The Way We Eat Now summary

In the past, many families would hold onto recipes that were passed down multiple generations. But how many of your grandmother’s recipes do you still cook? While it can be important to hold on to our food traditions, what really affects our health is when we make sudden, drastic changes to the way we eat.

To see how sudden dietary changes can affect a generation of people, let's look to India in the 1990s.

When we were toddlers, we learned how to avoid the foods we didn’t like by closing our mouths or throwing a tantrum. As adults, we have even more control over what we decide to eat, but what we can’t do is control the massive machinery behind the food industry to ensure that we only get what’s good for us.

Instead, we’ve gotten an increasing amount of processed foods. Around 2019, 57.9 percent of American calories could be attributed to ultra-processed foods. And as for developing countries that are getting US foreign aid, the vast majority of the billions of dollars being spent is going toward processed foods.

In 1920s Westphalia, Germany, women working in textile factories worked an average of 54 hours a week. But each day, without fail, they would all sit down and eat lunch together for a break that could last as long as 90 minutes.

Does this sound even remotely like what goes on during your lunch break? Probably not, because eating has become a lot less social these days.

Do you have a favorite food trend? Maybe you can’t get enough of avocado toast or kale chips. While new recipes and food items can be fun to explore, you may be surprised to discover that there’s more to these fads than meets the eye. 

Sometimes a food trend can disappear as quickly as it emerged, but other times, it can so drastically change the demand for an ingredient that the repercussions are felt globally.

One of the consequences of living in a hectic, fast-paced environment is that you can feel like there’s never enough time to slow down and cook your own meals. Currently, Americans spend approximately half of their food budget on eating out. But a lifestyle of constantly dining out not only takes a toll on your wallet, it can also cost you valuable nutrition.

Part of the problem is that we tend to eat with a more carefree attitude when we dine out, which means more calories and more sugar. Of course, restaurants are well aware that ingredients like sugar and fat appeal to our taste buds, so they don’t hesitate to apply these ingredients liberally. In particular, the menus at fast-food restaurants feature items that are especially high in sugar and fat, while containing very few crucial nutrients like fiber and vitamins.

While we can all agree that having some choice is better than having no choice at all, the question of whether a massive amount of choice is better than some choice isn’t so obvious. After all, doesn’t it get harder to know when you’ve picked the best option when there’s a seemingly endless selection?

As a matter of fact, there is such a thing as too many options, and the repercussions go deeper than just making a poor choice. According to psychologist Barry Schwartz, there is a phenomenon known as the paradox of choice, and it essentially means that we tend to be less happy when faced with too many options. 

With so many of us preferring to eat out, grab ready-made meals on the go or resort to snacks during lunch breaks, it may seem like everyone’s pots and pans are just gathering dust.

Fortunately, studies show that a wider range of people are stepping up to the stove and cooking at home. For much of history, the kitchen was considered the woman’s domain, but between 1965 and 2007, the average amount of time an American woman spent in the kitchen dropped from 112.8 to 65.6 minutes a day. Meanwhile, men began to clock in more kitchen time, with their average increasing from 37 to 45 minutes.

Earlier, we looked back at the four historical stages of food. And with some of these new developments, you might be wondering, what will stage five look like?

Given that stage four has been marked with abundance and fewer people experiencing starvation, to move into stage five, we need to learn how to sort through the abundance and make smarter and healthier food choices. And to do this, we’ll need help from governments and grassroots initiatives.