One of my domestic projects this month has been to use up fruit, tomato sauce, and pesto stored in my freezer, to make room for this year’s harvest from my garden and my friends’ ranch garden and fruit trees. The recent addition of my backyard garden will likely make it worthwhile to purchase a small chest freezer, but for now I need to make do with existing space. I should probably try canning some of the produce, but that’s a pretty labor-intensive venture. Typically, we have excellent yields of basil, tomatoes, peppers, and peaches, so that means I’ve been eating pasta with pesto, homemade vegetarian pizzas, and peach cobbler or lowfat yogurt fruit smoothies lately. Sounds like a reasonably healthy diet (for an American), but nevertheless, without 3+ gym sessions per week, horse-riding, daily walks with the dog, and swimming, my weight would be going in the wrong direction.

Ohio WPA Art Program (1940)

This food-related project coincides with reading David Kessler’s book The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite, on the recommendation of a friend (who, like Kessler, once worked for the FDA). In the first few chapters, we are introduced to several typical Americans (colleagues of Kessler), overweight and not, who struggle with resisting tempting, calorie-laden foods. These are not people with eating disorders; rather, they are responding to foods that are designed as highly rewarding and reinforcing stimuli, full of sugar, fat, and/or salt. Kessler describes neurobiological and psychological research that expands older models of eating modulated by homeostatic mechanisms, to include the nucleus accumbens (reward center in the ventral striatum), opioid circuits, dopamine-driven attention bias, and the reinforcing effects of multisensory stimuli. In the second section of the book, we learn how the food industry uses this information to develop complex products with a mix of attributes (mouthfeel, temperature, texture, viscosity, agreeable flavor combinations), which are highly palatable, hedonic, and salient. Some food industry buzzwords for you. Yeah.

Herbert Bayer, for NYC WPA War Services (1941)

As Kessler describes, hypereating and obesity are fairly recent trends in the US. Food is generally very plentiful, very convenient, and relatively inexpensive here, allowing people to consume cheap fat-, salt-, and sugar-laden foods quickly, and in all kinds of situations. It’s unusual to attend a meeting or seminar in an academic setting in the US at which there isn’t some sort of food on offer, and social gatherings associated with scientific conferences tend to revolve around food. Portion size is another example of a food-related norm that has changed in the past few decades (the most vigilant scientists identified statistics supporting an obesity trend in the US in the early 1980s). Americans snack more and are less physically active, and even the nature of a typical school lunch has changed. Take a look at the items listed on the WPA poster below, from the mid-1930s: a meat/vegetable dish (most likely soup), a sandwich (not this hamburger monstrosity), a piece of fruit, and milk to drink. No sugary soda or energy drink, no Fritos or Cheetos or Doritos or Megagorditos, no candy bar or Twinkie.

WPA Oklahoma Art Project (1936)

The End of Overeating is definitely not a standard diet book. There are no recipes, meal suggestions, exercise regimes, or calorie count tables. For some readers, an awareness of the manipulations used in the food industry, a recognition of the behavior patterns associated with conditioned hypereating, and the suggestions for how to avoid such unhealthy traps, will be very useful. I haven’t eaten the exact dishes at Chili’s or Panda Express that are described in the book, but reading about the ways in which the foods are prepared was enough to put me off eating at those restaurants again in the near (and possibly distant) future. I think I have a better understanding of why certain complex foods are so appealing and irresistible, and why I should avoid purchasing, or even looking at them, in the grocery store. Once that Ben and Jerry’s Imagine Whirled Peace or Phish Food ice cream is in the freezer at home, the temptation is too much.