the corporate food culture, or why and how things have gotten to the stage where eating well (as I define it) on a regular basis is now beyond the economic reach of many people. Another rant for another time.)
At the same time, we’re not stupid. We know full well, if we stop to think about it, that no, most of these meals are not healthy. You don’t need a professional nutritionist to know that a meal of, let’s say (looking idly at the T.G.I. Friday’s menus available online) Crispy Green Bean Fries, a bacon cheeseburger, fries, and a (full-sugar, full-caffeine, why not get your money’s worth if you’re paying for uppers?) Coke is probably not something you really want to think about in terms of its number of fat grams or calories.
Which is it, right there: people know this kind of food is high-calorie and high-fat. That’s not news. But they don’t want to have that be the deciding, or limiting, factor in whether they eat it. So it isn’t. It simply isn’t. It’s called denial.
There are excellent compelling reasons that it happens, and not too many that are nearly so compelling as to regularly cause people to override the denial. Clearly the fear of becoming fat isn’t enough to do it. Nor is the fear of heart disease. Hell, even the fear of feeling bloated, gassy, queasy, or getting diarrhea — all extremely common reactions to eating too much high-fat food — isn’t enough to keep people from doing it, and those sensations set in a whole heck of a lot quicker, relative to the moment of eating, than weight gain or a heart attack.
Sure, it’s counterintuitive. But human beings are perverse creatures and what we do is often that way. In all seriousness, I know a number of people with substantial allergies to cow’s milk who will, knowing full well that it will make them feel ill if they do it, eat ice cream with gay abandon right up until the moment that they have to run to the bathroom. I used to be one of them, before my dairy allergies got worse. Only when things got to the point that the negative repercussions created such misery that I wasn’t willing to put up with them any more to get to that sweet, sweet butterfat did I finally manage to break off what had been a lifelong love affair with ice cream.
This is where the other kind of denial comes in: the denial, on the part of the researchers and campaigners who are pushing for transparency in the menus of these table-service chains, that frankly, It’s Always More Complicated. Putting calorie and fat-gram counts in menus isn’t going to slow that many people down. They’re on packaged foods everywhere already. I honestly don’t see it putting a big dent in potato chip sales. The forces at play are a lot more complex, multivalent, and quirky than that.
Me, I wouldn’t mind seeing restaurants selling unitized, corporatized, pre-quantified meals having to list their ingredients and their nutritional information, if only because it might — and I emphasize might — make some of them come a little cleaner about what they’re feeding people, and be a little more honest about the quality of their ingredients and their emphasis on using ingredients that are actually food, and not the sometimes dubious products of food science on which such restaurants lean so heavily. I do think that some people would appreciate having the information. I know that I would, because finding out the hard way that I just ate something that contained a dairy product when I didn’t expect it to is really not so much fun. But in all honesty, I rather doubt, all other things being equal, that knowing how many calories are in that club sandwich is going to make me skinny or reprieve me from whatever heart disease may conceivably lurk in my future. Nor is it going to do so for anyone else.
On the other hand, not being in denial about the ways that what I indiviually eat might affect my individual biology and my own personal health? That’s done me quite a lot of good, thanks. Giving up dairy products for good was not easy for me, but without question it has produced an enormous improvement in my overall health. Learning to cook and eat a lot of Chinese and Middle Eastern dishes, with small amounts of meat and large amounts of vegetables, has similarly made me feel better and improved various aspects of my overall clinical health. These are things that I discovered, through trial and error and over time, were what this particular human animal requires in order to be the most efficient and happy troublemaker it can.
But, I hasten to note that I think that’s not a process that any amount of white-coated finger-waggling or posting calorie counts in recipes is ever going to produce. For me, or anyone.