The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change

by Bee Wilson

For most people across the world, life is getting better but diets are getting worse. This is the bittersweet dilemma of eating in our times.

good food – good in every sense, from flavour to nutrition – used to be the test by which we judged the quality of life. A good life without good food should be a logical impossibility.

We are the first generation to be hunted by what we eat.

Since the birth of farming ten thousand years ago, most humans haven’t been hunters, but never before have we been so insistently pursued by our own food supply. The calories hunt us down even when we are not looking for them.

As things stand, our culture is far too critical of the individuals who eat junk foods and not critical enough about the corporations who profit from selling them.

The problem isn’t just that some people are overfed and others are underfed, lacking enough basic calories to ward off gnawing hunger (though that remains a real and brutal problem). The new difficulty is that billions of people across the globe are simultaneously overfed and undernourished: rich in calories but poor in nutrients.

‘There are so many myths about food,’ Imamura says. One of the myths he refers to is the notion that there is such a thing as a perfectly healthy diet.

The calories available to the average American increased from 3,100 per day in 1950 to around 3,900 by the year 2000 – around twice as much daily energy as most people need, depending on their activity levels. Put another way, to avoid over-eating in today’s food environment, most of us would need to reject half of our allotted calories. Every day. This is not impossible but nor is it easy, given that it is human nature to eat whatever’s available.

We are living in a world of perpetual feast but with genes, minds and culture that are still formed by the memory of a scarce food supply.

With certain exceptions, our bodies simply do not register the calories from liquids in the same way that we do with solid food. This is one of the starkest mismatches between human biology and our current patterns of consumption.

We speak of having better food choices, yet for the most part, we eat the foods that food companies want to sell us.

It is Monteiro’s contention that ultra-processed foods of all kinds, more than any single nutrient, are responsible for much of our diet-related ill health.

Given the choice, it is probably not the best move to consume too many ultra-processed foods. But it is an extremely smart move to sell them, which explains why these foods are so widely available in our shops.

The salient point, however, is not just that vegetables are expensive in absolute terms but that they are much more expensive than they used to be, relative to other foods. In the US from 1980 to 2011, it became more than twice as expensive for Americans for purchase fresh fruit and vegetables compared to purchasing sugary carbonated beverages.

In the UK, from 1997 to 2009, the price of fruit and vegetables rose 7 per cent while the price of junk foods fell 15 per cent.

Like anything else that we buy, food is subject to the bizarre workings of market forces, but unlike other consumables, good food is essential to the quality of life – a commodity for which there is ultimately no substitute.

Sooner or later, maybe we will once again recognise that a prosperous life without good food is no prosperity at all. As the old saying goes, ‘you can’t eat money’.

Stage four of the nutrition transition has not only entailed a change in what we eat. It is also an obliteration of the rituals of how we ate in the recent past. Our health is affected by the rhythms and rituals of eating as much as it is by the content of our diets.

Once we hated to waste food; now we hate to waste time, which has become the ‘ultimate scarce commodity’,

Snack foods are part of the answer to the question of how deprivation and obesity coexist. For those on low incomes, snacking is often a strategy for dealing with the need to skip meals to save money. A bag of potato crisps is much cheaper than a plate of hot food in a café.

The great irony of our collective belief that we lack the time for proper meals is that nothing makes you feel so rich in time as a good meal, especially if it is shared. When we obsess too much about time efficiency, we enjoy our time less.

Every human deserves access to food of a decent quality. For millions, there has never been such an exciting or abundant time as today to live and eat, but for all the plenty, we haven’t yet figured out how to let everyone join the party. Eating a decent dinner may not be a duty any more, but that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be a right.

Choice does not always set us free. Sometimes, it leaves us paralysed with indecision