foodperson.com

A friend sent me a link today to a slide show on the Time magazine website, and that link led me to discover a whole “special report” on The Way We Eat. It’s worth reading, and the slide show of families’ food around the world is worth watching. (It’s from Peter Menzel’s book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats.)

The way we eat is a subject that fascinates me on many different levels, from “how can anybody eat that crap all the time?” (in reference to the a heavily processed food and fast food that has helped pack the pounds on the U.S. populace) to “how can people stand to be so overweight?” The inconvenience alone is enough to make me want to stay thin.

This set of articles attempts to tackle a bunch of related questions, looking particularly at “The Science of Appetite.” The report doesn’t have all the answers (beyond the implied standard to consume fewer calories than you expend if you want to lose weight), although it does offer clues as to what triggers our appetite and tips for satisfying it with fewer calories.

It’s all very interesting, and, of course, complicated by the ongoing bugaboo of farm policy that makes bad food (that is, high calorie, low nutrition) significantly cheaper than good food (low cal, high nutritive values).

I’m not sure what my point is here, but as someone who loves food, it makes me sad to see that fast, homogeneous, bad food is becoming more and more the norm. It’s as if in the drive to get more done people’s taste buds have become hypersensitive to anything but very fatty, salty foods, which taste just great to them. Maybe future anthropologists will shake their heads at this maladaptive behavior.

Anyway, take a look at the articles. View the slide show. However much we might like to think otherwise, we aren’t rational beings, at least when it comes to our food. I’d be very interested to know your impressions.