The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [153]
This situation suits the food industry just fine, of course. The more anxious we are about eating, the more vulnerable we are to the seductions of the marketer and the expert’s advice. Food marketing in particular thrives on dietary instability and so tends to exacerbate it. Since it’s difficult to sell more food to such a well-fed population (though not, as we’re discovering, impossible), food companies put their efforts into grabbing market share by introducing new kinds of highly processed foods, which have the virtue of being both highly profitable and infinitely adaptable. Sold under the banner of “convenience,” these processed foods are frequently designed to create whole new eating occasions, such as in the bus on the way to school (the protein bar or Pop-Tart) or in the car on the way to work (Campbell’s recently introduced a one-handed microwaveable microchunked soup in a container designed to fit a car’s cup holder).
The success of food marketers in exploiting shifting eating patterns and nutritional fashions has a steep cost. Getting us to change how we eat over and over again tends to undermine the various social structures that surround and steady our eating, institutions like the family dinner, for example, or taboos on snacking between meals and eating alone. In their relentless pursuit of new markets, food companies (with some crucial help from the microwave oven, which made “cooking” something even small children could do) have broken Mom’s hold over the American menu by marketing to every conceivable demographic—and especially to children.
A vice president of marketing at General Mills once painted for me a picture of the state of the American family dinner, courtesy of video cameras that the company’s consulting anthropologists paid families to let them install in the ceiling above the kitchen and dining room tables. Mom, perhaps feeling sentimental about the dinners of her childhood, still prepares a dish and a salad that she usually winds up eating by herself. Meanwhile, the kids, and Dad, too, if he’s around, each fix something different for themselves, because Dad’s on a low-carb diet, the teenager’s become a vegetarian, and the eight-year-old is on a strict ration of pizza that the shrink says it’s best to indulge (lest she develop eating disorders later on in life). So over the course of a half hour or so each family member roams into the kitchen, removes a single-portion entrée from the freezer, and zaps it in the microwave. (Many of these entrées have been helpfully designed to be safely “cooked” by an eight-year-old.) After the sound of the beep each diner brings his microwaveable dish to the dining room table, where he or she may or may not cross paths with another family member at the table for a few minutes. Families who eat this way are among the 47 percent of Americans who report to pollsters that they still sit down to a family meal every night.
Several years ago, in a book called The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, sociologist Daniel Bell called attention to the tendency of capitalism, in its single-minded pursuit of profit, to erode the various cultural underpinnings that steady a society but often impede the march of commercialization. The family dinner, and more generally a cultural consensus on the subject