Convenient Food is Killing Us

The following is part-one of a three-part discourse that will first look briefly at trends within the food industry, and the associated diet led health epidemic in America. Part-two will assess biodynamic wines as small yet potential elements of a solution. The final part will be a comparative tasting between conventional and biodynamic wines. Stay tuned.

20th CENTURY CONVENIENCE
The first drive-in “restaurant” opened in Dallas in 1921. The TV dinner went mainstream in 1953. The microwave gained commercial traction in 1967. Starbucks opened its first drive-through in 1994. The first wine vending machine debuted in Harrisburg, PA in 2010. What do these culinary milestones have in common? One word: convenience.

Prior to the 20th century, food had been many things, but “convenient” was not one of them. Farmers sweat in fields, and cooks sweat in kitchens. Meals took time to plan and prepare. But things have changed. Now, immediate gratification foods are abundant, and oddly addicting. This is no accident.

GIVING CONSUMER WHAT THEY WANT
In the ever assiduous push to increase profits, the food companies have pulled all stops. Coca-Cola has recently won marketer-of-the-year by AdAge, the global media company that collects data on marketing trends, who praised the corporation’s numerous achievements as “examples of the way the company is coalescing around management's 2020 Vision, which involves doubling system revenue and more than doubling servings to some 3 billion per day.” Let that number sink in.

Coca-Cola’s extravagant push for market share is no anomaly. In an attempt to discover the potato chip’s most satisfying crunch, Frito-Lay has employed a $40,000 machine that simulates the chewing of a human mouth, and determined that consumers prefer a chip that crunches under approximately four pounds per square inch (“The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,” NY Times, 2013). You didn’t know that you preferred your Doritos to crunch under four pounds of pressure, but you do.

Yet the drive to capture market share by catering to the consumers’ desires—be those desires conscience or sub-conscience—is not limited to junk foods. Companies in markets perceived as more sophisticated, such as wine and single-malts, have been engineering their products to exacting, consumer driven specifications. Producers strive to give people what they want, whether it’s oak dust used to make wine taste as if it’s aged in French barrels, or the caramel colorings and chill filtering employed in scotch production to achieve a consistent appearance from year to year. The problem is: what one wants and what one needs are often dissimilar. A diet imbalanced with chips and soda—even wine, cheese and whisky—can kill you.

As early as 1999, the world’s largest (junk) food producers—Nestlé, Kraft, Nabisco, Pillsbury, General Mills, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars—were documented by the New York Times as meeting together to discuss the rise of obesity in America, especially that found in children. The meeting may have terminated early due to fears of eroding bottom lines, but the degradation of Americans’ health is far from ending.

The CDC reports that 36.5% of American adults are obese, and that nearly 10% of Americans have diabetes. Even more staggering, 84.1 million adults have pre-diabetes—that’s nearly 40% of the US population. With 90-95% of all diabetes being Type 2—widely preventable via healthful living, e.g., proper nutrition—there is little doubt that America is facing a nutrition driven health epidemic. While some foreign people groups lack enough food to live, many Americans are being killed by the foods they binge eat.

WE ARE NOT VICTIMS
As sad as this state of affairs is, we must not label the American consumer a victim. While consumers are obviously the target of food industry marketing dollars, they must not be treated as victims of some insidious scheme spawned by a co-op of evil food corporations. Individuals make choices; there are still 60% of Americans who don’t have pre-diabetes, largely because of choices they have made. However, the correct choices are not always evident.

SOLUTIONS?
Clearly there is a worldview that sees pharmaceuticals as the solution to any number of America’s health problems. AdAge reports that advertising expenditures of pharmaceutical companies increased by 15.6% over 2015 (the most recently available data), the largest increase of the six major market categories composed of America’s 200 leading advertisers. However, many astute individuals recognize that drugs are not the silver bullet.

Next week: While a more natural and thus healthful wine is also not the silver bullet, it may be one piece of a dietary solution.

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