There’s a question that has been rattling around my mind ever since I watched Netflix’s “You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment” back in January: Why are so many TV shows and documentaries so eager to inform us that eating fruits and vegetables is better for our health, and for the environment, than the stuff many of us eat instead?
To be fair to “You Are What You Eat,” it does offer slightly more than this: It clearly wants to persuade you to eat less meat. The docuseries uses sets of identical twins to explore how different diets affect overall health; of each pair, one is assigned a vegan diet and the other a “healthy” omnivorous diet. The sisters Wendy and Pam, for instance, are told by a fitness expert that they could be at risk for diabetes, then informed, as though they might not have heard this before, that “nutrition will help that a great deal, as well as exercising.” They return in the final episode, in which they’re expected to have gained muscle and lost fat. Pam, on the vegan diet, has lost around eight pounds, most of it muscle; Wendy, on the omnivore diet, has lost about three, all of it muscle. They confess to not following their meal plans perfectly. Unsurprisingly, being told the “correct” thing to eat didn’t instantly reshape their lives.
You can tell that the assembled experts who proceed to admonish them are straining to be diplomatic, but it only makes them seem patronizing. How else could someone sound while telling you what you already know, as if you didn’t already know it? Fruits and vegetables are healthy dietary choices. Exercise is good for you. Most of us have fully absorbed these messages by the time we hit third grade. And yet television still reminds us of them with a muted arrogance and a patronizing smile. “You Are What You Eat” is just one popular example — in Netflix’s top 10 shows the week of its release — among many: Recent times have also brought us “Feeding Tomorrow,” “Live to 100,” “Poisoned,” “Beyond Weight Loss,” “Eating Our Way to Extinction” and many more.
This programming may be well-meaning, informative or even inspiring, but much of it strikes me as deeply misguided in its tone. It’s true that the American diet is in dire need of intervention: We as a nation eat too much ultraprocessed food, too much sugar and saturated fat. It’s also true that industrial meat production is a worrisome driver of climate change and pollution. But the idea that people might be led to change their diets simply by telling them these things would seem to be disproved by the evidence all around us: Most of us already know this, and yet we eat what we do. The audience for these programs is presumably full of people who already think about nutrition and the environment — say, the rigorously healthy omnivore who, watching “You Are What You Eat,” considers cutting out meat once and for all. Yet these shows often seem to imagine another kind of viewer entirely: the benighted who think a fiber-free, sugar-and-burgers diet is as good as any other and simply need a television show to inform them that they are wrong.
There is, however, a pretty simple fact that this programming feels hesitant to really reckon with: Most people do not eat for the purpose of achieving maximum health. We eat things because they taste good, because they are convenient, because they are affordable, because they are satisfying. It’s not as though modern food programming is unaware of this; it will often note the poor choices available to the average person, critiquing cynical fast-food companies or grocery stores full of ultraprocessed foods. But it still seems to imagine that someone watching might be persuaded via health data to navigate this landscape differently — as if you, the viewer, were a living spreadsheet, optimizing your diet so you can live forever in pure, unreflective efficiency.
It is entirely possible — challenging, but possible — to cultivate a genuine love of healthy food.
Take “Feeding Tomorrow,” which, yes, critiques our food system’s environmental impacts — but also cannot help pressing a view of food as significant mostly for its practical applications for personal health and the environment. Lisa McDowell, director of clinical nutrition and wellness at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor, Mich., talks in one segment about healthy food as a quality-of-life factor. Yet she also emphasizes it as a performance enhancer. Speaking of her role as a nutritional adviser for athletes, she asks, “What are the foods that you can really hardwire into their day where it gives them just a little bit of an edge?” She is meanwhile ripping open a pack of protein powder to blitz in a blender with some vegetables.
Or take “Live to 100,” which is about the author Dan Buettner’s fascination with so-called blue zones — places with high concentrations of centenarians. He finds that the long-living folks in places like Okinawa and Sardinia eat lots of plants and very little meat and that they are less stressed, more interested in things and more socially connected than we are. Okinawans, he notes, are “consuming an array of foods which all have medicinal properties or health benefits,” by which he means they eat a wide range of mostly plants; in Sardinia, he rhymes about an enclave of people who eat “whole grains, greens and beans.”
Members of these cultures, you cannot help noticing, were not persuaded to eat this way via comparison of their long-term health outcomes with those of other people. (They live in relative isolation, in fact.) Rather, they have cultivated their habits and culinary traditions as satisfying and sustaining ways of life, not measures for maximizing health or optimizing performance.
This is precisely what is missing from so many of today’s health-and-nutrition shows: They have surprisingly little to say about the satisfaction all those fruits and vegetables and whole grains can offer beyond what you might see at your next physical. Our cravings may not be rational, but they are changeable; it is entirely possible — challenging, but possible — to cultivate a genuine love of healthy food instead of food that slowly kills us. But rarely is that love born of metrics.
It is, in my experience, sparked by pleasure. You can learn how to love shiitake mushrooms or garlicky broccoli or crisp but tender roasted chickpeas, heaped with blistered scallions and peppers, over a bowl of deepest gold saffron rice — not because they will improve your next set of blood tests but because they are fully capable of tasting fantastic. I used to happily consume my share of burgers and fries like any number of Americans, and I took great pleasure in it. What changed, for me, wasn’t some sudden realization that other choices might be healthier or more virtuous; it was that I began learning how to cook and slowly realized how delicious plants could be. The key was learning that the zingy zest of lemon, the bright sting of ginger or the muted earth of spinach could be every bit as delicious as anything else I’d been feeding myself. Feeling better, feeling healthier, came from that enjoyment.
This is why, watching all this nutrition programming, I often find myself wondering if their aims would be better accomplished by simple cooking shows. Turn on a cooking show, and you probably will not be scolded or patronized by people who know little of your struggles or the loves, memories and traditions you have forged around food. Turn on a cooking show, and you will see the pursuit and the practice of pleasure itself — say, the ways mushrooms can muster intense savoriness or roasted vegetables can be as satisfying as anything that bleeds. You will see new ways to love food. And that, if you’re lucky, may point the way toward a healthier way to live.
Nicholas Cannariato is a writer who lives in Chicago.
Source photographs for above photo illustration: CSA Images/Getty Images.
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