FOUR   NOT TOO MUCH: HOW TO EAT

If a food is more than the sum of its nutrients and a diet is more than the sum of its foods, it follows that a food culture is more than the sum of its menus—it embraces as well the set of manners, eating habits, and unspoken rules that together govern a people’s relationship to food and eating. How a culture eats may have just as much of a bearing on health as what a culture eats. The foodstuffs of another people are often easier to borrow than their food habits, it’s true, but to adopt some of these habits would do at least as much for our health and happiness as eaters.

What nutritionism sees when it looks at the French paradox is a lot of slender French people eating gobs of saturated fat washed down with wine. What it fails to see is a people with a completely different relationship to food than we have. Nutritionists pay far more attention to the chemistry of food than to the sociology or ecology of eating. All their studies of the benefits of red wine or foie gras overlook the fact that the French eat very differently than we do. They seldom snack, and they eat most of their food at meals shared with other people. They eat small portions and don’t come back for seconds. And they spend considerably more time eating than we do. Taken together, these habits contribute to a food culture in which the French consume fewer calories than we do, yet manage to enjoy them far more.

Paul Rozin has confirmed many of these observations in a comparison of French and American eating habits conducted in restaurants in Paris and Philadelphia. Rozin focused on portion size and time spent eating. He found that serving sizes in France, both in restaurants and supermarkets, are considerably smaller than they are in the United States. This matters because most people have what psychologists call a unit bias—we tend to believe that however big or small the portion served, that’s the proper amount to eat. Rozin also found that the French spend considerably more time enjoying their tiny servings than we do our Brobdingnagian ones. “Although they eat less than Americans,” Rozin writes, “the French spend more time eating, and hence get more food experience while eating less.” He suggests that the French gift for extracting more food experience from fewer calories may help explain why the French are slimmer and healthier than we are. This sounds like an eminently sensible approach to eating and suggests an overarching policy that might nudge us in that direction.

PAY MORE, EAT LESS. What the French case suggests is that there is a trade-off in eating between quantity and quality.

The American food system has for more than a century devoted its energies to quantity and price rather than to quality. Turning out vast quantities of so-so food sold in tremendous packages at a terrific price is what we do well. Yes, you can find exceptional food in America, and increasingly so, but historically the guiding principle has been, in the slogan of one supermarket chain, to “pile it high and sell it cheap.”

There’s no escaping the fact that better food—whether measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond)—costs more, usually because it has been grown with more care and less intensively. Not everyone can afford to eat high-quality food in America, and that is shameful; however, those of us who can, should. Doing so benefits not only your health (by, among other things, reducing your exposure to pesticides and pharmaceuticals), but also the health of the people who grow the food as well as the people who live downstream and downwind of the farms where it is grown.

Another important benefit of paying more for better-quality food is that you’re apt to eat less of it.

“Eat less” is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot less than we presently do is compelling, whether or not you are overweight. Calorie restriction has repeatedly been shown to slow aging and prolong lifespan in animals, and some researchers believe it is the single strongest link between a change in the diet and the prevention of cancer. Put simply: Overeating promotes cell division, and promotes it most dramatically in cancer cells; cutting back on calories slows cell division. It also stifles the production of free radicals, curbs inflammation, and reduces the risk of most of the Western diseases.

“Eat less” is easier said than done, however, particularly in a culture of cheap and abundant calories with no deeply rooted set of rules to curb overeating. But other cultures do have such rules and we can try to emulate them. The French have their modest portions and taboo against seconds. The people of Okinawa, one of the longest-lived and healthiest populations in the world, practice a principle they call hara hachi bu: Eat until you are 80 percent full.

This is a sensible idea, but also easier said than done: How in the world do you know when you’re 80 percent full? You’d need to be in closer touch with your senses than many Americans at the table have become. As Rozin and other psychologists have demonstrated, Americans typically eat not until they’re full (and certainly not until they’re 80 percent full) but rather until they receive some visual cue from their environment that it’s time to stop: the bowl or package is empty, the plate is clean, or the TV show is over. Brian Wansink, a Cornell professor of marketing and nutritional science who has done several ingenious studies on portion size and appetite, concludes that Americans pay much more attention to external than to internal cues about satiety.* By comparison the French, who seem to attend more closely to all the sensual dimensions of eating, also pay more attention to the internal cues telling us we feel full.

So how might paying more for food help us eat less of it? In two ways. It is well established that how much we eat is strongly influenced by the cost of food in terms of both the money and effort required to put it on the table. The rise in obesity in America began around 1980, exactly when a flood of cheap calories started coming off American farms, prompted by the Nixon-era changes in agricultural policy. American farmers produced 600 more calories per person per day in 2000 than they did in 1980. But some calories got cheaper than others: Since 1980, the price of sweeteners and added fats (most of them derived, respectively, from subsidized corn and subsidized soybeans) dropped 20 percent, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent. It is the cheaper and less healthful of these two kinds of calories on which Americans have been gorging.

These are precisely the kinds of calories found in convenience food—snacks, microwavable entrées, soft drinks, and packaged food of all kind—which happens to be the source of most of the 300 or so extra calories Americans have added to their daily diet since 1980. So these foods are cheap in a second sense too: They require very little, if any, time or effort to prepare, which is the other reason we eat more of them. How often would you eat french fries if you had to peel, wash, cut and fry them yourself—and then clean up the mess? Or ever eat Twinkies if you had to bake the little cakes and then squirt the filling into them and clean up?

Recently a group of Harvard economists seeking to advance an economic theory for the obesity epidemic correlated the rise in the average weight of Americans with a decline in the “time cost” of eating—cooking, cleaning up, and so on. They concluded that the widespread availability of cheap convenience foods could explain most of the twelve-pound increase in the weight of the average American since the early 1960s. They point out that in 1980 less than 10 percent of Americans owned a microwave; by 1999 that figure had reached 83 percent of households. As technology reduces the time cost of food, we tend to eat more of it.*

My guess is that the converse still holds true, and that paying more for food—in every sense—will reduce the amount of it we eat. Several of the rules offered below are aimed in that direction. While it is true that many people simply can’t afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we’ve somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the Internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority. We spend a smaller percentage of our income on food than any other industrialized society; surely if we decided that the quality of our food mattered, we could afford to spend a few more dollars on it a week—and eat a little less of it.

Is it just a coincidence that as the portion of our income spent on food has declined, spending on health care has soared? In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food and 5.2 percent of national income on health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on health care has climbed to 16 percent of national income. I have to think that by spending a little more on healthier food we could reduce the amount we have to spend on health care.

To make the overall recommendation to “pay more, eat less” more palatable, consider that quality itself, besides tending to cost more, may have a direct bearing on the quantity you’ll want to eat. The better the food, the less of it you need to eat in order to feel satisfied. All carrots are not created equal, and the best ones—the ones really worth savoring—are simply more satisfying, bite for bite. To borrow Paul Rozin’s term, exceptional food offers us more “food experience”—per bite, per dish, per meal—and as the French have shown, you don’t need a lot of food to have a rich food experience. Choose quality over quantity, food experience over mere calories.

EAT MEALS. This recommendation sounds almost as ridiculous as “eat food,” but in America at least, it no longer goes without saying. We are snacking more and eating fewer meals together. Indeed, sociologists who study American eating habits no longer organize their results around the increasingly quaint concept of the meal: They now measure “eating occasions” and report that Americans have added to the traditional big three—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—an as-yet-untitled fourth daily eating occasion that lasts all day long: the constant sipping and snacking we do while watching TV, driving, and so on. One study found that among eighteen-to fifty-year-old Americans, roughly a fifth of all eating now takes place in the car.*

That one should feel the need to mount a defense of “the meal” is sad, but then I never would have thought “food” needed defending, either. Most readers will recall the benefits of eating meals without much prompting from me. It is at the dinner table that we socialize and civilize our children, teaching them manners and the art of conversation. At the dinner table parents can determine portion sizes, model eating and drinking behavior, and enforce social norms about greed and gluttony and waste. Shared meals are about much more than fueling bodies; they are uniquely human institutions where our species developed language and this thing we call culture. Do I need to go on?

All this is so well understood that when pollsters ask Americans if they eat together as a family most nights, they offer a resounding—and resoundingly untrue—reply in the affirmative. In fact, most American families today report eating dinner together three to four nights a week, but even those meals bear only the faintest resemblance to the Norman Rockwell ideal. If you install video cameras in the kitchen and dining-room ceilings above typical American families, as marketers for the major food companies have done, you’ll quickly discover that the reality of the family dinner has diverged substantially from our image of it. Mom might still cook something for herself and sit at the table for a while, but she’ll be alone for much of that time. That’s because dad and each of the kids are likely to prepare an entirely different entrée for themselves, “preparing” in this case being a synonym for microwaving a package. Each family member might then join mom at the table for as long as it takes to eat, but not necessarily all at the same time. Technically, this kind of feeding counts as a family dinner in the survey results, though it’s hard to believe it performs all the customary functions of a shared meal. Kraft or General Mills, for instance, is now determining the portion sizes, not mom, and the social value of sharing food is lost. It looks a lot more like a restaurant meal, where everyone orders his or her own dish. (Though the service isn’t quite as good, because the entrées don’t arrive at the same time.) Of course, people tend to eat more when they can have exactly what they want—which is precisely why the major food companies approve of this modernized family meal and have done everything in their considerable power to foster it. So they market different kinds of entrées to each member of the family (low carb for the dieting teenager, low cholesterol for dad, high fat for the eight-year-old, and so on), and engineer these “home meal replacements,” as they’re known in the trade, so that even the eight-year-old can safely microwave them.

But the biggest threat to the meal-as-we-knew-it is surely the snack, and snacking in recent years has colonized whole new parts of our day and places in our lives. Work, for example, used to be a more or less food-free stretch of time between meals, but no longer. Offices now typically have well-stocked kitchens, and it is apparently considered gauche at a business meeting or conference if a spread of bagels, muffins, pastries, and soft drinks is not provided at frequent intervals. Attending a recent conference on nutrition and health, of all things, I was astounded to see that in addition to the copious buffet at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, our hosts wheeled out a copious buffet halfway between breakfast and lunch and then again halfway between lunch and dinner, evidently worried that we would not be able to survive the long crossing from one meal to the next without a between-meal meal.

I may be showing my age, but didn’t there used to be at least a mild social taboo against the between-meal snack? Well, it is gone. Americans today mark time all day long with nibbles of food and sips of soft drinks, which must be constantly at their sides, lest they expire during the haul between breakfast and lunch. (The snack food and beverage industry has surely been the great beneficiary of the new social taboo against smoking, which used to perform much the same time-marking function.) We have reengineered our cars to accommodate our snacks, adding bigger cup holders and even refrigerated glove compartments, and we’ve reengineered foods to be more easily eaten in the car. According to the Harvard economists’ calculations, the bulk of the calories we’ve added to our diet over the past twenty years has come in the form of snacks. I don’t need to point out that these snacks tend not to consist of fruits and vegetables. (Not even at my nutrition conference.) Or that the portion sizes have swelled or that the snacks themselves consist mainly of cleverly flavored and configured arrangements of refined carbohydrates, hydrogenated oils, corn sweeteners, and salt.

To counter the rise of the snack and restore the meal to its rightful place, consider as a start these few rules of thumb:

DO ALL YOUR EATING AT A TABLE. No, a desk is not a table.

DON’T GET YOUR FUEL FROM THE SA M E PL ACE YOUR CAR DOES. American gas stations now make more money selling food (and cigarettes) than gasoline, but consider what kind of food this is: except perhaps for the milk and water, it’s all highly processed nonperishable snack foods and extravagantly sweetened soft drinks in hefty twenty-ounce bottles. Gas stations have become processed-corn stations: ethanol outside for your car and high-fructose corn syrup inside for you.

TRY NOT TO EAT ALONE. Americans are increasingly eating in solitude. Though there is research suggesting that light eaters will eat more when they dine with others (probably because they spend more time at the table), for people prone to overeating, communal meals tend to limit consumption, if only because we’re less likely to stuff ourselves when others are watching. This is precisely why so much food marketing is designed to encourage us to eat in front of the TV or in the car: When we eat mindlessly and alone, we eat more. But regulating appetite is the least of it: The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from mere animal biology to an act of culture.

CONSULT YOUR GUT. As the psychologists have demonstrated, most of us allow external, and mostly visual, cues to determine how much we eat. The larger the portion, the more we eat; the bigger the container, the more we pour; the more conspicuous the vending machine, the more we buy from it; the closer the bowl of M&Ms, the more of them we eat. All of which makes us easy marks for food marketers eager to sell us yet more food.

As in so many areas of modern life, the culture of food has become a culture of the eye. But when it comes to eating, it pays to cultivate the other senses, which often provide more useful and accurate information. Does this peach smell as good as it looks? Does the third bite of that dessert taste anywhere near as good as the first? I could certainly eat more of this, but am I really still hungry?

Supposedly it takes twenty minutes before the brain gets the word that the belly is full; unfortunately most of us take considerably less than twenty minutes to finish a meal, with the result that the sensation of feeling full exerts little if any influence on how much we eat. What this suggests is that eating more slowly, and then consulting our sense of satiety, might help us to eat less. The French are better at this than we are, as Brian Wansink discovered when he asked a group of French people how they knew when to stop eating. “When I feel full,” they replied. (What a novel idea! The Americans said things like “When my plate is clean” or “When I run out.”) Perhaps it is their long, leisurely meals that give the French the opportunity to realize when they’re full.

At least until we learn to eat more slowly and attend more closely to the information of our senses, it might help to work on altering the external clues we rely on in eating on the theory that it’s probably better to manipulate ourselves than to allow marketers to manipulate us. Wansink offers dozens of helpful tips in a recent book called Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, though I warn you they’re all vaguely insulting to your sense of yourself as a creature in possession of free will.

Serve smaller portions on smaller plates; serve food and beverages from small containers (even if this means repackaging things bought in jumbo sizes); leave detritus on the table—empty bottles, bones, and so forth—so you can see how much you’ve eaten or drunk; use glasses that are more vertical than horizontal (people tend to pour more into squat glasses); leave healthy foods in view, unhealthy ones out of view; leave serving bowls in the kitchen rather than on the table to discourage second helpings.

EAT SLOWLY. Not just so you’ll be more likely to know when to stop. I mean “slow” in the sense of deliberate and knowledgeable eating promoted by Slow Food, the Italian-born movement dedicated to the principle that “a firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life.” The organization, which was founded in response to the arrival of American fast food in Rome during the 1980s, seeks to reacquaint (or in some cases acquaint) people with the satisfactions of well-grown and well-prepared food enjoyed at leisurely communal meals. It sounds like an elitist club for foodies (which, alas, it sometimes can be), but at its most thoughtful, Slow Food offers a coherent protest against, and alternative to, the Western diet and way of eating, indeed to the whole ever-more-desperate Western way of life. Slow Food aims to elevate quality over quantity and believes that doing so depends on cultivating our sense of taste as well as rebuilding the relationships between producers and consumers that the industrialization of our food has destroyed. “Food quality depends on consumers who respect the work of farmers and are willing to educate their senses,” Carlo Petrini, Slow Food’s founder, has said. When that happens, “they become precious allies for producers.” Even connoisseurship can have a politics, as when it deepens our appreciation for the work of the people who produce our food and ruins our taste for the superficial pleasures of fast food.

It is no accident that Slow Food has its roots in Italy, a country much less enamored of the “folly of Fast Life” than the United States, and you have to wonder whether it’s realistic to think the American way of eating can be reformed without also reforming the whole American way of life. Fast food is precisely the way you’d expect a people to eat who put success at the center of life, who work long hours (with two careers per household), get only a couple of weeks vacation each year, and who can’t depend on a social safety net to cushion them from life’s blows. But Slow Food’s wager is that making time and slowing down to eat, an activity that happens three times a day and ramifies all through a culture, is precisely the wedge that can begin to crack the whole edifice.

To eat slowly, in the Slow Food sense, is to eat with a fuller knowledge of all that is involved in bringing food out of the earth and to the table. Undeniably, there are pleasures to be had eating that are based on the opposite—on knowing precious little; indeed, they sometimes depend on it. The fast-food hamburger has been brilliantly engineered to offer a succulent and tasty first bite, a bite that in fact would be impossible to enjoy if the eater could accurately picture the feedlot and the slaughterhouse and the workers behind it or knew anything about the “artificial grill flavor” that made that first bite so convincing. This is a hamburger to hurry through, no question. By comparison, eating a grass-fed burger when you can picture the green pastures in which the animal grazed is a pleasure of another order, not a simple one, to be sure, but one based on knowledge rather than ignorance and gratitude rather than indifference.

To eat slowly, then, also means to eat deliberately, in the original sense of that word: “from freedom” instead of compulsion. Many food cultures, particularly those at less of a remove from the land than ours, have rituals to encourage this sort of eating, such as offering a blessing over the food or saying grace before the meal. The point, it seems to me, is to make sure that we don’t eat thoughtlessly or hurriedly, and that knowledge and gratitude will inflect our pleasure at the table. I don’t ordinarily offer any special words before a meal, but I do sometimes recall a couple of sentences written by Wendell Berry, which do a good job of getting me to eat more deliberately:

Words such as these are one good way to foster a more deliberate kind of eating, but perhaps an even better way (as Berry himself has suggested) is for eaters to involve themselves in food production to whatever extent they can, even if that only means planting a few herbs on a sunny windowsill or foraging for edible greens and wild mushrooms in the park. If much of our carelessness in eating owes to the ease with which the industrial eater can simply forget all that is at stake, both for himself and for the world, then getting reacquainted with how food is grown and prepared can provide a useful reminder. So one last rule:

COOK AND, IF YOU CAN, PLANT A GARDEN. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be fast, cheap, and easy; that food is a product of industry, not nature; that food is fuel, and not a form of communion, with other people as well as with other species—with nature.

So far I am more at home in the garden than the kitchen, though I can appreciate how time spent in either place alters one’s relationship to food and eating. The garden offers a great many solutions, practical as well as philosophical, to the whole problem of eating well. My own vegetable garden is modest in scale—a densely planted patch in the front yard only about twenty feet by ten—but it yields an astonishing cornucopia of produce, so much so that during the summer months we discontinue our CSA box and buy little but fruit from the farmers’ market. And though we live on a postage-stamp city lot, there’s room enough for a couple of fruit trees too: a lemon, a fig, and a persimmon. To the problem of being able to afford high-quality organic produce the garden offers the most straightforward solution: The food you grow yourself is fresher than any you can buy, and it costs nothing but an hour or two of work each week plus the price of a few packets of seed.

The work of growing food contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it, of course, but there is something particularly fitting about enlisting your body in its own sustenance. Much of what we call recreation or exercise consists of pointless physical labor, so it is especially satisfying when we can give that labor a point. But gardening consists of mental work as well: learning about the different varieties; figuring out which do best under the conditions of your garden; acquainting yourself with the various microclimates—the subtle differences in light, moisture, and soil quality across even the tiniest patch of earth; and devising ways to outwit pests without resorting to chemicals. None of this work is terribly difficult; much of it is endlessly gratifying, and never more so than in the hour immediately before dinner, when I take a knife and a basket out to the garden to harvest whatever has declared itself ripest and tastiest.

Among other things, tending a garden reminds us of our ancient evolutionary bargain with these ingenious domestic species—how cleverly they insinuate themselves into our lives, repaying the care and space we give them with the gift of good food. Each has its own way of announcing—through a change of color, shape, smell, texture, or taste—that the moment when it has the very most to offer us, when it is at its sweetest and most nourishing, has arrived: Pick me!

Not that everything in the garden always works out so well; it doesn’t, but there is a value in the inevitable failures too. Whenever your produce is anything less than gorgeous and delicious, gardening cultivates in you a deep respect for the skill of the farmer who knows how consistently to get it right.

When the basket of produce lands on the kitchen counter, when we start in on the cleaning and cutting and chopping, we’re thinking about a dozen different things—what to make, how to make it—but nutrition, or even health, is probably not high on the list. Look at this food. There are no ingredients labels, no health claims, nothing to read except maybe a recipe. It’s hard when contemplating such produce to think in terms of nutrients or chemical compounds; no, this is food, so fresh it’s still alive, communicating with us by scent and color and taste. The good cook takes in all this sensory information and only then decides what to do with the basket of possibilities on the counter: what to combine it with; how, and how much, to “process” it. Now the culture of the kitchen takes over. That culture is embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, any one of which contains more wisdom about diet and health than you will find in any nutrition journal or journalism. The cook does not need to know, as the scientists have recently informed us, that cooking the tomatoes with olive oil makes the lycopene in them more available to our bodies. No, the cook already knew that olive oil with tomatoes is a really good idea.

As cook in your kitchen you enjoy an omniscience about your food that no amount of supermarket study or label reading could hope to match. Having retaken control of the meal from the food scientists and processors, you know exactly what is and is not in it: There are no questions about high-fructose corn syrup, or ethoxylated diglycerides, or partially hydrogenated soy oil, for the simple reason that you didn’t ethoxylate or partially hydrogenate anything, nor did you add any additives. (Unless, that is, you’re the kind of cook who starts with a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, in which case all bets are off.) To reclaim this much control over one’s food, to take it back from industry and science, is no small thing; indeed, in our time cooking from scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts.

And what these acts subvert is nutritionism: the belief that food is foremost about nutrition and nutrition is so complex that only experts and industry can possibly supply it. When you’re cooking with food as alive as this—these gorgeous and semigorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh—you’re in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, or a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients. No, in the eye of the cook or the gardener or the farmer who grew it, this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on the other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight. I’m thinking of the relationship between the plants and the soil, between the grower and the plants and animals he or she tends, between the cook and the growers who supply the ingredients, and between the cook and the people who will soon come to the table to enjoy the meal. It is a large community to nourish and be nourished by. The cook in the kitchen preparing a meal from plants and animals at the end of this shortest of food chains has a great many things to worry about, but “health” is simply not one of them, because it is given.