Book review: Healthy food is an app click away, but we’re eating more junk than ever. How did we get here?
That contradiction is at the heart of British food journalist Bee Wilson’s astute, wide-ranging “The Way We Eat Now: How the Food Revolution Has Transformed Our Lives, Our Bodies, and Our World.”
What’s to blame? Among the contributors she details are evolutionary biology, international investment in junk-food companies, restaurant marketing and portion inflation, family and work changes, a flood of cheap vegetable oil, relentless snack promotion in developing nations, the rise of restaurant home-delivery services, and the way our brains don’t register high calories in liquid form.
She writes like the busy mom that she is, caught up as we all are in the whirlwind schedules and demands of modern life. While she promotes civilized, set-aside mealtimes when possible, she eschews an overly nostalgic view of centuries past in which women spent hours a day preparing meals because they had no freakin’ choice. She also has an endearingly single-minded grudge against bland Cavendish bananas.
The author Bee Wilson. That’s where Wilson’s optimism kicks in. She thinks we have at least a fighting chance of following those four nutritional stages with a fifth one in which we concentrate on the quality as well as the quantity of food, find time for the preparation of it and make it economically feasible for even the poorest among us to eat healthily and pleasurably.
In 2016, it “had the highest average consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages on the planet,” its citizens “eating unusually large quantities of salty snacks and chips and packaged sweet desserts.” Among Latin American countries, it had the second highest rate of obesity after Mexico, 66 percent when 35 years before it was more common to be malnourished.
If such laws are to stick, inducements to eat better, she says, will include more affordable vegetables, bred for taste over size and supermarket stackability.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Healthy plant-based diet (but not plant-based junk food) may protect kidneys(Reuters Health) - While a healthy-plant based diet is tied to a lower risk of k...
Read more »
Quiz-Based Life Insurance Company Now Valued at $450 MillionAre you healthy enough to get cheaper life insurance? Health IQ Insurance Services uses a quiz to find out if individuals are fit enough to merit a discounted policy.
Read more »
Creating A Workplace Culture That Values Mental HealthCulture is a powerful tool to encourage healthy habits, and many companies have leveraged culture to successfully and cost-efficiently promote better mental health in the workplace by creating a culture that values mental health needs and providing support without stigma.
Read more »
Healthy plant-based diet (but not plant-based junk food) may protect kidneys(Reuters Health) - While a healthy-plant based diet is tied to a lower risk of k...
Read more »
Proposed Texas bill would ban food stamp recipients from buying junk food, soda, energy drinksA proposed Texas bill would ban residents from purchasing junk food using food stamps. House Bill 4364, filed by Texas state Rep. Briscoe Cain in March, would make food items such as candy and energy drinks ineligible to buy with food stamps.
Read more »
Japan's labor shortage eats away at back-breaking work cultureWhen she worked in sales for a Japanese bank, Chihiro Narazaki was passed over f...
Read more »
Perspective | I am terrified my newborn girl will inherit my 22-year-long eating disorderShe will be with me at almost every moment, see everything I do, hear everything I say, and her little sponge-brain will absorb it all.
Read more »
‘Star Wars: Episode IX’ release date is one year away, here’s what we know so far‘Star Wars: Episode IX’ release date is one year away, here’s what we know so far MayThe4thBeWithYou
Read more »
Beyond Meat is getting the Silicon Valley treatment even though it's a food companyBeyond Meat is being valued at more than 40 times revenue, while most big food companies have price-to-sales multiples of less than two.
Read more »