Set The Pan Over Medium-Wrong
by tristero
Matthew Yglesias has it wrong and Mark Bittman rightly responds :The fact is that fast food isn’t “bad” because it’s fast — it’s bad because of crummy ingredients. And it contains crummy ingredients because crummy ingredients — i.e., ground up cow’s noses, high fructose corn syrup, potatoes grown for “sliceability” (or whatever it’s called), or worse — are more profitable than real ingredients.
(Ground-up cow's noses? Um, do they, you know, wipe them clean before they grind 'em up? Or do they just irradiate the snot like they do the fecal matter?)
In fact, the problem isn't even eating awful fast food as it is eating it all the time. You like to feed your children irradiated cow's nose every once in a while for a treat? Alright, whatever. But if you do it a lot, which Americans are increasingly doing, you're gonna risk making them really, really sick as they grow up:BACKGROUND: Fast-food consumption has increased greatly in the USA during the past three decades. However, the effect of fast food on risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes has received little attention. We aimed to investigate the association between reported fast-food habits and changes in bodyweight and insulin resistance over a 15-year period in the USA...
FINDINGS: Fast-food frequency was lowest for white women (about 1.3 times per week) compared with the other ethnic-sex groups (about twice a week). After adjustment for lifestyle factors, baseline fast-food frequency was directly associated with changes in bodyweight in both black (p=0.0050) and white people (p=0.0013). Change in fast-food frequency over 15 years was directly associated with changes in bodyweight in white individuals (p<0.0001), with a weaker association recorded in black people (p=0.1004). Changes were also directly associated with insulin resistance in both ethnic groups (p=0.0015 in black people, p<0.0001 in white people). By comparison with the average 15-year weight gain in participants with infrequent (less than once a week) fast-food restaurant use at baseline and follow-up (n=203), those with frequent (more than twice a week) visits to fast-food restaurants at baseline and follow-up (n=87) gained an extra 4.5 kg of bodyweight (p=0.0054) and had a two-fold greater increase in insulin resistance (p=0.0083).
INTERPRETATION: Fast-food consumption has strong positive associations with weight gain and insulin resistance, suggesting that fast food increases the risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes.*
Which brings us to Matt's silliest point: The good news is that there’s no real reason to think that food you prepare yourself is for some reason intrinsically healthier than food someone else prepares for you. Indeed, a normal “home cooked” meal is mostly eaten by people who didn’t cook it.
You actually can get a good meal in a restaurant? Golly, who knew? And I had absolutely no idea that you had to know at least the basics of cooking in order to make sure you didn't poison your family every evening! As for considering that a home-cooked meal prepared by 1 person for her/his family is comparable to the kind of cooking you get at McDonald's.... Matt can't be serious or he simply doesn't know the first thing about what it takes to scale up cooking to the point where billions and billions are served.
But, of course, aside from Matt, no one is talking about incompetent home cooking (or good restaurants). And as far as I know, unlike the clear association found between regular fast food consumption and serious health risks, there are no studies that link an increase in home-cooked meals to a risk of an increase in obesity and type 2 diabetes. It is only trivially true that intrinsically, home-cooking is not healthier than fast food; in the real world, it most certainly is healthier, and potentially a lot healthier and will continue to be a lot healthier until cow's nose futures rise exorbitantly and shit is priced like Shinola.
But Matt's objections to Oliver are twofold. Of course, there are extremely good reasons, simply from the point of view of health, to limit your intake of fast food and cook at home more often (or, I suppose strictly speaking: if you can afford it, eat at a decent restaurant all the time). But Matt also objects to what he perceives as a moral argument: he apparently thinks Oliver is saying that you should, in order to be some kind of a good person, cook your own food. If so, that's not what the foodies are saying.
When foodies like Oliver, Pollan, or Bittman urge people to cook more often, they are advocating, more or less explicitly, a cultural/political position, and doing so in shorthand (something well understood by Big Food). In their writing, they often strenuously object to the promotion of a mass lifestyle that benefits the bottom line of large corporations, that benefits only the bottom line of large corporations, and that benefits the bottom line of large corporations at the (unbelievably costly) expense of the public's health.** They point out that corporations literally are teaching and acclimatizing the public to want - in fact, crave - over-priced, over-processed junk food for the plain and simple reason that some asshole in a suit can make more money than he - invariably, a he, and usually a Republican or other rightwinger - could make by selling somethng decent. If that strikes you as wrong, be aware that it will take a lot to change that, but you CAN do three things right away that will help. You can refuse to eat fast food that often, you can refuse to treat junk food as a staple, and... you can cook at home.
The moral issue at stake prevents the political reason - to take back control of what you eat - from becoming "politicaly correct." It is, in fact, the pursuit of happiness or, in the case of food, the pursuit of pleasure. For Bittman in particular, but really any foodie agrees with this, the deep enjoyment of food and the deriving of enormous pleasure from the rituals of eating, is an essential part of being human. To deprive people of this, to reduce eating to a dreary, messy chore to be dispensed with in around the same time as a longish sojourn on the can is shameful.
Of course, not everyone likes to cook, not everyone will ever like to cook. But the entire thrust of industrial food is to deprive people of all pleasure they can get from food - except for the over-processed shit that brings in the big bucks. In many ways, the War on Food is one more rightwing crusade, one of the most successful. It is often promoted and defended by the very same people who advocate, and profit from, other attempts to limit the average person's access to deep personal pleasure, like the War on Fucking.
Suggesting that people cook more is not about taking their time away from tweeting or watching Gossip Girls or downloading mass quantities of whatever porn they like. It's about proposing a simple (and small and only partially effective) solution to our genuinely wacky food system, which actively encourages slathering a high-end cake icing on everything in order to get your kids to eat "healthier" foods.
Of course, our "national eating disorder" will not end only by encouraging people to cook more, something Oliver, Pollan, Bittman, Nestle, et al, are quite aware of. Most of the issues are extremely complex and the potential solutions far from straightforward. But there are a few easy, cheap, ways we can all make our food system better. And by far the easiest, and the cheapest, is to cook real food more often for ourselves, our families, and our friends. And some of us might even be surprsed to learn it can be rather enjoyable, even fun.
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*Cue all the Big Food and Fast Food apologists to note that obesity, and its associated health issues, have multiple factors. No, really? I had no idea. And that lets off the hook the companies that are deliberately trying to get us to eat their garbage so that their CEO's children won't ever have to...how, exactly? For your convenience, I repeat the relevant link.
**To be strictly accurate, I should hedge this a little, as it is over-simplifying to say that these writers see no benefits to industrial food except to the companies' bottom lines. Pollan, especially, observes that industrial agriculture has done an extraordinary job of increasing the number of calories available for consumption, effectively ending the necessity for anyone, anywhere to starve (that's not the same as saying that starvation is non-existent, of course). See The Omnivore's Dilemma. His objection is that there are a tremendous number of problems with the way this abundance has been achieved, and with the kinds of food industrial production encourages. Pollan further argues that there are far less destructive and far more practical ways to feed the world.