Due to the their rarity or cost of production, some foods used to be eaten exclusively by the wealthy, but industrial agriculture has dramatically leveled the playing field. Humans, though, are often keen to distinguish themselves, and so the emphasis has shifted from the exclusivity of foods to their supposed “health” benefits. In essence, the rarity has gotten more rare, the distance has increased, and the rituals of production have become more elaborate, all in the name of rare nutrients and compounds that contribute to “health”.
As much as we like to hate on mass production and modern agriculture, improvements in technology and supply chains have had an equalizing effect on society, such that the foods of past elites have become quite obtainable by the average person today. If you ever feel like cooking a juicy steak, you can find one for $10-15 at the grocery store, rather than waiting for a once-per-year festival when you splurge your savings. I remember investigating the price of spices in medieval Europe last year, to find that a months’ supply of pepper – however much that was total – cost nearly 2 days worth of wages, and it really puts life today into perspective. For all of our modern anxieties over pesticides, metabolism, and overall health, we are rarely concerned about food poisoning, pestilence, and famine because we generally don’t need to, and what a blessing. The biggest complaint these days is the price of eggs, which makes me laugh.
I do not have such a rosy view of the past as I once did. It is easy to long for America’s bucolic history, fed by paintings of the countryside and stills of farm life, but those were days when most people worked in agriculture because it was the only way to feed the population, but it was not easy work, and bad years could have devastating consequences. Food quality was not guaranteed, and if you go back far enough, infectious disease wasn’t properly understood. It was only in the 1800s that people realized surgeries were significantly more successful if surgeons washed their hands before operating. Nutritional deficiencies were ill understood as well. That people die “early” in their 60s today is still a tragedy, but not all too long ago, it was uncommon to make it that far; moreover, death in childhood was much more common.
So…before we get too bitter about modern lifestyle diseases, let’s maybe take a moment to appreciate how great life has become, such that we even have the luxury of caring.
That all being said, I don’t think anybody is particularly comforted by big chemical manufacturers hiding evidence that their factory workers were getting sick and dying due to exposure to high concentrations of novel chemicals. I don’t think anybody is particularly excited to develop heart disease in their 50s, or to spend most of their adult lives carrying dozens of extra pounds, or otherwise suffering from maladies of brain fog or unnecessary pain.
It is not at all clear to me that following some “perfect” diet will get you to age 100. Most (though not all) centenarians seem to follow a largely plant-based diet, and that is absolutely worth something, but it’s not to say that if you do, too, you are guaranteed to make it that far. As such, it strikes me that the modern obsession with health doesn’t have nearly the ROI people think it does, although as I argued in my last post, that’s because diet obsession is a psychological phenomenon, manifested sociologically. The physiological affects are real, but typically only secondary from the perspective of motivation. Numerous diets can be beneficially healthy, but people often choose to associate with one over another as a part of identity selection.
This makes it all the more noteworthy that the only people wealthy enough to obsess over food are at least in the middle class, having sufficient excess income to afford “health food” products sold at a premium. It’s not clear that all “cheap” foods are unhealthy, but the culture seems to be heavily predisposed to believe so, and I think this is a huge tragedy.
Let’s start with produce. As I understand it, after world world 2, there was a huge push to re-orient the nation’s chemical factories used during the war toward civilian applications, and so we saw a huge influx of chemicals into consumer products. In the 60s and 70s, this manifested in the use of chemical fertilizers for growing crops, as well as pesticides to preserve them, and farmers went wild with these, since they decreased crop loss to insects and infection, and moreover shortened the production process and allowed unimaginable decreases in total cost for end consumers. The problem was, nobody had any idea how bad these chemicals would be, both for the environment, and for humans, and so people came to push back heavily as studies came out revealing the dangers.
None of this really crystalized until the 2000s (or so?), which kicked off the “organic” movement, emphasizing a more sustainable approach to agriculture, and banned the use of synthetic chemicals in order to use the “USDA Organic” label. The book “Grain by Grain” talks a lot about this, and is a pretty interesting read. Nonetheless, because of the loss of efficiency, it typically costs more to produce things this way, and so paying extra to “buy organic” became a common middle-class tactic to “achieve health”. There is a lot of missing data on these pesticides and herbicides, and even much-maligned chemicals such as glyphosate are arguably not as bad as they are made out to be, but it has already become quite entrenched in the culture that paying more money to avoid chemicals or perceived “adulterations” increases the healthiness of one’s diet, and this is ground zero for how elitism has crept in.
One thing I have noticed is a growing scorn for cheap foods. Bananas – despite their turbulent history and politics – are typically only maligned for being “too sugary”, just as paleo and low-carb diets have come to disdain wheat of any kind for decades. Hatred of oats is on the rise, too, and several YouTube channels I watch have addressed oats recently because they’ve received so many requests to do so. Instead, you see people advocating for expensive, non-wheat flours such as almond, cassava, etc., a general hatred of frequently-used “cheap” seed oils, a preference for more-expensive organic produce, and even the Carnivore diet encouraging people to eat 2 pounds of ground beef per day, which probably costs about $10 per person, per fucking day, at its cheapest, probably double that for organic beef. I don’t at all deny that these diets are making health claims around food, and are advocating for what they claim to be healthier, but I also can’t shake the feeling that something else is going on here, since there is no law of the universe that states that cheap food is by nature unhealthy. It almost feels like a war on the poor, but because it’s “health” related, it lends the air of legitimacy for snobs to look down on people who can’t afford “the correct” diet. It no doubt has made some people rich, for better or worse.
Don’t ask questions, just buy product!
To be completely fair, one of the easiest ways to make food more affordable is to cut corners. And this, I think, is where the idea that cheap food is unhealthy comes from. But as I’ve talked about before, the type of food generally has a greater effect on price than the quality of food, such that “cheap” bananas really aren’t bad for you, at least not even remotely in the sense that “cheap” bread can be bad for you, since bread is a composite food, through which small adulterations can have a compounding effect on quality. Most supermarket bread bears no resemblance to real bread, and that’s where “cheap” becomes a problem. Moreover, “organic” chicken nuggets are going to cost a heck of a lot of money, but people mistake these as being healthy [though hey, I like chicken nuggets sometimes, too][meat + seed oils + carbohydrates = offend everyone!]
Now, before I go too far down this rabbit hole, I also want to state that buying more expensive foods is not inherently wrong, either. Even though there is often no clear, 100% link between specific pesticides and, say, cancer, there is a growing awareness that many of these chemicals are generally bad for the body and the environment. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to avoid these chemicals, even if for no other reason than that we sometimes DON’T know how they affect the body. However, it seems a lot of studies suggest that eating non-organic produce is still immensely beneficial, and likely outweighs any potential ill-effects of pesticide residue, which typically only survives on the food in absolutely minuscule amounts. Even then, though, while I would defend people not spending extra on organic produce, it’s often only slightly more expensive. That I can buy a large cylinder of organic oats for $6 leaves me hard-pressed to complain it’s a whole $2 more expensive than a cylinder of non-organic oats at $4. I suppose there might be some people for whom every single dollar counts, but compared to the price of rent, I don’t think anybody cares about $2. Of course, if you don’t want to buy organic oats, I’m not here to judge you, either.
The other way that elitism has taken over these diet trends in through the introduction of exotic “super foods”. There is this weird, immensely interesting discontent with the North American diet, in which local and/or native foods are perceived to be lacking. Perhaps growing discontent with society fuels this at a subconscious level, but food companies go scouring across the globe for exotic ingredients they run a few quick studies on, then pay a marketing firm a billion dollars (or whatever) to pump up as the next miracle cure. Strawberries and blueberries are blase, and aren’t we still unhappy? – but how about acai berries, from the amazon! Oooh, aaah! Quinoa didn’t really hit the American diet until the 2000s, when it was touted as a kind of superfood, an anti-grain grain from the Andes (because, you know, grains are the devil, unless they’re from far away). Oooh, aaah! I can only imagine the Andean farmers: “Those Americans are dumbasses. Let’s sell as much of this as we can!”
To be fair, our supermarkets have never had a greater selection of foods, and I think that is generally a good thing. Variety is good, and apparently good for the intestines, too. But it all comes at a price, and it’s often steep. And sometimes the message to the poor is: “unless you can afford these foods, you are unhealthy“. And that’s not right.
Because I have more money than I have intelligence, I broke down and bought the bag of acai powder I mentioned several posts ago. In my defense, I don’t think of acai as a superfood, it’s just an interesting berry I’ve never tried before, and I wanted to buy some kind of whole berry powder to test with my oatmeal. But it was like $24 for 4oz, not even the 8oz I originally kept thinking it was. The taste isn’t impressive, either, at least not in its powdered form. Moreover, whenever you see it in a frozen smoothie mix, the mix is exorbitantly expensive, which is odd because the smoothies I make come out to be quite cheap, but then again, I buy my ingredients separately. Some people pay this much for stuff because they’re convinced it’s better for them, but I suppose that all depends on what “better” means to you. For what it’s worth, I think you can safely skip acai. For the same price, or less, you could easily buy a perfectly functional bread machine from a thrift store and start cranking out some real bread loaves with minimal effort, instead.
Of course, the biggest challenge is that while it’s entirely possible to eat healthily on a low-income, especially if you avoid composite foods, the tradeoff is often the price you pay in time for preparation, which you might not have if you have kids or you work a second job. Boiling beans for 1.5 hours often isn’t in the works. I don’t have answers to these challenges. But I really don’t think the answer is 2 pounds of ground beef per day, either. Ugh.
I have a general rule I’ve been trying to follow for awhile, which is that it should not take more than 30 minutes to prepare a meal. That’s not to say there aren’t some really tasty meals that take longer to make, it’s only to say that there is no law of the universe that states only meals that take a long time to prepare can be tasty and healthy. Personally, my super simple burritos taste better to me than Qdoba or Chipotle. If only you knew how not-fancy they are, you might not believe me, and I wouldn’t either, but I honestly do prefer mine 90% of the time. The hardest part about them is cooking the ground chicken, which takes 15 minutes and maybe lasts 3-5 meals, and maybe a separate 15 minutes to cook the tortillas after heating the cast iron skillet for 10 minutes, which makes 12 tortillas, but I rarely make both at the same time (and now that I think of it, they actually make packs of 18, so maybe I should start buying those). I guess my whole wheat hamburger buns take almost 2 hours to make, but the vast majority of that time is hands-off, and a dozen buns will typically last me several weeks. I guess I prefer prepping ingredients separately, as opposed to all-at-once, and that’s a strategy for not spending too much time making food, but still, every 10 minutes beyond 30 it takes to prepare a meal halves the probability I will actually make it. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
What’s your ROI? What are you hoping to get out of caring for you health? What nutrition is available to you? What nutrition is reasonable? I think we’re surrounded by healthy food. Fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, even decently affordable meats, if you don’t go too crazy over them. But as always, it’s caveat emptor, and be careful of what people try to push on you. Nobody is pounding down acai smoothies and making it clean and easy to age 100. Stop it. Get some help.