Compared to even five years ago, the quantities in which confectionery is marketed are obscene. Oversized chocolate bars are nothing new, but I was stunned recently at my nearest supermarket to see Snickers chocolate being sold not by the bar, not even by the supersized bar, but by the metre, consisting of ten bars joined together: 2,340 calories of chocolate, on special offer for £1. If that is not an incitement to overeat, I don’t know what is.
Encouraging us to buy more food than we intend or need is a large part of the business strategy of all the major food companies. Until the mid-1990s, Hank Cardello advised some of the biggest food producers in the world. Cardello reveals that the mantra of the packaged food companies was that ‘you could make Americans eat just about anything, so long as you sold it right’. When the Western appetite for packaged foods finally started to reach saturation point, the industry moved on to new markets overseas. In developing and middle-income countries, branded food now hunts people down even in the privacy of their own homes. Through direct sales, multinational food companies are aggressively targeting low-income customers in some of the world’s remotest villages.8
It isn’t that food executives are evil people who actively set out to make their customers obese. But as Cardello has explained, for too long, the wellbeing of consumers simply didn’t figure in the calculations of the big food and beverage companies that he worked with. ‘All we thought about was market expansion and our own bottom line.’9 Food and beverage manufacturers explicitly talk among themselves of ‘heavy users’ as representing their key clientele: when it comes to sugary drinks and sweets, 80 per cent of the product is bought by just 20 per cent of the customers. ‘Heavy user’ is industry speak for people suffering from binge-eating disorder.
Yet junk food is far from the only cause of obesity, whose roots are complex and multifaceted. Across the board, across all social classes, most of us eat and drink more than our grandparents did, whether we are cooking a leisurely dinner at home from fresh ingredients or grabbing a quick takeaway from a fast food chain. Plates are bigger than they were fifty years ago, our idea of a portion is inflated and wine glasses are vast. It’s become normal to punctuate the day with snacks and to quench our thirst with a series of calorific liquids, from green juice and detox shots to craft sodas. You can gain weight eating expensive organic artisanal apple tarts and huge mugs of milky coffee just as easily as you can eating cheap fried chicken and Coke. As the example of grapes shows, we don’t just eat more burgers and fries than our grandparents. We also eat more fruit and more granola bars; more avocado toast and more frozen yoghurt; more salad dressing and many, many more ‘guilt-free’ kale chips.
Almost every country in the world has experienced radical changes to its patterns of eating over the past five, ten and fifty years. For a long time, nutritionists have held up the ‘Mediterranean diet’ as a healthy model for people in all countries to follow. But recent reports from the World Health Organisation suggest that even in Spain, Italy and Crete, most children no longer eat anything like a ‘Mediterranean diet’ rich in olive oil and fish and tomatoes.10 These Mediterranean children, who are, as of 2017, among the most overweight in Europe, now drink sugary colas and eat packaged snack foods and have lost the taste for fish and olive oil. In every continent, there has been a common set of changes from savoury foods to sweet ones, from meals to snacks, from small independent food shops to giant supermarkets, from dinners cooked at home to meals eaten out, or takeaways.
Close to 10 per cent of preschool children in developed countries such as Australia now suffer from some kind of food allergy, ranging from shellfish to eggs and nuts. These can be scary and confusing times in which to eat, made still scarier by the fact that there are so many ‘experts’ out there selling us fear of food and fad cures. Times of transition have always been a gift to confidence tricksters.11 When everything seems to be changing and we can no longer rely on the truths of the past, we become vulnerable to hucksters. Some diet gurus tell us to beware all grains; others tell us that we should fear supposedly ‘acid-producing’ foods ranging from dairy to meat and coffee. These new diets are perhaps best seen as a dysfunctional response to a still more dysfunctional food supply: a false promise of purity in a toxic world. Meanwhile, eating disorders are on the rise across the world, among men as well as women.
Happiness at the table entails making your peace with food, and so it’s a worrying development that eating now is so often treated as an all-or-nothing game. Food has never been so angrily polarised into virtues and vices, elixirs and poisons. On a single street in a single town there will be some people eating giant burgers toppling with many layers of meat and sauces and others eating supposedly perfect meals of kale and seaweed with fermented kombucha to drink. There are gurus telling us to avoid gluten ‘just in case’ and others teaching us to be frightened of cheese. I worry that in many cases, our pursuit of the perfect meal has become the enemy of the good-enough meal. While we fixate on this or that wonder ingredient, the thing that seems to be in short supply now is the everyday, unglamorous home-cooked dinner.
Part of the problem is that we have lost our trust in our own senses to tell us what to eat. We wouldn’t be such easy prey for extreme diets if we could recognise food when it’s right underneath our noses. Humans seem to have become – both collectively and individually – very poor at identifying food when we see it, partly because so much of what our culture offers up for us to taste is so heavily packaged and disguised.
If we have lost knowledge about what we are actually eating, we have also lost the old norms regarding how to eat it. Sometimes this looks like freedom; sometimes like chaos. In 1958, survey data suggests, nearly three-quarters of British adults drank hot tea with the evening meal, because this was the expected way to behave. Now, such shared expectations about food have largely vanished. Who can say for certain when ‘lunch time’ is any more? This generation has lived through revolutionary changes not just in what we eat but how we eat it. Our appetites used to be held in place by a series of invisible threads, rituals which told us how to behave when we held a knife and fork. Now, the rituals are mostly gone; and so are the knives and forks.
The nutrient content of our meals is one thing that has radically changed; the psychology of eating is another. Much of our eating takes place in a new chaotic atmosphere in which we no longer have many rules to fall back on. The problem is partly that cooking at home from raw ingredients is no longer the unquestioned daily routine that it once was. One of the functions of traditional cuisines was to create a common understanding of what ingredients could and couldn’t be combined. Sometimes, these rules could feel restrictive and annoying, such as the Italian insistence that fish and cheese can never enhance each other (tell that to the person who has just enjoyed a delicious fish pie with cheddar cheese on top). But at least these culinary rules gave a sense of structure to our eating, whether you obeyed them or not. Now, many of us are eating with no structure to guide us, as the day passes in a blur of bizarre snacks. When I interviewed a product developer for a major UK supermarket in 2017, she said that the main way that British eating behaviour had changed over the past decade was that people had become so erratic and hard to categorise. In a single basket of food, shoppers oscillate wildly between vegan health foods such as oat milk and meat-heavy ‘dude food’ such as pizzas topped with pulled pork.
On an early evening train journey recently, I looked up at my fellow travellers and noticed, first, that almost everyone was eating or drinking and second, that they were all doing so in ways that might once have been considered deeply eccentric. One man had both a cappuccino and a can of fizzy drink from which he was taking alternate sips. A woman with headphones on was nibbling an apricot tart, produced from a cardboard patisserie box. She followed it with a high-protein snackpot of two hard-boiled eggs and some raw spinach. Sitting across from her was a man carrying a worn leather briefcase. He reached inside the case and produced a bottle of strawberry milkshake and a half-finished packet of chocolate-caramel sweets.
Like other modern eaters, these travellers were improvising their own food rules as they went along. The most surprising thing about this scene – which took place between Birmingham and London – is that it could have happened on a train between cities almost anywhere. As I first embarked on this book, my plan was to explore how people eat in very different ways around the world. But as I met people from different