Fat land : how Americans became the fattest people in the world (5 page)

WHO GOT THE CALORIES INTO OUR BELLIES

There was more to all of this than just eating more. Bigness: The concept seemed to fuel the marketing of just about everything, from cars (SUVs) to homes (mini-manses) to clothes (super-baggy) and then back again to food (as in the Del Taco Macho Meal, which weighed four pounds). The social scientists and the marketing gurus were going crazy trying to keep up with the trend. "Bigness is addictive because it is about power," commented Irma Zall, a teen marketing consultant, in a page-one story in USA Today. While few teenage boys can actually finish a 64-ounce Double Gulp, she added, "it's empowering to hold one in your hand."

The pioneers of supersize had achieved David Wallerstein's dream. They had banished the shame of gluttony and opened the maw of the American eater wider than even they had ever imagined.

WORLD WITHOUT BOUNDARIES

(Who Let the Calories In)

Sometime during the late 1980s — no one can pinpoint the exact date — Ron Magruder, the president of the thriving Olive Garden chain of Italian restaurants, received a telephone call from a dissatisfied customer. The call had been patched all the way up to Magruder because it was so . . . different. The caller, named Larry, wasn't complaining about the food or the service or the prices. Instead, Larry was upset that he could no longer fit into any of the chairs in his local Olive Garden.

"I had to wait more than an hour and half to get a table," Larry told Magruder. "But then I found that there wasn't a single booth or chair where I could sit comfortably."

Magruder, a heavyset man easily moved to enthusiasm, was sympathetic to Larry's plaint. And as president, he could do something about it. He had his staff contact the company that manufactured the chairs for the chain and order a thousand large-size chairs. He then had these distributed, three each, to every Olive Garden restaurant in the nation. It was, as Magruder later told the eminent restaurant business journalist Charles Bernstein,

WHO LET THE CALORIES IN

a perfect example of his management philosophy: "We're going to go the extra mile for any customer, no matter what the situation."

Tales like these are the warp and woof of contemporary American management culture, limning as they do the ageless high wisdom that the customer is always right. But the essentials of Larry's tale — the easing of painful, if traditional, boundaries like a restaurant chair, and the acceptance of excess — also go to the core of the popular culture that gave birth to the modern American obesity epidemic. Indeed, if fast-food companies of the 1980s seemed to see the American eater as an endlessly expanding vessel for their product, Americans of the same period rejected the entire notion of limits themselves. They seemed to believe that the old wisdom could be inverted: Gain could come without pain. In 1980 even the hidebound U.S. Department of Agriculture began promoting its new diet guidelines as The Hassle-Free Food Guide.

Nowhere did this new boundary-free culture of American food consumption thrive better than in the traditional American family, which by the '80s was undergoing rapid change. The catalyst came in two forms: individual freedom (born of the liberation movements of the '60s and '70s) and entrepreneurial adventurism (born of the economic tumult of the late '70s and early '80s). Women, freed from the stereotypical roles and duties of the '50s housewife, now made up a substantial percentage of the workforce. Taking their rightful place alongside their male counterparts in every profession from law to medicine to construction to engineering, they set forth to transform the American corporation and helped fuel a long overdue renaissance in management culture. Men, freed from the traditional notions of being the family's sole breadwinner and disinclined to give any one employer too much loyalty, went in search of professional and personal fulfillment. Garages burst with strange new contraptions called PCs, and Mom soon joined Pop in founding strange and almost magical new businesses. Freedom was good — and profitable.

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The familial price of this freedom was told in time — mainly the lack of it when it came to the kids. And when it came to eating together, that time became ever dearer. The mom of a generation previous had had the time to cook a complete meal, insist that everyone show up to eat it, and then wrestle each child's food issues into an acceptable family standard. The new parent had no time for such unpleasantness. After all, what was more important: to enjoy one's limited time with one's children, dining out at McD's, or to use that time to replicate the parent's own less than idealized childhood table? Most parents were pragmatists. It was easier and more practical simply to eat out — or to order in.

The numbers show that that is exactly what the American family did. In 1970 what the USDA calls the "food away from home" portion of the average American's food dollar was 25 percent; by 1985 it had jumped to 35 percent and by 1996 Americans were spending more than 40 percent of every food dollar on meals obtained away from home. The trend was clear and unambiguous. In 1977 the proportion of meals consumed away from home was 16 percent; by 1987 that figure rose to 24 percent; by 1995 to 29 percent. Snacking too moved out of the home and into the streets, with 17 percent of snacks being consumed away from home in 1977, 20 percent in 1987, and 22 percent in 1995.

Calorically speaking, the shift was even less ambiguous. In 1977, Americans got only 18 percent of their calories away from home; in a decade that figure had grown to 27 percent, and in less than another decade (by 1994) to 34 percent. Fat consumption away from the traditional table soared, from 19 percent of total calories in 1977 to 28 percent in 1987 to 38 percent in 1995. Where fast-food places accounted for just 3 percent of total caloric intake in 1977, that share rose to 12 percent two decades later.

And thanks to the revolution in food processing, commodity prices, and fast-food marketing, what was in that food also changed rapidly. Here the Butzian revolution had fused with the triumph of the value meal and new-style sugar and fat technologies. Yummy sizzling meat — it was everywhere! Coca-Cola —

WHO LET THE CALORIES IN

it was almost free! In this regard the single most telling statistic came from the USDA. "We calculate that if food away from home had the same average nutritional densities as food at home . . . Americans would have consumed 197 fewer calories per day." Put another way, that's an extra pound's worth of energy every twenty days.

That food on the run was getting more caloric was a reflection of another, less understood phenomenon, that of "nutrient control." Nutrient control means simply that — the degree to which one exercises some control over what goes into one's food. Fast food and convenience food by their very nature preclude such control; to put it the way a French intellectual might, a Big Mac is a caloric fait accompli. So is a Swanson's TV dinner or any boil-in-the-bag fettuccine Alfredo. To be convenient — to be stable and have a long shelf life, or to retain good "mouthfeel" after an hour under the fast-food heat lamp — food had to contain larger and more condensed amounts of fats and sugars. Such was one source of those extra 197 calories.

But Americans of the 1980s kept eating more for another reason as well. Increasingly, as the away-from-home numbers show, they ate in a kind of gastronomic time warp, justifying their larger portions because they were "eating out" or because it was "a treat." But now the treat had become a daily treat. Eating out was just, well, eating. As three of the USDA's more pointed scholars put it: "Where that may have been a reasonable attitude twenty years ago, when eating out was more infrequent, [today] that belief becomes increasingly inappropriate." Americans had ceded "nutrient control" — and self-control.

Of course, ceding control — avoiding hassles and conflicts with one's children — was the whole point, wasn't it?

Such was the overwhelming message of a wide range of 1980s child-care books, most of which centered on the important but ultimately squishy notions of "autonomy" and "empowerment." Both notions derived from a reaction to the conformist society of

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the previous generation — the same society that had stereotyped and oppressed woman and made man into little more than a "productive unit." Such books inevitably emphasized the overriding importance of a child's personal choices as a way to instill self-confidence and responsibility. Unfortunately, when it came to food, their authors tended to view the child as a kind of infant-sage, his nutritional whims a "natural" guide to how parents should feed him.

One of the more wide-ranging of these books — one that eventually sold more than 3 million copies and made its authors virtual nutritionist stars — was Fit for Life. Published in 1985 and written by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, two holistic nutritionists from California, Fit was originally pitched as a dietary guidebook ("You can eat more kinds of food than you ever ate without counting calories!"). But in the ever conflict-avoiding 1980s, Fit for Life eventually became a kind of all-purpose advice book for regaining one's "vital principles." On the subject of children and nutrition, its authors were insistent: Food should never become a dinner-table battleground. "Pressure causes tension," the Diamonds wrote. "Where food is concerned, tension is always to be avoided." Here the operative notion — largely un-proven — is that a child restrained from overeating will either rebel by secretly gorging when away from the table or, worse, will suffer such a loss of self-esteem that a lifetime of disastrous eating behaviors will ensue.

The authors of 1985's Are You Hungry? A Completely New Approach to Raising Children Free of Food and Weight Problems took the sentiment to its next logical step. With the intent of helping children develop their own sense of self-control, New School for Social Research authors Jane R. Hirschmann and Lela Zaphiropoulos put forth three basic guidelines to parents: "First, they [children] should eat when they are physically hungry and only when they are hungry. Second, they themselves should have the responsibility for determining the foods they eat. And finally they should stop eating when they feel full."

WHO LET THE CALORIES IN

Reading deeper, however, there was also another issue: the comfort of the parent. "To questions like 'Why can't I eat my dessert first?' or 'Why can't I eat all my Halloween candy?' you can answer 'No reason at all. You can.' And this answer doesn't lead to ill health or loss of family discipline," the pair promised. In fact "good parenting requires this answer because it leads to 'self-demand' feeding . . . Life can be much easier with self-demand feeding because it allows you to give up unnecessary control and the concomitant struggles over food."

It would be tempting to lay the entire blame for such intellectual indulgence at the feet of the ever demonized politically correct, but there it does not belong, or at least not entirely, for the fact is that, despite our "spare the rod, spoil the child" big talk, Americans have been historically predisposed in exactly the opposite direction, particularly in matters concerning children and food. Part of this derives from the very nature of the American family. As the sociologist Edward Shorter has noted, in contrast to its European counterpart, the American family was "born modern." From early on it was nuclear, seeking as it did to withdraw itself from the meddling of the traditional extended family. At its center was not a child in the European tradition — essentially just one more actor in an extended community — but rather a child as the very reason for being, for feeling and acting independently. As a result, the American child commanded disproportionate "respect" — he wasn't to be hurried too quickly into the pain of adulthood. Rather, he was to be mollified with the tremendous bounty of the new nation. And the nation's greatest bounty was food, glorious food.

That is, more food. For well into the postwar years, when true undernutrition among the middle class became a rarity, undernutrition remained the central concern of most parents. This is not to say that Americans have never attempted to deal with fat children; the pages of turn-of-the-century newspapers were filled with advertisements promising to help one's "chunky" offspring "slim down." But the thrust of those efforts — from early-twenti-

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eth-century medicaments to twenty-first-century fat camps — were almost always social and aesthetic: Plump Janey was being alienated at school. Fat Joey was being harassed by the slimmer boys. Nowhere in those efforts was childhood overeating paired solely with health concerns. Always in the background were the taunts and the teases. The notion that overfeeding might be over-ridingly a health problem and a health problem alone never entered the American psyche.

A counterpoint to the culture of the overfed American could be found in late-nineteenth-century France, which like the United States of the period was undergoing rising rates of urbanization and declining rates of childhood mortality. The French family too was coming to a new understanding of the child. With wet-nursing on the decline, the French mother was increasingly in charge of her own little enfant cher. There was thus more natural sentiment toward the occupant of the cradle. This was a new development, for a new reason. Only a hundred years or so previous there would have been a good chance that little Mathilde, away from her mother's breast, would not make it past her first birthday; true maternal attachments could wait until she was five or six. By the late nineteenth century, however, with better medical practices and pasteurized milk widely available, the chances were good that not only would she make it out of the cradle but that she would be a part of Mama's life for the rest of her years. Chere Mathilde became chere chere Mathilde.

One of the first unanticipated products of this new generation of more indulgent French mothers was Venfant obese. By the 1930s French medical journals were full of case histories of fat children. But unlike their American counterparts, the French fat child was not considered to be so socially vulnerable. Rather, his or her condition was to be dealt with — directly and forthrightly — as a medical issue. Fortunately, there was already a public health network through which to treat the problem. This was known as the puericulture system.