Poison Food

Americans are seriously overweight. They are also, apparently, seriously unhealthy. Now, Robert Kennedy, Jr. who did not much care about the health of his second wife, one Mary Richardson Kennedy-- when he tried to destroy, as a tactic in a divorce negotiation, thus leading her to hang herself in the barn-- is going to help us solve it by removing some bad chemicals from children’s cereals.

So, cereal makers are poisoning our children and compromising everyone’s health. And lest we ignore it, pharmaceutical manufacturers are poisoning our minds by advertising the latest and greatest pill, advising us to rush out and inform our doctors that we know best, because we saw some ad.

Obviously, the issue of American obesity is well beyond my ken. If the condition requires a choice between gastric bypass surgery and a new pill, one might reasonably argue that the problem involves physiology and cannot be overcome by better diet and more exercise.

Surely, there are perfectly appropriate uses for the new drugs. The problem is that we have been told that they will solve everyone’s weight problem, to the exclusion of other treatments.

It’s one thing to say that some people are suffering a metabolic disturbance. It’s quite another to say that everyone should be taking a pill to control weight. 

So, Heather Mac Donald suggests that we are losing sight of the simple fact that healthier behavioral habits can do wonders for our weight. 

As she sees it, chronic obesity, as a societal issue, is a cultural issue. We eat too much and exercise too little:

We are to believe that the sharp rise of obesity in the U.S. over the last several decades is due to genetic changes in Americans’ susceptibility to weight gain. To portray obesity as something brought on by behavior—overeating and under exercising—is to blame the victim and to commit “fat-shaming.”

To what extent is obesity a function of bad habits? To some extent it must be. If, as Aristotle once said, the cure for bad habits is to develop good replacement habits, then our relationship with our appetites should not always be considered a biomedical issue. Besides, there are degrees of overweight:

By medicalizing behavioral issues, the elites transfer power from the individual to themselves, the dispensers of technocratic responses to social problems.

The recent alteration in the Anglosphere’s diet and lifestyle is massive and obvious, however: snacking throughout the day, a diet of highly sweetened processed foods, and a lack of exercise or even of merely walking modest distances. 

To state the obvious, food consumption is a social ritual. It is not equivalent to shooting up nutrients. True enough, chemicals are involved, but there is more to it than chemistry.

 Environmental litigation focuses obsessively on chemicals. Kennedy ties Americans’ worsening health to those chemicals. He is fixated on the dyes that make processed junk food more brilliant. He wants to get rid of the artificial coloring in Froot Loops. He wants more regulation of preservatives and pesticides.

But, Mac Donald has an alternative. Don’t feed your children Froot Loops. Simple and direct. How come no one else thought of this.

Rather than coloring Froot Loops with “natural” dyes, as Kennedy suggests, a better course would be to persuade parents not to feed their children Froot Loops in the first place. 

Mac Donald recommends that we reconsider what we have done to the rituals surrounding food consumption. We know that children who participate in regular family dinners tend to have superior mental health. 

Worse yet, the alternative to excessive snacking is home cooking. Naturally, our culture does not approve of it. Surely, feminists do not approve of it. 

Family dinners socialize children, to their benefit. One suspects that it moderates appetite. It is far more difficult to scarf down a bunch of cupcakes when other people are witnessing your  bad behavior.

Kennedy should make the case for home cooking—for mothers actually preparing meals for their families, rather than leaving their children to wolf down the contents of cellophane packs or to microwave frozen pizza whenever those children can tear themselves away from their screens. (Sitting down to a cooked family meal is also a means of socializing children. Feminists scorn such domestic activities as a sneaky means of diverting females from the partner track.)

So, it’s about discipline, but especially about ritualizing food consumption.

Understandably, Big Food wants us to eat as much of its products as we can stuff down our stomachs before bursting. The solution to its blandishments is not more regulation but more self-discipline. Nor are costly drugs, with their inevitable side effects, necessary to reduce obesity.

Of course, there is the problem of appetite. The therapy world tells people who have eating disorders to eat when they feel hungry. It’s a bow to the goddess of appetite.

The trouble is, unless every member of your family feels hungry at precisely the same time, this so-called rule will make family dinners impossible.

So, let’s introduce a new rule: eat when it’s time to eat. Eat when everyone has gotten together around the table to partake of the repast. Make dinner a social bonding ritual, not merely a nutritional issue.

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