Interesting fact: the average American sees about 3,000 ads every day. And a few weeks ago, I had an epiphany while watching ad number 229. It was a commercial for a popular antacid where a mother at a birthday party was trying (unsuccessfully) to take a bite out of a heavily loaded burger. Why was she struggling? The burger was trying to bite her back! The ad is part of a TUMS ad campaign where heavily processed food slaps, punches and attacks the eater. The slogan is pretty clever: “Your favorite food fighting you? Fight back fast with TUMS.”
But then it hit me in the face that something was terribly wrong with the whole message. In medical school, they had taught us that pain was a protective sensation – it was supposed to help people avoid things that might cause them serious bodily harm. If the food that we eat causes us physical pain on a regular basis, then maybe the answer is NOT to neutralize that pain with a medication. Maybe the answer is to eat foods that love us back.There was a time when we were intimately connected to our food and it’s origins. The food we chose to feed our families protected and sustained us. Over the past 30 years, slowly but surely, the relationship has turned toxic. We’ve woken up in the 21st Century and found ourselves in an abusive relationship with a corndog.
A few years ago, I had dinner with a mother who had recently moved to the US from Mainland China. She had cooked a simple, fragrant meal with finely minced ginger and plenty of vegetables. While we chatted over a glass of wine in the kitchen, she said something that made run in search if a piece of paper and a pen. “Chinese people have a very different relationship with food than Americans,” she said. “In China, we love food. It’s a big part of everyday and an even bigger part of every celebration. Here in America, people seem to think: ‘Food is bad. Food will make me fat.’”
As a huge variety of processed food has found its way onto the supermarket shelves, companies have had to make their products increasingly appealing in order to stay competitive in a tough marketplace. They’ve done this, largely, by exploiting our preferences for foods that are high in fat, sugar and salt. The irony is that the foods that once helped us survive and fend off starvation have become the same foods that could end up killing us.
Is it any wonder then that we’re at war with our food? With the rise of the obesity epidemic and the increasing anonymity of industrial food production, we’ve come to see eating as a combat sport. In a land where French fries and Buffalo wings lurk on every street corner, far too many Americans feel that food is lying in wait for them – ready to attack at the slightest lapse of willpower. Because we are biologically programmed to over-consume high calorie foods when they’re available, we end up fighting a losing battle.
Americans and their food are in need of some good couple’s counseling. Someone needs to hit the reset button. And where better to do this than our very own kitchens. Around the stove and the kitchen table, we can re-kindle the love, the symbiosis and the good health of our honeymoon days with food. All we need is a handful of confidence, a few glugs of courage and a pinch of creativity. So dust off your sense of humor, pull out some fresh ingredients, and let’s get cooking.
