Americans disagree about a lot of things, but we rarely quarrel when it comes to our food. For a nation built on grand democratic virtues, there is still nothing that defines us quite like our love of chow time.
We have plenty of reasons to fetishize our food — not the least being that we’ve always had so much of it. Settlers fleeing the privations of the Old World landed in the new one and found themselves on a fat, juicy center cut of continent, big enough to baste its coasts in two different oceans. The prairies ran so dark with buffalo, you could practically net them like cod; the waters swam so thick with cod, you could bag them like slow-moving buffalo. The soil was the kind of rich stuff in which you could bury a brick and grow a house, and the pioneers grew plenty — fruits and vegetables and grains and gourds and legumes and tubers, in a variety and abundance they’d never seen before.
With all that, was it any wonder that when we had a chance to establish our first national holiday, it was Thanksgiving — a feast that doesn’t merely accompany a celebration but in effect is the celebration? Is it any wonder that what might be our most evocative patriotic song is America the Beautiful, in which an ideal like brotherhood doesn’t even get mentioned until the second-to-last line, well after rhapsodic references to waves of grain and fruited plains? “We’ve defined an American version of what it means to succeed,” says neuroscientist Randy Seeley, associate director of the Obesity Research Center at the University of Cincinnati Medical School. “And a big part of that is access to an environment in which there is a lot of food to be consumed.”
The problem is, all those calories come at a price. Humans, like most animals, are hardwired not just to eat but to gorge, since living in the wild means never knowing when the next famine is going to strike. Best to load up on calories when you can — even if that famine never comes. “We’re not only programmed to eat a lot,” says Sharman Apt Russell, author of Hunger: An Unnatural History, “but to prefer foods that are high in calories.” What’s more, the better we got at producing food, the easier it became. If you’re a settler, you eat a lot of buffalo in part because you need a lot of buffalo — at least after burning so many calories hunting and killing it. But what happens when eating requires no sweat equity at all, when the grocery store is always nearby and always full?
What happens is, you get fat, and that’s precisely what we’ve done. In 1900 the average weight of a college-age male in the U.S. was 133 lb. ; the average woman was 122 lb. . By 2000, men had plumped up to 166 lb. and women to 144 lb. . And while the small increase in average height for men accounts for a bit of that, our eating habits are clearly responsible for most. Over the past 20 years in particular, we’ve stuffed ourselves like pt geese. In 1985 there were only eight states in which more than 10% of the adult population was obese — though the data collection then was admittedly spottier than it is now. By 2006, there were no states left in which the obesity rates were that low, and in 23 states, the number exceeded 25%. Even those figures don’t tell the whole story, since they include only full-blown obesity. Overall, about two-thirds of all Americans weigh more than they should.
“Sit down on a bench in a park with a person on either side of you,” says Penelope Slade-Royall, director of the U.S. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. “If you’re not overweight, statistically speaking, both of the other people sitting with you are.”
If there was any firewall against the fattening of American adults, it was American kids. The quick metabolism and prodigious growth spurts of childhood make it a challenge just to keep up with all the calories you need, never mind exceed them. But even the most active kids could not hold out forever against the storm of food coming at them every day. In 1971 only 4% of 6-to-11-year-old kids were obese; by 2004, the figure had leaped to 18.8%. In the same period, the number rose from 6.1% to 17.4% in the 12-to-19-year-old group, and from 5% to 13.9% among kids ages just 2 to 5. And as with adults, that’s just obesity. Include all overweight kids, and a whopping 32% of all American children now carry more pounds than they should. “There’s no way to overestimate how scary numbers like this are,” says Seeley.
See a special report on the science of appetite.
See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.
