Eat less, eat better: A dispatch from date night

The other night Mrs. Morris the Elder and I went out for dinner by ourselves while her parents watched our four children. For those of you without kids, going out to dinner alone when you have four children is like the childless equivalent of a two-week Michelin-starred river cruise on the Seine, complete with regular poached pheasant and hourly foot rubs. It’s just kind of luxurious! In any event, we went to a local sort of tavern that mostly serves sandwiches. Because we felt like Caligulan centurions, we ordered like crazy people: Two appetizers, two generous sandwiches with a big order of fries apiece, I had two rich beers, it was just an absurd feast. We ate like crazy!

And let me tell you, we felt like shit afterwards. We just ate way too much. It all tasted pretty good but of course the food was pretty standard mid- to low-quality industrial fare, and we just stuffed ourselves, and we felt it. And even after all that gorging we still had enough leftovers afterwards to make a modest lunch the next day.

This illustrates something. I have been arguing for the better part of 20 years, in a variety of formats, that as a country we should be eating much better—that the vast majority of what we consume in this country is a lot of very low-quality food that is not good for you. This really is not all that controversial: The American food industry for about six or seven decades now has been mostly a race to the bottom, a mad scramble to produce vast quantities of food as dirt-cheaply as possible, with the end result—foreseen and intended—that we eat a great deal of qualitatively cheap food, stuff that is of low material value and which makes you materially less healthy by eating it. We should wonder that this is at all disputed: Do we think seeking out and buying the cheapest product simply by dint of its cheapness is going to get us the best product? Does it work that way in any other industry?

This kind of argument gets lots of people very mad. Believe me. To be sure, there are most assuredly people who for one reason or another simply cannot afford to pay much more for better food. There are still other people, probably the great majority of Americans, who simply do not prioritize good food, who would rather spend money on other things—electronics, travel, cars, luxury housing, clothing—and who have consequently devalued food in their hierarchy of consumer needs. Many of these people will insist that they simply cannot afford better food when what they actually mean—consciously or not—is that they don’t want to spend the money on it. Which of course is not the same thing, or even adjacent to the same thing.

None of this would matter all that much except for the fact that our food habits are just immiserating so many of us—at the micro level, as Mrs. Morris and I discovered the other night, and at the macro level, where we’re approaching a country in which the majority of people are obese. We eat a lot of bad food in this country, considerably more than we need to be, and the predictable end result is that many of us are fat and unhealthy, a considerable number of us severely so. Being unhealthy, fat and/or obese is extremely suboptimal. People who are generally healthy have probably never considered just how acutely miserable it feels to be that unwell: The shortness of breath, the lethargy, the aches, the heart palpitations, the creaky joints, the difficulty of standing up, the difficulty of sitting down. the sweat, the chafing, the hygiene, the social anxiety at wondering whether one will fit into a seat or in a restaurant booth—the list goes on. It’s unhappy stuff. We’ve got this whole convention now where we’re not supposed to acknowledge this, where we’re obliged to pretend that people can be “healthy at any size,” but the very simple truth is that fat and obese people overwhelmingy tend to be just chronically, profoundly unhealthy, in many cases debilitatingly so, in ways that make their lives miserable and shorten their lifespans greatly. This is very basic stuff.

Very few people want to be this way, and in fact a great deal of our medical discourse is given to figuring out how to get people to lose weight and be healthier and happier, in spite of the efforts of “fat activists” to discourage it. And really the simplest, easiest way to pull that off is this: Most people need to eat healthier food and they need to eat less food overall. That is really it. If the country began adhering to that general maxim en masse we’d see a rapid and unmistakable turnaround in the national health situation. The average U.S. weight would start to drop rapidly if we did this. Does anyone doubt that?

Happily, there’s room to maneuver on this. The average American adult now consumes somewhat more than about 3,500 calories per day; that’s up from around 2,800 in 1961. Picture what your middle-class Boomer parents ate on an average day in 7th grade in Skokie, Illinois: That’s how you get to 2,800. And it was fine. People who ate 2,800 calories weren’t going hungry. They were satiated and happy. Imagine eating like the Skokie Kiwanis were eating during the Kennedy administration: It’s something to aim for. And it’s really very attainable!

Take it from us. In our house we have three meals a day; we have very minimal snacks, oftentimes none. If you can cook something from scratch, we tend to do it. We are regularly adjusting portion sizes to ensure that growing kids get what they need at every meal and that Mrs. Morris, if she is pregnant or nursing (for several years the general state of affairs), is getting proper nutrition. We eat a varied diet with meat, grains, vegetables, dairy; we go meatless two or three days a week. We waste very little. By modern American standards we eat moderately; in a house with six mouths (and another on the way), you don’t really have any other choice. But nobody ever goes hungry or even unsatisfied; we always eat just enough and no more and everyone seems healthy enough—certainly more healthy than we felt after our meal out, as fun as it may have been.

All of which is to say: There is significant room here to improve how we eat. Mrs. Morris and I may have pigged out relative to how we normally eat, but the data indicate that’s how a great many people eat normally to begin with, which is why so many people are so fat and so sick and so unhappy. Add in the excess eating combined with how much food we throw away uneaten every year—about 120 billion pounds, all told—and it is obvious most of us could very easily afford—financially and logistically—to eat less, better food. It’s not all that hard, once you commit to doing it.