No diet, no detox: how to relearn the art of eating
The Guardian | Bee Wilson | 5 January 2015
Abstract: Once you recognise the simple fact that food preferences are learned, many of the ways we approach eating start to look a little weird. To take a small example, consider the parents who go to great lengths to “hide” vegetables in children’s meals. Is broccoli really so terrible that it must be concealed from innocent minds? Whole cookbooks have been devoted to this arcane pursuit. It starts with the notion that children have an innate resistance to vegetables, and will only swallow them unawares, blitzed into pasta sauce or baked into sweet treats; they could never learn to love courgette for its own sake. We think we are being clever when we smuggle some beetroot into a cake. Ha! Tricked you into eating root vegetables! But since the child is not conscious that they are consuming beetroot, the main upshot is to entrench their liking for cake. A far cleverer thing would be to help children learn to become adults who choose vegetables consciously, of their own accord.
The question of how we learn to eat – both individually and collectively – is the key to how food, for so many people, has gone so badly wrong. The greatest public health problem of modern times is how to persuade people to make better food choices. But we have been looking for answers in the wrong places.
The way we eat is not a question of worthiness but of routine and preference, built over a lifespan
David L Katz of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center is a rare voice of sanity in the clamorous world of nutrition. He disputes the commonly held view that the reason we don’t eat better is because there is so much confusion over what the “best diet” really is. The medical evidence suggests that it doesn’t matter whether we reach this point via a low-fat route or a low-carb one (or vegan or paleo or just good old-fashioned home cooking). “Our problem,” notes Katz, “is not want of knowledge about the basic care and feeding of Homo Sapiens. Our problem is a stunning and tragically costly cultural reluctance – to swallow it.”
Take vegetables. The advice to eat more vegetables for health could hardly have been clearer. We have been given the message many times, in many forms. Many people, however, have absorbed the lesson from childhood that vegetables and pleasure – and more generally, healthy food and pleasure – can never go together. Consumer scientists have found that when a new product is described as “healthy”, it is far less likely to be a success than if it is described as “new”.
