A Nation Playing with Its Food

By Barbara Ehrenreich

They say we're a race of orally compulsive piggies. At least this seems to be the going explanation for America's latest leap into pandemic obesity -- 33% of U.S. adults 20 years of age or older are estimated to be overweight. It almost doesn't matter what we eat, the obesity experts say. Give us low-fat foodstuffs, and we'll binge on them in megacalorie doses; turn your back for a moment, and we'll be scarfing down a Mallomar or whatever other substance comes to hand. What we really need is love, according to the mass-neurosis theory -- or community or respect -- and what we settle for invariably is pizza.

It may be, though, that the fault lies not in us but on our plates. Americans are probably no more orally compulsive than they were 100 years ago, but the food has mutated, diversified, proliferated and fused in ever more outlandish combinations. Rockefeller University obesity researcher Jules Hirsch estimates that there were about 500 foodstuffs available to Americans 100 years ago, compared with more than 50,000, ranging from pop-tarts to Portobello mushrooms, today. Food, which once served primarily as a cure for hypoglycemia, has become an entertainment medium.

I grew up, for example, in a culture that recognized only four major foodstuffs: potatoes (mashed or fried), beef (roast or stewed), desserts (cake or pie) and vegetables (canned). There were "salads" too, involving miniature marshmallows encased in lime Jell-O. And there were, at the far fringes of human gastronomic experience, "foreign" foods, meaning mainly spaghetti. In those days, the only way to have fun with food was to put the peas to work as projectiles or make moats out of mashed potatoes.

It was the yuppies who pioneered the food revolution. At first, old food fogeys like myself mocked them for their balsamic vinegar and sun-dried tomatoes, but secretly we hid our Hamburger Helper in the back of the cupboard and dumped the Crisco out. In dizzying succession, the yuppies hit us with the jicama, the kiwi, the leek and the miniature eggplant. By the end of the 1980s, thanks to their heroic efforts, every Midwestern town sported a fern- filled "Maude's" or "Davio's" offering white chocolate mousse and blackened fish. For those who could afford to eat fashionably, dinner replaced the theater as the highbrow event of the evening -- if not the only fun part of the night.

Once we were encouraged to seek variety in our water beds, not our refrigerators. But according to the latest sex survey, most of us are now content with the erotic equivalent of vanilla ice cream. Sex got too scary and too hard to negotiate. For the millions of us who live glued to keyboards and monitors (computer at work, TV at home), food may be more than entertainment. It may be the only sensual experience left.

Sadly, in the food revolution as in everything else, the poor are getting stuck with the greasy end of the stick. The affluent like to gorge on the kinds of high-fiber, heart-smart foods that were once relegated to the global peasantry: polenta, lentils, kale, bulgur wheat. Meanwhile, the fat-filled, heart-dumb foods once favored by kings and courtiers have been sedimenting down the socioeconomic scale. And, oh, the joys of nouveau low-income food, in its ever more wanton and promiscuous forms -- fries topped with melted cheese spread, nachos topped with everything, burritos buried in sour cream and guacamole! Not to mention flavors unheard of a generation ago -- honey mustard (what deranged home-ec dropout thought that one up?), ranch, jalapeno. Of course, there isn't much alternative if you live in a ghetto where the nearest supermarket is likely to be a bus ride away and the only accessible food source is Store 24.

But wherever you sit at the national smorgasbord, whether you dine off Styrofoam or Limoges, there's the same relentless struggle against the encroachments of billowing flesh. Affluent people have better weapons, of ) course -- StairMasters and NordicTracks -- but even they are sometimes forced to fly first class just to find seats that will accommodate their thighs.

The problem, according to experts, is that we have lost the ability to distinguish appetite from fullness. But who wants to? Entertainment, if it's worthy of the name, never fills you up. No one walks out in the middle of a movie just because the first half was particularly gripping. So if you've grazed your way through a fascinatingly multicultural meal, curiosity alone will demand dessert, no matter what the tummy has to say.

Hence the glorious relief of those recent holiday meals. The food is unreformed, archaic, predictable -- mashed potatoes and gravy, overcooked veggies, huge slabs of pie. It's democratic, if not downright egalitarian -- meaning pretty much the same collection of foodstuffs whether you dine in a mansion or a soup kitchen. We can give thanks, with a chorus of satisfied belches, that the food is for once meant just to be filling, and that the only entertainment we're likely to find at the table is the people who are seated around it.