Science / Medicine : American Diet: Tough Habit to Break
If you believe the style-page columnists, America is in the thick of the New Age of Food Consciousness. We’ve changed our food habits and preferences in dramatic ways, they tell us. Not only are we obsessed with eating more healthfully, we’re also becoming gastronomic sophisticates--Healthy Gourmets.
These are dizzying times, but while the food trendies get most of the attention, they don’t get the lion’s share of the shelf space.
Indeed, if you visit the average suburban supermarket or restaurant strip, you will confirm what food-marketing researchers have been insisting for more than 15 years: Despite all the hype, most people remain loyal to American Standard foods we’ve supposedly cut back on. Thus, a Gallup poll of dinner-time restaurant patrons several years ago found that 59% would order plain corn as their most likely side dish, while only 8% would order borderline-exotic zucchini vinaigrette. For the main course, 10 to 1 would opt for prime rib instead of blackened redfish.
While blackened redfish is pushing it, the majority also remains indifferent to far more serious trends. Even at the height of the 1989 Alar-pesticide-cyanide scare, 73% in one poll remained “completely or mostly confident” about supermarket food safety. Although just about everyone occasionally voices some worries, when it comes to shopping, cooking and eating, those who actually change their behavior rarely top a third of any sample, frequently less.
Despite all the advice to eat more fiber, more Americans do not eat much whole-wheat bread, fresh fruit, or broccoli--let alone radicchio. The cholesterol news notwithstanding, the burger remains the fast-food favorite and fried potatoes the most popular side dish. Fewer than half of us have even tried frozen yogurt.
Why, given all that we’ve heard about health and nutrition, have most Americans been so slow to change? What’s at the root of this recalcitrance?
For one thing, self-identity. Eating is not a purely pragmatic act done just to satisfy taste buds or nutritional needs--it’s loaded with social and emotional meanings. You are, after all, what you eat. This sentiment, behind some of the odder entries on chic Health Gourmet menus, works both ways. Flaunting a hard-guts bravado, some people may enjoy appearing indifferent to danger.
More pervasive is the feeling that healthy food probably tastes bad. According to nutritional anthropologist Norge Jerome of the University of Kansas Medical Center, many people distinguish between “food” and “nutrition.” Food should taste good, while nutrition is good for you but not much fun.
Other longer-running gender, ethnic and class patterns also play a part. On the whole, men tend to be less health-conscious, perhaps because diet-related professions--especially nutritional science and home economics--were feminized in the late 19th Century, thereby relegating them to marginal status in a patriarchal culture. Moreover, in many working-class and ethnic subcultures, women subordinate their own nutritional concerns to the tastes of their husbands and children.
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his book “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste,” further suggests that working-class people may be less likely than the more affluent to defer gratification--to eat salad rather than sirloin--because they have a more pessimistic appraisal of the future.
But the most obvious class variable is price. Healthy food is generally more expensive than the basic supermarket variety.
