05/11/2019
"Wilson, for her part, isn’t fussy about whether the food is cooked at home or somewhere else; she just wants it to be nutritious and delicious. Her own extensive reporting indicates persuasively that the most effective way to counter a toxic food system is with government regulation. In Amsterdam, fast-food advertising is strictly controlled and no sweets or sodas are allowed in schools—and obesity rates among children have dropped by 12 percent since the rule was imposed in 2012. Three years ago, Chile passed what Wilson calls “the most aggressive range of laws against unhealthy foods that the world has yet seen,” including an 18 percent soda tax and a ban on using cartoon characters to market breakfast cereals. Packaged foods high in sugar, salt, or fat now carry prominent black labels identifying the products as unhealthful, and surveys show that some 40 percent of Chileans shop with the labels in mind.
"It’s hard to imagine American politicians pushing back with such vigor against the food industry. All the focus on nutrition and food safety, and all the celebrity activism, is no match for the ferocious lobbying of big agriculture and industrial food producers. Some pretty effective brainwashing has been done, too. Many consumers, including the affluent, are now convinced that they can make what the industry loves to call “healthy choices” simply by turning to reformulated versions of familiar products: low-fat chips, reduced-fat cookies, sugar-free soda, “all natural” frozen burritos. Meanwhile, one of the industry’s most resounding successes is to have retrained our culinary sensibilities, not merely our palates. Whenever we feel hungry or even just sense that mealtime is hovering, an ever-ready yen for something—anything—with a familiar brand name kicks in. If we can afford the more expensive version, we might even believe that we’re eating well.
"We aren’t. Whether it’s potato chips or air-popped organic corn puffs, “smart” frozen entrées or conventional frozen versions, these products are doing way more good for the companies producing them than they’re doing for us. I’m not trying to force the exhausted women in Pressure Cooker to start massaging fresh kale for salad, I promise. We’ll always need shortcuts, takeout, and convenience products to fall back on. But junk food, plain or fancy, stopped being a convenience a long time ago. Today it lives right in the house with us, greets us on the street, finds us at work, and raises our children for us. Our relationship with food, wholly transformed since the ’60s in ways both heartening and horrifying, has lost touch with a truth none of us can afford to leave behind: Cooking isn’t a luxury; it’s a survival skill."
How the “food revolution” turned us into snackers, guaranteeing the demise of healthy home cooking
