Hungry (14 page)

In the twenty-first century, we see so many food products that it is prudent to draw fences around certain of them and say, “I don’t go there.” We need the “I don’t eat” routine so we can pare down the possibilities. In
Mindless Eating
, food scientist Brian Wansink calculated that the average person makes more than two hundred food decisions per day. If even one of those choices didn’t have limits, life would be impossible.

Have we all gotten a little carried away? When silly as well as legitimate reasons for avoiding food become central to our identities, my theory is that we’re all a little eating disordered. We are what we don’t eat.

In some countries, such as Japan, individuals mainly want to fit in and be like everyone else, and their diets follow suit. America is the opposite. We are all special, and we all have special dietary requirements.

In Silicon Valley, dietary variation is a commonplace cost of business for large companies and meeting and event planners. The giant Cisco Systems has cafeterias that meet Muslims’ halal requirements. Google became renowned for its seasonal, local, organic food and its celebrity chef, Charlie Ayers. When he left Google to open a restaurant based on the Google philosophy, it took the company a year and a half to find a replacement who met all of the requirements: five years as a sous chef and three years as an executive chef, plus experience preparing ethnic and vegetarian cuisine using organic ingredients. They would need these skills, the job posting said, to cook an “eclectic menu capable of suiting every Googler palate, from vegan entrées to pad Thai, grilled burgers, and wood-fired pizza.”

Of course there are serious health concerns that cause people to reject certain foods, such as lactose-intolerance, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, gluten intolerance, and food allergies. People with allergies commonly avoid milk products, wheat gluten, a particular spice, and most notably, peanuts. Parents didn’t need salmonella to add to their worries about peanut butter. Once a parent hears about anaphylaxis, a life-threatening reaction to peanuts that requires an emergency injection of adrenaline, she becomes very cautious.

With these and more to keep in mind, home cooks and anyone in the hospitality industry might as well subscribe to
Prevention
magazine. Restaurants receive all manner of special requests and interrogations about ingredients. Menus often encourage this, to avoid poisoning the diner and the expensive lawsuit that would result. Diners with serious food issues may know enough to mention them when they make a reservation. Or to inquire about the ingredients before they order a dish. At Manresa, consistently the top-rated restaurant in Silicon Valley, diners have used a card that says, “Hi, I’m eating at your restaurant, and I’m looking forward to my meal. These food groups will make me severely ill and will be life-threatening.” Those foods tend to be onions, mushrooms, garlic, oil, and nuts, says chef-owner David Kinch, who photocopies the card for every station in the kitchen.

Other restaurants have received instructions for “nothing acidic,” “no yeast,” “nothing fermented,” “no seeds,” “some kinds of squashes but not others,” Lessley Anderson wrote on the foodie website Chow.

And dinner parties, phew, what a headache. Evite should add a box for “Guest Doesn’t Eat X.” Guests may say, “Oh, don’t make anything special for me,” and mean, “Just don’t make anything that’s going to gross me out.” Now, do you have to ask every guest if he or she is a vegetarian, and if so what type? The etiquette is evolving.

In an email from Panama, nutritionist Marion Nestle told me about attending a pig roast. “The host told me later that several people complained they don’t eat pork,” Nestle wrote. “They, of course, had been specifically invited to a pig roast, and there were plenty of other things eat.”

In my little circle, Lia is lactose-intolerant, Cathleen can’t have wheat gluten, Ellen has a violent reaction to cinnamon. Ellen’s husband, Neal, is a pescatarian and eats tomatoes cooked but never raw. If possible, he’s fine with picking out the tomatoes. Just having them in the vicinity, even touching the lettuce, doesn’t spoil the salad for him. If we served paella, though, most likely we would leave out the pork, just as people who know Ned know to leave the nuts out of cookies and cakes. Ned hates nuts as ingredients but if you put out a bowl of salted Marcona almonds, watch out. What he hates is the textural interference of nuts in food. They disrupt the chewy landscape of brownies, the creaminess of puddings and ice creams.

Food preferences and aversions like Neal’s and Ned’s often get established in childhood. Ned recalls, “Maybe it was religious. I went to a Jewish preschool and hated it because they often served nuts in lunch foods.” Because of the nuts and equally appalling raisins, Ned’s whole preschool memory is painful.

Parents are cautioned to respect strong food dislikes, and to keep in mind that while food is prepared and offered with love, children naturally reject some of it. Control and rebellion are powerful motivators. Don’t be like the Himmels with their finicky first child, hovering and fretting at every occasion, so that Jacob became the One Who Didn’t Eat. Or the older Himmels with their finicky second child, Ned Who Doesn’t Eat Nuts, for whom special cakes were baked.

 

 

 

But why do these food quirks stick around, long after they’ve outlived their youthful usefulness? I had to wonder if biology somehow cemented those feelings into our sense of self. Scientists are finding that more and more human traits and behaviors are based in organic life processes, rather coming strictly from experience or choice. Nearby at Stanford University, preeminent neurobiology professor Robert Sapolsky was the one to ask. Sapolsky studies the biology of every important human behavior, from people who can’t stop working eighty hours a week to those who won’t eat sushi.

Sapolsky has found that adolescence and early adulthood are the ages when humans and other primates enjoy novelty. And for music and fashion as well as food, that window snaps shut around age thirty-nine. A prolific author and MacArthur “genius” fellow, Sapolsky did a study of fifty sushi restaurants in the Midwest and found that if an adult hadn’t voluntarily tried sushi by age thirty-nine, there was a ninety-five percent chance he or she never would. While culture and psychology are the usual suspects, Sapolsky sees biology at work. “It is a rare adult monkey who would try a new food. When you see the same thing in a rat, you’re looking at biology,” he said. Sapolsky summed up the human quandary in a 1998 piece for the
New Yorker
: “If I’m actually going to die someday, I’m sure not going to waste any of my finite number of meals on some new food that I turn out not to like.” Extrapolating on my own, I figure that biological imperative could have something to do with why we hang on to childhood aversions as well. “If I already know I don’t like black licorice, why bother? There are lots of other chewy sweets.”

As for the current American “I don’t eat” phenomenon, biologist Sapolsky suspects culture and psychology. “I don’t eat” is not something you hear much in other countries, most of which don’t have as many choices. Looking at France, which though more multicultural than it used to be is still a lot more homogeneous than the United States, Sapolsky told me in an email, “I’d say that we are more varied in the what-we-eat department, and maybe even more so, what-we-don’t-eat than the French because we are more heterogeneous culturally. Beyond stuff like hamburgers and pizza, it’s not that we’re great individualists but, rather, lots of us follow an ethnic cuisine that is as defined as is the national cuisine for France.” Americans exercise their freedom of food choice in myriad avoidances: pork for Muslims and Jews; meat for people of South Indian heritage; milk for the lactose-intolerant; bread, pasta, and soy products for the gluten-allergic.

Rather than an expression of our uniqueness, Sapolsky sees long-term planning as the reason for refusing certain foods. “If I had to guess what that’s about, psychologically, it’s because we Americans secretly believe that we can live forever, and somewhere in that irrationality and denial is, among other things, the phrase ‘If we only eat right.’ So we are battling appetite for, if not our immortal souls, our immortality. Okay, that’s a little sarcastic. But something emotionally like that.”

Is there something in human biology that’s programmed to spend a certain amount of time obsessing about food? Planning, preparing, eating, and dieting take a big bite out of one’s day. Are we just hungry hunter-gatherers in new clothes?

Sapolsky eviscerates that little theory, because even the hunter-gatherers had other things on their minds. “From what we know of hunter-gatherers, and given the freedom to extrapolate backward, with ninety-nine percent of human history spent in small huntergatherer groups, there was probably not all that much pressure to get yourself fed. Traditional rainforest hunter-gatherers spent only thirty percent of their time or so getting their day’s calories. I don’t think it has been bred into us as a major obsession.”

I was looking forward to blaming everything—food obsession, the way we stick with childhood aversions as adults, the national negativity about food—on biology, but it wasn’t going to happen. As Nestle put it, “People do have these things but they usually are socially constructed, not biological. And they can change.”

 

 

 

In the sixties, a lot of people did change their eating habits. “You are what you eat” became a mantra, widely accepted to mean that a person’s mental, physical, and emotional health depended on putting good substances into his body. As Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote in
The Physiology of Taste
, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.” By that he meant that personality and character were revealed at the dinner table. Later that century, Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach wrote in his essay “Concerning Spiritualism and Materialism”: “A man is what he eats.” In 1942, nutritionist Victor Lindlahr adapted the phrase to title his book,
You Are What You Eat: How to Win and Keep Health with Diet
, an explication of the “catabolic diet”—eating foods that, he claimed, take more calories to digest than they contain.

“You are what you eat” hung around to inform America’s foodie revolution, long after other sixties sayings fell away. (Such as “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.”) In the seventies, fresh, seasonal, and organic became the watchwords of foodie faith. Sustainable and local came later.

We speak all these noble words, and their accompanying food philosophies are sound—good for our bodies and for the environment. But when we get specific, often we speak in terms of rejection. Instead of enjoying the bounty of the earth, we push food away, and make a lot of noise about it.

For children, “I don’t eat X” is a sure path to family celebrity. Chelsea is the child who doesn’t eat eggs, not because of an allergy, just because she’s appalled by the idea of eggs. Everyone will remember Mom and Dad buying a special egg substitute product for Chelsea, and that she suffered noisily with cereal when they went elsewhere for breakfast. Not even Chelsea remembers how the egg thing started, but she became the One Who Doesn’t Eat Eggs. As with eating disorders, she got attention and power.

Nutritionists tell parents not to fret, that all children refuse food and that many reject foods they’ve never had (which is everything, but still, don’t get alarmed). In the trade, saying no to new is called
food neophobia
, a developmental stage that should end by age five and pick up again in adolescence.

That’s a relief. But nutritional advice often changes, conflicts, and gives parents even more to worry about. Consulting
Finicky Eaters: What to Do When Kids Won’t Eat!
I learned: “It is not unusual for our daily lives and family mealtime environments to be chaotic and stressful. Environmental stressors can develop from a variety of sources, including chaotic work schedules, cultural beliefs around eating, and the diagnosis of a developmental disability. Family schedules and mealtimes have become increasingly chaotic as children have become involved with more extracurricular activities and parental work schedules are more varied than in the past.” I couldn’t help noticing the word
chaos
or
chaotic
in every sentence.

The calm, rational adult follows what Susan Baker, MD, and Roberta Henry, RD, write in
Parents’ Guide to Nutrition
: