The comment below from another diary struck me. I was initially planning to reply, but my thoughts super-sized themselves into a diary-sized piece. Anyway:
"Pick an appetizer. What's in Buffalo wings? You start with the fatty part of the chicken. Many times it's fried in the manufacturing plant first. It's fried again in the restaurant. That red sauce? Sugar and fat. That creamy sauce? Fat and salt.
And man, is that delicious. Come on --- even here in Buffalo, nobody eats chicken wings often enough to make an overall difference to his health. The kind food we eat is a relatively minor factor in our nutrition: far more important is the sheer amount. Compare our diets with those of the French: their diet consists of fatty cheese, wine, and various dishes with fatty cream sauces. (And don't get me started on the dessert.) Yet they are fit --- and it's because they look at food differently.
America's problem isn't the burger, but that it comes with two patties, three buns, and enough potatoes to feed 1840s Ireland. Our culture, far from limiting portions, encourages enlarging them. The quintessentially American idea is: "more is better, especially if I can get a good deal on it". Below the fold, I try to explore what makes food different.
Restaurants portions are nearly always too large, at least at places most people can afford to eat. I'm no twig, but I almost always feel the need to take half the meal home with me. Now, I'm not blaming restaurants, because huge portions are good business. It's our culture making huge portions good business that's the problem.
I have typical working-class parents. When I was a kid, my mother told me to "clean my plate" because "wasting food is a sin". Is it any wonder I was overweight as a child? I still feel a twinge of... guilt, maybe, when I place a napkin over whatever portion I don't finish.
My mother, even today, makes gigantic meals I can't possibly finish, and tries to guilt me into finishing them when I'm home. It's as refusing food is a refutation of love. "I'm stuffed." "But won't you please try the lasagna?"
You might laugh, and say, "well, that's what mothers do!" Well, you're right, but if you pause for a moment, you'll realize that's actually indicative of the problem: we revere food. We have a holiday dedicated to stuffing ourselves to the gills. The idea of eternal plenty is as American as a Norman Rockwell painting, and this deep reverence for providing is embedded deep in our culture. When my mother serves me a 3,000 calorie meal, she's not thinking about fulfilling my dietary needs for the day, but trying to use that underlying cultural motif of plenty to strengthen the bond between us. A full plate is a symbol of strength, of intimacy, and of success. To reject food is to reject this cultural idea, and reject the deep undercurrents of family, God, and America.
That idolization of "plenty", with the advent of practically limitless food, has become a cultural albatross around our necks (and our waists). Is it any wonder that obesity is most prevalent in the very areas of the nation that we consider most traditional?
Look, you can advocate healthy foods all you want, and that might do a few people some good. But most people are aware of basic dietary principles, yet ignore them. As much as the idea appeals to our technocratic instincts, dispassionate scientific education is powerless against ingrained culture and primordial instinct. Contrary to popular belief, Americans are not stupid, and of course we rationally know that soda will make us fat and that deep fried turkey will clog our hearts. Yet when it comes time to eat, that part of our brains just isn't what guides us. Instead, it's the animal instinct, modulated by cultural influences buried deep enough to work, that make us, at Subway, reach for the chips and not the apple.
Only in quiet contemplation do we later entertain the notion that we might have made a bad choice. We scarcely remember the powerful urge that drove us to do the thing we know is wrong, and in Sisyphean frustraction we exclaim, perhaps at the perfectly sculpted forms dancing across our televisions, "why can't I just lose weight?"
Dispassionate scientific education about food does nothing to address this problem. All the rational knowledge in the world will not have the typical American eat organic kale on wheat flatbread for lunch, nor will it allow someone to stick to the celery sticks on game day. The problem is in a completely different cognitive regime.
The obesity problem is only amenable to a cultural solution. We need to instill the notion that more is not better, that the horn of plenty is a barbed hook, and that obesity is as pernicious as smoking. In fact, we need to take a lesson from the anti-tobacco people and start focusing on forming an emotional connection between overeating and guilt, and cast the obese as victims of an addictive substance. We need to remind people that overeating leads to obesity, not in some divorced context, but right at the moment of consumption. Nutrition labels should be more prominent, and instead of abstract "calories", should just the amount of weight a typical person can expect to gain. Fast food restaurants ought to have calories (or weights) on their menus. Public service advertisements should focus on actually repulsing people, perhaps by showing the horrific consequences of morbid obesity and associated diseases, all juxtaposed with images of heaping plates.
Eventually, we can counter our tradition of supposing that when it comes to food, that more is always hearty and good. Perhaps we'll see fewer supermarket frozen dinners with "OVER ONE POUND OF FOOD" on the front, and we'll look at people buying such things with the same mixture of pity and disdain we feel when we see someone coughing his lungs up outside a bar while reaching for his lighter. Maybe at restaurants, appetizers will become appetizer-sized, and normal people can finish the dinners. It might be anti-American, but it's pro-Americans.