RE: Healthy Junk Food
This Atlantic article has been universally derided by my friends. They think Freedman is making health food advocates into strawmen. That he’s trolling because his argument is so one-sided and focuses only on unhealthy wholesome food. That he’s saying wholesome food is bad and processed food is good. I think they’re just missing the point of the article. Here’s my response…
Headline aside, I don’t think he’s trolling. He’s not saying there are no healthy wholesome options. He’s not saying upper-middle class folks should be eating at McDonald’s. He’s focusing on the poor, underprivileged, obese, heart disease-ridden population and looking at practical solutions to help them lose weight and eat healthier. These are the people who reject food because it’s healthy. Who assume healthy food cannot taste good. He’s putting himself in their mindset as he trolls the aisles of Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. Just like the bodegas that he mentions, if we install farmer’s markets in their communities they’ll gravitate toward the sausage and cheese (you don’t even need to go to poor communities to see that - just come up to Wisconsin).
Yes, people have subsisted on wholesome food for 10,000 years, but that doesn’t mean they were healthy. Freedman mentions research showing that affluent people in ancient societies likely had clogged arteries. If we make wholesome food cheap enough for underprivileged communities, what’s to stop them from eating like the affluent of ancient Peru? (I’m all for increasing access to fresh fruits and veggies, and Freedman is too. His argument is simply about the wholesome/processed dichotomy.)
It’s nice that the health consequences of wholesome food are well understood, but having data about the effectiveness of a diet does no good if you can’t get people to stick to it.
Freedman’s point is not that you can’t eat healthy with a wholesome diet, but rather that eating wholesome doesn’t imply eating healthy. His point is that the obesity crisis in America is much too important to let any ideology dictate our public health approach. I was a big fan of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution (which brought real food back to public school cafeterias), and I think we should be teaching kids about where food comes from and what real food looks like and how to make flavorful real food, but I think at the same time we shouldn’t be so cynical about the processed food industry. Food scientists aren’t all evil Dr. Frankensteins out to kill our children. Many of them are doing exactly the things we can all agree are important, such as helping people with portion control. He talks about this in the article.
There is a certain privilege to assuming a single mother of three kids should just be able to head over to the farmer’s market and whip up a fresh stir-fry for her family after her 12+ hour work day. The fact that someone can work a 40-hour week and not make a living wage is a disgrace, but until we fix that we have to be aware of all of the consequences, even those that may make us uncomfortable.
Freedman’s logic only seems contorted if you come at it with a specific ideology: if you take it for granted that there are grave health consequences of processed food. When it comes to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, it’s not clear processing food makes it necessarily worse (even if many processed foods contain ingredients that do exacerbate those issues).
