First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (24 page)
There is a great deal more to Kuwait’s obesity crisis than just gender. But wherever we live, one step in learning to eat better would be to move beyond gendered notions of food. Both boys and girls would be better off if they could copy the best aspects of each other’s eating habits. Boys could do with being more conscientious about vegetables and more honest about their body size. Girls would benefit from adopting a manly liking for hearty main courses instead of sugary pink cupcakes and chocolate. Like boys, they should know that they have permission to eat when they are hungry.
The great potential of siblings—or the virtual siblings we assemble among our friends—is that they make us less alone at the table. We borrow tastes and habits from them. Maybe their example makes us see that one tiny bowl of cornflakes is not a big enough breakfast, or, conversely, that a crunchy stick of celery can be surprisingly delicious, especially if you add peanut butter and raisins. When they go through a craze for Moroccan take-out, or wok cooking, or growing herbs, it broadens our horizons, too. And—when we are not squabbling—their company makes everything taste better.
Siblings don’t have to be rivals at the table. These days, my sister and I live on different continents, so we don’t eat together as often as I’d like. (She bagged America; I was left with Europe.) But when we do meet, the dynamic of eating is quite different from what it once was. Now that we are middle-aged and have our own children, we have both calmed down, and the result is the sort of culinary convergence I would never once have thought possible. It turns out that we are not so different when we sit down to eat side by side. We both like very strong coffee; toasted bagels with butter, not cream cheese; avocado sushi rolls; and any kind of fruit, especially crisp, tart apples in the autumn, or ripe, juicy pears, which remind us of our mother. When I’m visiting my sister, we sometimes go to a Vietnamese deli near her house that makes delicious sandwiches. She orders a tofu
banh mi
: soy-marinated tofu with crisp coriander leaves, pickled carrots, and daikon radish in a soft hoagie roll. I pause for a mo
ment, consider going for roast beef on rye, just to prove I am my own person, and then I choose exactly the same.
“For some reason,”
writes marketing expert Bryan Urbick, “girls have a special relationship with chocolate.” Almost all the ads for chocolate on TV are aimed at women, depicting them as powerless to resist its melting charms.
Chocolate’s status as food for girls and women—something to be yearned for and then regretted—is so ingrained that it would be easy to assume that there is something deep within females that makes them crave the chemicals in chocolate. Girls often talk this way themselves, saying that they “need” the happy serotonin of chocolate because they have their period.
There are, no question, some potent chemicals in chocolate. These include phenylethylamine (an amphetamine-like substance), caffeine, and anandamide (a cannabinoid). Yet the form in which most women crave chocolate is milk rather than dark chocolate, and milk chocolate is significantly lower than dark in these compounds and higher in sugar and fat. If a “chocoholic” is craving anything, it is probably the dopamine release of sugar. The idea that menstruation hormones make women crave chocolate was undermined by a recent study in which researchers found that postmenopausal women only experienced a very slight drop in their chocolate cravings, despite the fact that they no longer had periods. The researchers concluded that stress, not hormones, drove women to chocolate.
Women have a special relationship with chocolate mostly because our culture tells them to. It goes back to the old claptrap about sweet treats being for “ladies,” while savory tastes are for men. Chocolate is undoubtedly an appealing substance: the heady
aroma, the sweet taste, the way it melts at body temperature. But there’s no biological imperative that says that women should be driven to seek these experiences more than men.
In 2006, a fascinating study was done on students in Spain and the United States. Among the Americans, only 59 percent of the men would admit to chocolate cravings, as against 91 percent of the women. In Spain, chocolate cravings were much more evenly split, with 78 percent of Spanish men and 90 percent of Spanish women saying they craved it. This is a clear indication that the female craving for chocolate is something that is culturally determined, not innate.
Female chocolate cravings are an archetypal learned behavior. From our earliest years, as girls we pick up on the fact that chocolate is special and
for us
. We are given it at birthdays and holidays or to calm our tears. We absorb the message that chocolate will soothe us when we are down, and that when we are happy, it will make us happier still. We tell ourselves we don’t just want it but need it. Yet buying it also seems to leave more women than men feeling guilty.
A girl’s physiology does not make her need slabs of chocolate once a month, any more than it creates a requirement for marshmallows, macaroons, and salted caramel éclairs. If our chocolate habit is learned, then—unlikely as it seems—it can be unlearned, or at least toned down a touch.
So it happens that when I write of hunger,
I am really writing about love . . .
M. F. K. Fisher,
The Art of Eating
A
child feels woozy, slips under his desk and onto the floor.
Another child yawns for hours every morning, only properly waking up after lunch. A third seems incapable of concentrating on even the simplest lesson, as if his brain isn’t quite there.
Such hunger wasn’t meant to exist in civilized societies where food is plentiful; nevertheless, as workers for hunger charities can attest, scenes like this are a daily occurrence in some of the schools of the affluent West. The No Kid Hungry initiative works at a state and a city level to help provide free breakfasts to low-income children in 25,000 schools across America, on the premise that a child who has not eaten in the morning is not ready for learning. Giving a child a bowl of cereal, some fruit, and a carton of milk is a small thing. And yet, viewed from the perspective of an individual child’s future, feeling full in the morning is not small. It can make the difference between being switched on to education and all the advantages this brings and not. People who work for No Kid Hungry have found that compared to other low-income pupils, the children who eat a free school breakfast have higher math scores and better attendance rates, are more likely to graduate from high school,
and, perhaps most critically, are less likely to experience hunger as adults.
Once the pattern of not being hungry in the morning is set, it modifies the way you eat for life.
Satisfying hunger is the most basic function of eating. Assuming there’s enough food—and this cannot always be assumed, as the presence of food banks and school breakfast programs reminds us—hunger management doesn’t seem like something anyone should have to learn. Unlike our appetite for specific foods, hunger is an innate animal mechanism that we are born with. Yet as it plays out in the modern food environment, hunger is far from simple. Beyond infancy, acquiring the ability to cancel out our hunger adequately without overshooting the mark has become a complicated task, whether in the hungry developing world or the overstuffed West.
Like boredom, moderate hunger is one of those childhood discomforts that modern parenting—plus a world of abundance—seems to have all but abolished in middle-class families. Children and adults alike are constantly topped up with snacks to keep bad moods at bay. My handbag has a compartment filled with cashews, cereal bars, and dried fruit in readiness for those frequent moments when they groan, “We’re huuuuuungry,” these children of mine who have never really known the gnawing emptiness of real hunger. Hunger now tends to be nipped in the bud before the first growl of the tummy. Yet when it comes to bona fide child malnutrition, we are still far too willing to pretend it doesn’t exist. While malnutrition in poor countries remains the number-one cause of child mortality in the world, its effects can also be seen closer to home.
The rise of child obesity creates the illusion that our problems with eating are all about overfeeding, and we find it hard to recognize malnutrition even when it is right in front of us. Some are skeptical that any child in the developed world is truly hungry. Yet Feeding America, the largest hunger-relief program in the United States, estimates that 15.8 million American children live in “food insecure” households, and therefore grapple with hunger at least some of the time. The median household income of the families using Feeding America’s food banks was just $9,175 as of 2014. Eighty-four percent of the families they see report buying the cheapest food available, regardless of whether it is healthy. Cheap food
doesn’t
have
to be food that is unwholesome, unsatisfying, and lacking in
essential nutrients; but as it happens, it mostly is. Many children today in affluent countries are in the paradoxical situation of being overweight and malnourished at the same time (this is known as “hidden hunger”); they take in too many calories from cheap carbohydrates without getting enough of the micronutrients the body requires. Plenty of others, however, are hungry in the old-fashioned sense and lightheaded from a lack of food, particularly the protein foods children need to grow. And there is no hunger so ravenous as that of a child.
Teachers report children fainting on the playground; or those who come to school wired on a breakfast of sweets and fizzy drinks, or leftover scraps of fried takeout; in rare cases, boys’ and girls’ stomachs are distended, as with the African children on the TV news during famines. The UK charity Magic Breakfast tries to address the problem. Former businesswoman Carmel McConnell founded the organization in 2001 after visiting London’s inner-city schools as part of her research for a book. Shocked to hear of pupils complaining of hunger, she immediately got to work. Now, Magic Breakfast supplies more than 8,000 children with healthy breakfasts through morning “clubs.” The breakfast usually consists of cold cereals and milk, fresh fruit, and special protein-enriched bagels served with butter and jam; sometimes there is porridge, which fills the children up if only they can be persuaded to eat it.
On a bright July morning, I eat a “Magic Breakfast” at Keyworth primary, an “outstanding” school in a deprived area of South London. The children—aged four to eleven—are eating buttered bagels and wedges of apples and oranges. There’s a good, toasty smell in the room. The atmosphere is calm, with a group of soccer-mad boys at one end of the table and a gaggle of girls chattering away at the other end. The school’s head teacher, Susi Whittome, remembers that before the “breakfast club” was introduced, children often arrived at school either sleepy or “upset,” with many kids going wild or zoning out in class, which turned out to be a response to hunger. Both behavior and educational results at the school have greatly improved now that the children are not hungry. Whittome wants children to leave her school as “ambassadors for social justice”—not easily done on an empty stomach.
The symptoms of long-term hunger are horrible and complex, all the more so in a child. Apart from loss of weight, the child may feel tired and cold all the time, and worried, depressed, or disengaged. She bruises easily and lacks focus. Her skin is dull, and she may have permanent goosebumps and cracked lips. “White lips on black children” was one of the signs of hunger observed by Marvin Davies, a social worker and teacher working with agricultural laborers and their families in Florida in the 1960s. Prolonged chronic malnutrition affects children for the rest of their lives, because it affects both brain development and growth. One in four children in the world is stunted by hunger, and many of the consequences are irreversible. Yet in the short term, food has a power to reverse the symptoms of malnutrition very quickly. After just three or four weeks of adequate feeding, a child’s body may get back in sync: anti-hunger charities in the developing world cite similarly quick rates of recovery from feeding interventions. Magic Breakfast workers say they see children perked up by the very first bagel, which may give them enough energy to stay awake for that morning’s lessons. The psychological consequences of hunger, needless to say, last longer.
When I sit and eat with the children at Keyworth primary and ask them what they like about the breakfast, I expect them to talk mainly about the food. Certainly they are chewing their bagels with gusto. But what most of the children bring up is the social aspect. “It’s fun,” says one. “The best bit is playing games,” says another. When the children have finished eating and cleared their dishes, they are allowed to catch up with homework or play board games like Monopoly and Connect Four. Three sisters are sitting in a row, laughing.
Many of these children live in housing so small that there is no room to eat together around a table. When I ask one of the girls what she eats for breakfast on weekends, she says, “Anything random.” It isn’t just food that is lacking in their lives; it’s the space to share it in and the mood of relaxation and security that comes from a structured communal meal. In 2011, a study of more than 22,000 low-income families with young children found that those who lived in crowded housing were more likely to suffer from food insecurity. Likewise, a hundred years ago in Glasgow, investigators found that there was a direct correlation between the housing
where a child lived and the extent to which they were underfed. Whereas a thirteen-year-old from a house with four rooms weighed, on average, nearly eighty pounds, a child of the same age from a one-room dwelling weighed just seventy pounds. It may be that the size of the home and the child’s weight had a common cause in poverty: those families who could only afford one room were also those with the least money to spare for food. Either way, cramped accommodation is still one of the biggest obstacles to feeding a family well, because whether a meal is satisfying depends on the setting and the company as well as the food.
A breakfast club gives these children something their hard-pressed families couldn’t provide them no matter how hard they tried: the chance to sit at a spacious table and eat with friends. Food—the right food—is clearly essential to preventing hunger. High-protein bagels are good, especially when the alternative is a growling tummy and a fuzzy head. But talking to these children at Keyworth primary, it’s clear that the craving that they needed to satisfy was for something more than just toast. What makes breakfast clubs such as this one so effective is that they feed the hunger for social interaction as well as the hunger for food.
Hunger runs deep. Before you can fully cancel it out, you need to learn what it is you are truly hungry for.
Being able to regulate the amount of food we eat according
to our needs is perhaps the single most important skill when it comes to eating—and the one that we least often master. In contrast to its close relation, appetite, hunger looks like a basic impulse: an expression of the body’s biological need for food. Yet the more you examine it, the more you see that hunger is not a simple drive at all. Hunger is always a kind of emptiness—an absence of nourishment—but what it will take to replenish it is far from obvious. Back when we were children, we learned to respond to hunger in ways that were only partly about our body’s need for food. Maybe we suppressed our hunger so that we could eat less and lose weight, or we feigned it so we could eat more. Or we ignored it because we would rather carry on playing. Very little of the eating that happens in the modern world is as simple as feel hungry, eat
food. The great challenge for most people is learning how to recognize when we have had enough.
“The cry of the newborn for food,” says physiologist Anton J. Carlson, is hunger in its “purest form,” a pain that is immediately quieted with feeding. For the rest of our lives, hunger will never be quite so pure again. With animals, the main test for hunger is eagerness for food, but it’s one of our quirks as humans that we sometimes remain eager to eat even when our bellies are full to bursting. The existence of anorexia proves that it is possible to be hungry and yet not eager for food. Children will declare that they are stuffed and couldn’t eat another morsel, pushing their main course aside, only to discover that they are, in fact, “starving” when a tray of cupcakes appears. Many are quick to learn that “hunger” is the ultimate justification for eating. As a teenager, I remember often claiming I was peckish when really I was just lonely and bored. It’s far harder to refuse a child’s request for snacks when he pleads an empty stomach. Maybe grown-ups are not so different. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard waiters—hoping to sell something from the dessert menu—claim with an endearing smile that we have two separate stomachs, one for savory, one for sweet.
Even discounting the little lies we tell ourselves to justify a slice of cheesecake, hunger is not easy to measure or define. The feeling of nausea or stomachache—which ought to be the exact opposite of hunger—is remarkably similar to it in the early stages: rumbling in the gastrointestinal tract, stabbing pain in the abdomen, a restless feeling that your body is out of kilter and needs to be given something to fix it. Equally, it is possible to be so hungry that you do not feel hunger anymore. Aid workers helping acutely malnourished children perform an “appetite test.” If a child is so weakened that she refuses a small amount of food offered by a parent, she is in imminent danger and must be admitted to a hospital. Among nutritionists, there is no universally recognized standard for measuring the sensation of hunger. Common sense might say that hunger could be gauged by the amount of time since you last ate. If food is a fuel, we should feel that the tank is emptiest when the longest time has elapsed since it was filled—usually, in the morning. Unless you dabble in midnight feasts, the longest gap between meals is the overnight stretch
before breakfast. Yet numerous trials have shown that people do not tend to be hungriest in the morning, despite the gap.
Most people do not feel their peak hunger at weekday breakfast time (though they are more likely to be hungry for a weekend breakfast, another sign that hunger is a social drive). Some—mystifyingly, to me—have to be coaxed to nibble anything much in the morning. One of the great regrets of my life was pretending to be such a person when I was seventeen and on a language exchange with a family in France. On the first morning, they asked what I liked for breakfast. In my stilted French, I said I preferred just to drink black coffee, thinking this would make me look sophisticated (and yes, probably kidding myself that I’d come home as skinny as a French girl). Day after day, I watched in silent envy as the family devoured crusty baguettes with fresh white butter and apricot jam along with bowls of milky coffee and hot chocolate. I sipped my acrid black coffee. My pride would not allow me to admit how famished I was.
Apart from the gap between meals, another way to measure hunger is through various hormonal “biomarkers.” These seem to promise a more objective, scientific way to determine whether a person is hungry, though in practice they confirm that hunger is never fully objective. In the 1950s, low blood glucose levels were supposed to be the main cause of hunger (this was the “glucostatic” theory of the late Dr. Jean Mayer, a Harvard nutritionist who became president of Tufts University). When spending the afternoon with a toddler, sometimes it feels as if you can see the child’s blood sugar levels dropping by the second. If you catch them in time with a banana, all will be fine. If not, they will flatline into a tantrum.
