American food culture is really weird

Everything is more difficult than it has to be

This, from Slate’s Jenée Desmond-Harris…

Jenée @jdesmondharris

I don’t think there’s a single sentence on the parenting internet more smug than “they just eat what we eat”

…is really weird and also a great summation of so much of modern American food culture, which is among the oddest food cultures in the world. I mean, “they just eat what we eat” isn’t “smug.” It’s actually incredibly reasonable. It’s hard to imagine a more reasonable family policy than that. Yes, there are exceptions—there are kids who genuinely refuse to eat what’s on their plate, you simply have no other recourse than to make something special for them— but this is a very rare scenario. In the main if you’re fixing a bunch of different short-order meals for your kid every night, you’re doing it horribly wrong. It’s just not necessary.

And yet tons of parents do it, all the time, and I’m not sure why. They seem to believe their hands are tied and that if they don’t do it then their children will literally starve to death. I don’t know where that messaging came from, because it certainly seems like every major “parenting” authority advises against this. It’s hard to figure out where stuff arises in a culture, like natural gas from a fissure after an earthquake.

Americans have a very strange way of going about food and this is just one weird example of that. Another example is the snacking. With kids it’s endemic: Many if not most parents generally seem to believe that they have to load their children up with snacks wherever they go, all the time, in order to get them through the day. Here’s a great example of that tendency from a feminist comic writer who draws “momlife” comics and who often compares her husband unfavorably to herself:

I just don’t get this. You “leave the house with the kids” and you have to bring not just “drinks” but two separate snack reserves for your children? Why? Are you hiking the Appalachian Trail? But actually this is just a reflection of our larger cultural presumptions around snacking. Adults snack all the time, too—just constant eating, all the time, throughout the day, everywhere, at home and away from it, in the car, at work, while on walks. People have like an extra meal-and-a-half per day just from all the snacking. This is honestly very odd when you think about it. We don’t need this much food in our lives—that’s literally true, the average American daily caloric intake exceeds “maintenance” levels by like 55% or so—so it’s certainly not our bodies telling us that we need to consume more food in order to survive. It’s just habit. And it’s a very strange one.

You might be able to justify this on the grounds of, I don’t know, bacchanalianism or something—we’re eating all the time, it’s not good for us but we’re all aesthetes now or something so we’re just reveling in the wild orgiastic pleasure of it all. But we’re not, are we? Not really. I mean, in the main, American snack food is very bad stuff, just an endless permutation of sugar and cheap processed wheat stuff with maybe some desiccated cheese thrown in every now and then. But beyond that, Americans are absolutely the most anxious, neurotic food people on the planet. We’ve developed a neverending bewildering catalogue of ways to deal with our weird eating habits: the whole “you should eat five small meals a day” thing, the numbered chewing regiments, the currently popular “intermittent fasting” craze, the endless diets. Remember the Atkins diet? Where people stopped eating carbohydrates and just back-loaded like 2200 calories of protein onto their plates? It was all the rage, my family did it back in the day, and it was just miserable. Who wants to live in a world without bread and pasta? That sounds like a literal dystopia. But millions of Americans convinced themselves that it was the only way to do things. That’s very weird.

Of course, now you never hear about the Atkins diet anymore; seemingly overnight the people who had sworn their lives on it apparently decided that it was no longer the way to do things. That’s, also, very weird. You can get whiplash eating this way, though your neck muscles will presumably be strong from all that freaking protein you’ve ingested.

The solution to all of this seems pretty obvious: Just be normal about food. “Normal” can be a frustrating sort of advisory because it means different things to different people, but I actually think we all instinctively recognize the principle more readily than we’re all willing to admit. Eating three servings of Cheeto Puffs in your car, say, doesn’t seem normal at all by multiple different historical metrics. But enjoying a healthy, varied, regularly scheduled lineup of meals does seem normal. At the very least it seems normative.

If you’re struggling with how to eat well—both pleasurably and healthily—give this a shot: Don’t snack. Cook three good, interesting, enjoyable meals per day. Make the portions modest and appropriate; don’t starve yourself, don’t load it up like you’re doing the dollar buffet at Bucky's Hi-Hat-Eat-Em-Up. Include a bit of everything—meat, carbohydrates, grains, veggies. If you’ve got kids, serve them the same stuff you eat. Do this and you can be almost certain that you’ll enjoy eating and you’ll be healthy and your kids will feel and be the same way. Regardless of what your local Slate writer might claim, it’s not “smug” to eat this way. It’s great and if you try it I think you will feel good about it.