Rethinking the American Diet

Blogging live from lunch at South Water Kitchen in Chicago.

The photo on the front page of today's New York Times is astounding: hundreds of thousands of people in South Korea protesting U.S. beef imports. I guess that U.S. beef is not what's for dinner in Seoul and fear of mad cow disease (and a desire to protect the local beef producers) is why. The wide shot of the crowd doesn't pop up on the Times' Web site but this AP shot from Yahoo will give you the meaty flavor of the gathering.

I've been thinking a lot about beef ever since I read a piece in the Times a few months back about its environmental impact. Everyone eliminating 20% of one's beef intake, as I recall, was the equivalent of switching from a Camry to a Prius (if the Times' search engine wasn't so feeble I'd link you to the article). I've been trying to do that both for the health and environmental benefits (Hint: making breakfast meatless is an easy start; one or two dinners a week isn't that hard either. Harder but effective is to restrict oneself to small farm, grass fed beef -- it's just that much harder to find, especially in restaurants).

I tried being a pescitarian for a few weeks last year but, well, it only lasted a few weeks. I'm an omnivore and there isn't anything I can do about that. No apologies from me for eating things with faces. I could never do the no carb thing; the smell alone of fresh baked bread makes me weak in the knees. Vegetarianism? That is great until the ecoli shows up in the spinach or salmonella gets tomatoes whisked from the shelves faster than Obama signs at a McCain rally.

Mark Bittman's excellent piece in today's Dining In section (hey, I was on an airplane and the Times was all I had to read today) gives great ideas for putting meat in its place. The one that struck me most was conceptual: think of meat as a treasure, a jewel, rather than as the center of the meal. This is how meat is thought of in much of the world and this subtle mental shift makes portion control a lot more palatable. Think, for example, of answering the "what's for dinner" question with "A great caprese salad with fresh mozzerella a little sliced tenderloin" instead of "steak and salad." The ingredients don't have to change in order to alter expectations.

Here at the South Water Kitchen, the burger is advertised as a half-pounder. Who needs a half pound of beef for lunch? I remember when the Quarter Pounder was introduced and it was played up as an enormous amount of meat. Increasingly, restaurant burgers are 8, 10, or more ounces of beef. The USDA reports that per capita meat consumption is up 57 lbs per year (2000 vs. 1950).

Americans have steadily increased their caloric consumption between 1970 and 2000 (22% for women; 7% for men as of 2000 according to the National Center for Health Statistics; USDA suggests that it has grown by 24% overall). Soft drink consumption is up five-fold over the past 50 years. And we wonder why so many of those around us are obese.

With more people working more hours, dependence on convenient foods (ready to eat, take out, restaurants, etc.) will continue to grow. This means a greater dependence on a corporate food supply -- you don't get a lot of heat-and-serve options at your local farmers' market. While there are healthy options, too much of what we grab to go is laden with salt, high fructose corn syrup, factory farm bred meat and poultry, and other ingredients that are far from the best you can put in your body.

It's time to rethink the American diet. We need to make the personal and policy efforts necessary to increase local food production, small and medium-sized farms, and fresh, unprocessed foods. We need to acknowledge that most of us should be eating less and virtually all of us should be eating differently.

Then again, we may not have a choiceTom Pawlick is eloquent on the larger issues that may cause the current food system to collapse in The End of Food.

Now I'm off to produce an event at (sigh) Morton's Steak House. See how hard it is to eat small?