If it's not food...then what is it?

We are coming to the end of the two month vegan challenge. I've spent the last two months thinking a lot about food. I've talked to a lot of people (informally) about veganism and its benefits both health and performance-wise (side note: I got my lipids tested a week ago for a health initiative for work and was told that they were "perfect"). I've talked to some people who have started on the paleo diet and are having great results on it. I've read several articles about the relationship between chronic disease and diet as well as several articles espousing the so-called "Mediterranean diet". Then today I read this article in the New York Times which was adapted from a book (which is about to be released) called "Fat Sugar Salt" by Michael Moss:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

And I realized something (or I guess, was reminded of something). We, as a nation, are forgetting what food really is. The common denominator between all the "diets" (and I'm touching upon veganism here as a choice motivated by health rather than one motivated by morality, so bear with me) that I mentioned above is that if done right, they pretty much eliminate all processed non-food. Maybe, just maybe, it's not the fact that a vegan can't eat salmon or someone on a paleo diet can't eat legumes that make these diets successful, but that neither of them can eat powdered cheese food or Campbell's soup or flamin' hots. So much of what we see on our grocery store shelves is engineered (read the NYT article) in a lab, rather than grown in the ground.  In other words, so much of what we're eating really isn't food in the strictest sense of the word.

Quick Story: When I taught writing two years ago, we read the young reader's edition of "The Omnivore's Dilemma". The other teacher that I planned with came up with a brilliant idea: we let the kids bring in their favorite treats and eat them in class as long as they did the activity that we planned first. Every student brought something in (sometimes when I assigned homework, only 10% of kids would actually do it, but every kid brought in a "treat" that day). The first thing that we did was to ask the students (without looking at the ingredient list) was what their "treat" was made of. The kids were perplexed. So we guided them a little bit. We asked them what part of the food pyramid it would fall into. They were perplexed. No one knew what was in a flamin' hot cheeto, and no one could come close to linking it to anything that actually constituted food without looking at the ingredient list. Even after looking at the ingredients, they were still confused..."well, what is all this stuff?".I didn't know what most of the things on the list were any more than they did (Michael Pollan did- it's corn!). We asked them how often they ate the items they brought in. Most of them responded that they ate things like this multiple times a day.

The NYT article on the Mediterranean Diet pointed out something that should be obvious to us: that real food should be a treat and not a punishment (think about your best meals ever: did they involve processed cheese or breaded chicken nuggets? probably not). We, as a culture, like to convince ourselves that we are being deprived if we choose a salad over a Quarter Pounder with cheese. (There's even whole lines of "I'm depriving myself with non-food" food in the way of Lean Cuisines, Snackwells, those 100 calorie packs of things that resemble cookies, etc.). Marketers have led us to believe that the way to happiness is through our stomachs and that we "deserve" to eat desert with every meal (or supersize our meal, or that we are bad parents for not buying our kids food that is shaped like animals). I would like to make some sort of comment about how I believe in personal responsibility here, but I'm not sure that we, as Americans, have any sense of that anymore (certainly when it comes to food, debatably in other areas as well). Perhaps Michael Bloomberg is right to want to regulate what people eat. When my students ask me why I make certain rules, sometimes I am brutally honest: "Because I don't trust you yet to be in control of yourselves." If we don't learn to control what we eat, the government might be telling us that very thing more and more (and they might not be wrong).