Healthy Pleasures
Why can't American seem to figure out healthy eating? Is it because we too closely associate pleasure with guilt?
Americans aren’t well. We are more prone to chronic disease, obesity, and poor metabolic health than any of our economic peers. But our illness extends beyond physical health. We have lots of loneliness and accompanying mental struggles. We are a country obsessed with feeding our every impulse, but few of us seem to experience profound joy. I don’t know why that is, but I can’t help but see how this manifests in our eating.
Americans have a peculiar approach to health and eating. I work with an organization called Food Fight USA, where we advocate for cleaning up America’s food supply. My team does background research to help craft messages and determine the most effective approaches. Recently, I was in a meeting with my wonderful but savage GenZ co-worker. She is from the Philippines, and I couldn’t say enough good things about her. On this particular occasion, I went on and on about the balance between Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids. My coworker looked me dead in the eye and, with the most monotone voice, said, “This is all very American.”
I fell over with laughter. It was undeniably true.
Her point is that in every other country she’s lived, which is many, no one stresses about food the way Americans do, yet nearly all of these other countries have healthier diets. So why is it that Americans, with all our wealth and innovation, can’t seem to create a healthy, functional, pleasurable food culture?
Many if not most places in the world have generational food traditions that are connected to their geography and history. The influence of geography creates a set of ingredients and dishes that define a cuisine. Mexicans don’t just eat a a lot of chilis because they are tasty, but because chilis grow well in high-heat environments. Those sets of ingredients and dishes common to a community are passed down through generations and provide a vocabulary and language of what to eat.
However, American food functions fundamentally differently from other parts of the world. America’s food is shaped by ideas, not by a set of ingredients and dishes representative of the land that produces them. One of the ideas that shape American food is a specific medicalized perspective when it comes to “healthy” food. Our fixation on health in food follows a few specific trends. Food declared as healthy is usually novel, exotic, punitive, or all three. I’d argue the acai bowl is the peak fusion of these trends. (Acai bowls don’t taste good. I said what I said.)
Recently, novelties and exoticism have become huge trends in health innovations. Products declared as “Super Foods” promise to be cure-alls imported from faraway lands. Superfoods include pomegranates, kale, Brazil nuts, celery, and wild blueberries. Never mind the fact humans have been inhabiting every corner of this globe for millennia. I’m sure we can make it work even if we don’t have access to pomegranate juice.
We can’t ignore the puritanical and punitive mindset of health in the American psyche, either. Since the earliest colonial periods, Americans have been infatuated with diet as a route to good health and moral standing. Very often, the two are intermingled. Certain foods are “good for you,” but the meaning of that goodness is multi-dimensional. Food isn’t merely nutritionally sound but adopts a moral signifier as well.
Colonial Puritans published cookbooks that promoted more plain food. According to them, food shouldn’t be too flavorful. (A theme we see in current health conversations. Steam chicken and broccoli anyone?) The lack of spice was considered easier for digestion and displayed a lack of indulgence. We might want to disregard these cooks of the past, the fact is that their food tradition became the infrastructure of mainstream American cooking. Dishes like baked beans and mashed potatoes are still alive today. I think it’s not unimaginable that if their dishes lived on, so do many of their ideas.
This pattern of consuming foods that aren’t necessarily delicious but because they are “good for you” continues today. Wheatgrass juice is a recent example that comes to mind. Wheatgrass tastes awful, but people went crazy because of its perceived health benefits.
Many Americans view eating healthy as a testament to moral character. That’s why healthy eating is typically put into restrictive terms. People define healthy eating by what they don’t eat, not by what they do eat. I’m gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan. I don’t eat seed oils. I don’t eat for certain hours of the day. We deprive ourselves to show off our force of will, but we convince ourselves that it’s just about health.
The vegetarian movement was initially so fueled by moral righteousness that vegetarians were notoriously terrible at cooking vegetables. It wasn’t a movement based on love for vegetables and the wonderful flavors we can derive from them. When done well, vegetables and vegetarian eating can delight the palate in arguably more interesting ways than just a slab of meat. I have made vegan dishes that had even the most beef-loving Texans come back for seconds. Heck, India has one of the most dynamic and delicious food cultures in the world, and nearly 40% of the population is vegetarian. But American vegetarianism was known for tough whole grains, mushy vegetables, and an obsession with things like Tofurky. The pitch wasn’t that vegetarianism was pleasurable but rather healthy and moral. The healthy bit and the moral bit absolutely intertwined.
This point of view pretends that our taste buds and instinctive eating patterns aren’t to be trusted. It presumes that we are different from all other animals and that our taste buds are uniquely dysfunctional and will betray us if we let them. People talk about their “Cheat days” when they allow themselves to eat food they like. But calling it cheating automatically puts it in moral terms. It’s today’s version of buying indulgences from the Church hundreds of years ago.
It seems that a healthy diet cannot coexist with a pleasurable one. Since health is viewed in moral terms, indulgence is antithetical to health, regardless of the contents of the items being eaten. We valorize steamed chicken rice and broccoli but don’t share the same love for roasted chicken and root vegetables with sourdough bread. Both have similar nutritional profiles, but I know what tastes better.
When we can eat almost anything, it becomes confusing to know what to eat. Michael Pollen called this the “Omnivore’s Dilemma.” So, we end up with a food culture of extremes. On the one hand, people are practically giving themselves an eating disorder as they obsess over the “goodness” of each food item they consume. On the other hand, a large group of people has given up because it's all too confusing, so they reach for the quick and easy, which generally doesn’t serve them either.
Our dual obsessions with healthy eating and junk food are two sides of the same coin. They are both outcomes of an overly moralistic, anti-pleasure food culture. Just as eating flavorless health food isn’t pleasurable, I’d argue a diet overly saturated in ultra-processed junk isn’t pleasurable either. I have been known to eat junk food on occasion. I always end those meals with an upset stomach and unsatisfied palate. No matter how much I eat, I always feel empty. There is something both physiological and emotional that seems not quite fulfilled.
I contend that when your palate isn’t wrecked by overconsumption of fake foods like ultra-processed foods or overly neurotic eating habits that are just a disguise for some moral penance, your tastes lead you to the nutritional profile your body needs.
Cravings are signals. They are your body trying to tell you what it needs, but it doesn’t know how to say “electrolytes,” so fruit comes to mind. There is this common phenomenon. People will go their entire lives never having eaten a raw oyster. Then they’ll have a few at a party or on vacation, and then suddenly, they crave the slimy suckers regularly. Why is that? Yes, oysters are delicious, but they are also high in zinc, B12, and selenium. So perhaps the consumption of oysters just unlocked a new way for the body to say it would be like some B12 or Selenium. Another example is many women will confess to craving a cheeseburger either right before or during menstruation. Why? The body is about to go through a tiring process involving blood loss. Fat, protein, and iron are all good things for the body to have on hand in that situation, and a cheeseburger fits the bill.
Our tastes are instructive, but they exist within a context. The food you eat is the only frame of reference your body has to connect what it needs biologically with the options available at the store. These signals become lost or misconstrued in a food culture that no longer trusts their own tastes. So, while a person who eats diverse foods might crave fruit when searching for electrolytes, a person who only eats ultra-processed food might crave a soda. Alternatively, a person who has taken the puritanical approach to a healthy diet and only sees their cravings as demons to be defeated can become so disconnected from tastes they don’t even know what they want.
But what if pleasurable food is the key to breaking this cycle? What would it look like if we put pleasure at the center of our food culture? Pleasure is not empty consumption or impulsiveness. It requires great work, but people have forgotten how to do that work. Because we don’t have a multi-generational food culture and we reinvent American cuisine every generation, people don’t have a quick frame of reference for making pleasurable meals or culinary traditions that feed body and soul. Even when we look to the past, the industrialization of food is baked into American food traditions at this point. I’ve seen people show off a stained old 3x5 index card with Grandma’s old recipe for strawberry cake and one of the ingredients was CoolWhip. Not whipped cream. CoolWhip was listed by brand name on this 30+ year-old recipe that was lovingly passed down.
So, where do we start to rebuild a pleasurable relationship with food? First, we acknowledge and celebrate that many healthy dishes are also delicious. SPICES, avocado, tomatoes, olive oil, sardines, oysters, chocolate, chilis, beef, pork. I could go on. All of those things are delicious and exist within a healthy diet. Additionally, we must reject the overly moralistic categorization of foods. There are no “good” foods nor “bad” foods. Food and the experiences around food either feed our body and soul or detract from that fulfillment. Eating fake food and being orthorexic both detract. And if our lunch today detracts from our fulfillment, then we are not moral failures. We simply missed an opportunity to have a little pleasure in our day. A big part of the way we create that pleasure is by celebrating the bounty of food we experience in our era of plenty. We tend to our ingredients with the loving act of cooking, knowing that we will create dishes that feed all parts of ourselves.
But pleasure is also connection. Food is best shared with others. Taking time to stop and cook and eat with our family, friends, and community is a daily ritual that must be nurtured—not just on major holidays but throughout the day, week, month, and year. There are not only social benefits to eating with others but also physiological ones. When we eat with others, we slow down. We take a break from putting food in our mouths to tell a story or ask questions. We have social cues about sharing to ensure everyone has enough before we get seconds (although seconds are fine if you’re still hungry.) And these rituals are how we teach the next generation how to cook and eat, thus cultivating that multi-generational cheat sheet to good eating.
Finally, my most “Woo” belief is that food is a spiritual act. When we eat, we also commune with nature and the cosmos. Food is the transformation of the sun's rays by the earth into the energy in our body, allowing us to experience the thrill of consciousness and living. This, too, is one of the great pleasures of food.
We can find health and pleasure in food. There is no need for guilt. In fact, pleasure can show us the way.