Eating in the U.S.: "Demanding an Infinite Variety of Insane Things"

The U.S.’s modern, industrial food system is crazy — its environmental and health costs are just too high given our struggles to handle climate change, an obesity epidemic and a health insurance crisis.

The way we approach food in this country reminds me of a line from Mark Helprin’s novel Winter’s Tale, describing a dysfunctional newspaper office: “It crawled with absolutely serious people demanding an infinite variety of insane things.”

For example, we demand mountains of food to be available all the time. We are so manic about having an overabundance that we don't care that much of it is "food-like substances," or that much of it ends up being wasted.

A recent study published in PLoS ONE reported that the amount of food wasted per capita in the U.S. has increased by half since 1974. It is madness to produce so much more food than we can consume — especially unhealthy food from an industrial system run on petroleum — in a world threatened by dwindling resources and plagued by consumption-related health problems.

Not only do we want a lot of food, we also demand to have our every whim satisfied. If we want asparagus and oranges in December, by George, we should be able to have them. If Floridians want to eat fresh Alaskan salmon, well by all means someone should ship it to them. And if we all want to eat meat at every meal and not go broke doing so, then cheap meat should be produced by any means.

We tend to sound like the notoriously entitled Veruca Salt from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”: “I want the works / I want the whole works / Presents and prizes and sweets and surprises / Of all shapes and sizes / And now / Don't care how / I want it now!”

Of course we all know what happens to Veruca: She's declared a bad egg sent down a chute to the bowels of the factory. Will we, too, plummet to our demise, or can we grow up fast?

The blossoming sustainable food movement has made progress in breaking down the you-can-have-it-all ethos, but deciding not to eat the out-of-season veggies or the shipped-from-afar seafood is restricted to being voluntary and virtuous act in a capitalist culture where, if somebody will buy, somebody will do whatever it takes to sell. If we couldn’t get our treats, I wonder how many who pay lip service to sustainability would balk at someone else restricting their choices instead of themselves opting out.

Until we develop a food culture that calls luxuries by their true name, I imagine the outcry at any deprivation will be very loud indeed. As Veruca sang, “if I don't get the things I am after / I'm going to scream!” But if we continue our demanding ways, we too will find ourselves going down the tubes.

Photo: C1ssou via flickr