Bee Wilson: The Way We Eat Now

 

In The Way We Eat Now (published 2019), author Bee Wilson has a lot of interesting material taken from her earlier books. I found many repetitions here from these books, which I’ve been reading over the years — I didn’t really mind reading it all again. Starting in the introduction, she emphasizes one important point:   

“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.”   (p. xvii)

A consequence is the global rise in the rates of both malnutrition and obesity, due to consumption of less-than-healthy foods, and too much of them. This trend is not just a first-world problem, but becoming prevalent almost everywhere. 

Wilson cites many previous writers about the topic of food consumption and how it plays a role in our lives and in our society. I was amused at her citation of the work of the French food writer Édouard de Pomiane (1875-1964), “who was already thinking about how to eat well during busy times the best part of a century ago.” Several years ago, I read a number of his books, beginning with his most well-known cookbook called Cooking in Ten Minutes, or Adapting to the Rhythm of Modem Life. Pomiane was somewhat ahead of his time, for example having had the first cooking show on radio in the 1920s. I’ve always found him intriguing, so I enjoyed her summary of his life and work.

On my shelf: Pomiane’s books, many now long out-of-print.
His book on the cuisine of the Polish Jews is a very important
source of information on this destroyed community.

More Food, Less Quality

I would summarize Wilson’s idea thus: food is more plentiful, but this food is lower in quality, both in terms of taste and nutrition, than in the past. People eat more calories, and the foods they eat are becoming globalized; that is, traditional foods are less frequently consumed, and a limited range of foods have replaced the previous global variety. Especially: packaged and processed or ultra-processed foods are ubiquitous. This standardization has been rapid: “in the 1960s, there was no such thing as an average eater across most countries, just lots of specific and wildly divergent patterns of eating.” (p. 21)

In my opinion the spirit of the book is characterized by this statistical summary: “Perhaps the biggest change is in the quantities that we eat—around 500 calories on average more than our equivalents in the 1960s (from 2,237 calories in 1961 to 2,756 calories in 2009). … When you strip away the packaging, the recipes, and the brand names, most humans—from Rio to Lagos—are getting a sizeable majority of our energy from meat, sugar, refined wheat, rice, and refined vegetable oil.” (p. 21-23)

Wilson sees a self-reinforcing trend of  impoverished, though calorie-heavy, diets. She says “It’s hard to disentangle cause and effect here. Obesity contributes to poverty, and then poverty makes it harder to escape obesity. We know that across the world, lower socioeconomic status is associated with higher rates of obesity.” The issue is that this food is of a particularly unhealthy sort, specifically:  “More than half of the calorie intake in the United States—57.9 percent—now consists of ultra-processed food,” (pp. 71 and 88)

The American diet has changed along with much else about the American lifestyle, especially the decline in home-cooking:

“The economist Gary Becker (1930–2014) first articulated, in 1965, the idea that Americans had changed from people who economized on food into people who were frugal with time. Becker’s article ‘A Theory of the Allocation of Time’ was a groundbreaking essay that helped established a novel branch of economics: New Home Economics. Becker and his colleague at Columbia University, Jacob Mincer, were interested in explaining human behavior in terms of domestic households rather than seeing our actions as purely individual. … Partly what has changed is the way that time in households is divided up between the sexes. Since the 1930s, men of working age have done on average less paid work, but women have done a great deal more. American women did eleven more hours of paid work per week in the year 2000 than they did in 1970. This colossal social change was bound to have knock-on effects on the rest of life, leaving both men and women hard-pressed to find time to cook.” ( p. 132-133)

There are many little observations that make reading this book fun. For example: “Bananas are a quintessential modern food in that they are overwhelmingly grown in tropical regions but eaten in temperate ones.” (p. 28)  All in all, Wilson provides a very interesting collection of ideas about food.

An Unfortunate Parallel

In the current edition of the Guardian I read an article that seems to be an unfortunate parallel to what Wilson is saying — specifically, about how rich people are profiting from everyone else’s misfortune. The title of the article is a good summary: "Super-rich get ‘double dividend’ from causes and costs of climate crisis, report finds. Oxfam says investing by rich in disaster recovery widens inequality and gives incentive to delay climate action." 

I was particularly interested in the author’s observation about the food industry. Various events, “caused by extreme weather or war – have tended to boost the profits of major food trading companies that are dominated by billionaires, whose wealth has increased by $120bn since 2020. When drought, floods or storms hit crops, any subsequent increase in food prices tends to disproportionately benefit big corporations and their investors at the cost of small producers and regular consumers.” (link)

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