If you`re waiting for the Age of Aquarius or some other cosmic dawning, you may be overlooking a subtle but inevitable shift of significant magnitude. America is entering a new age of eating.
This has nothing to do with crystals or the tarot-or, for that matter, the Jetsons. Forget meals in a pill.
Increasingly, safety, ecology, morality and even spiritual values have joined nutrition, convenience, conviviality and flavor as factors that determine what we choose to eat.
For a generation now, we`ve been facing a growing onslaught of headlines about diet. Pressure has been mounting to change our eating habits.
What`s more, we worry. Contradictory messages abound. While we`re told to eat more produce, poultry and seafood, we face concerns about pesticide-related food safety, bacterial food poisoning and inspection practices.
At the same time, shifts in what we eat and who prepares it have been fostered by social change-the surge of women entering the work force, the flip-flopping of sexual roles and the ever-accelerating speed of life.
Stir into this swirling cauldron the sheer array of changes in the food supply. During 1989, according to the American Dietetic Association records, more than 3,000 new food products were introduced, and almost half of those foods made a nutritional claim.
Doomsayers have a field day with all of this. Family tradition, they`ll argue, has all but evaporated. Ever more eccentric culinary combinations are necessary to satisfy the jaded palate. Kitchenless homes and glove-compartment microwaves are on the horizon.
But society appears to be stomping its collective foot. Saturated with bad news and worry, terms such as ”lifestyle” and ”latchkey,” anxiety over status and health, we`re witnessing the dawning of a whole new attitude towards food.
Contemporary Americans are rethinking the way they view their world and live their lives. And food, in fact, is a barometer, says Barbara Caplan, vice president of Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, a research and polling organization in Westport, N.Y.
”From a standpoint of social change, I can`t think of a better metaphor than food,” Caplan says. ”Food in general is more than a pocketbook issue, far more than trends and fads. Patterns of food consumption are very much tied to lifestyles, attitudes and values.”
We`re not flighty about what we eat. Vintage research at California Polytechnic Institute at San Luis Obispo demonstrated that food is perhaps one of the most intimate and immutable factors of being human. Society can pressure the individual or family to change its traditions, lifestyles and language, but food preferences and habits are fairly fixed.
Health concerns complicate the equation for millions of Americans. According to Judy Putnam, an economist who charts food-consumption statistics for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the diet-health link has been a growing focus since the 1950s. During the 1960s and `70s, she says, concern started to become entrenched.
”The public is saying-about 60 percent of us, anyway-that they`re changing their diet for health reasons. And then there are 40 percent who never seem to care.”
More dramatic is the growing number of Americans who clearly associate what they eat with the state of their health. According to a 1990 Gallup survey, 83 percent of Americans-77 percent of men and 88 percent of women-believe that what they eat will affect their future well-being.
Phil Lempert, editor of The Lempert Report, a biweekly survey of marketing trends, says that during the last half of the century this awareness of nutrition and its role in health is probably the single most important development in our society`s view of food.
Nutrition`s impact on society cannot be underestimated, Lempert insists. He says that its effects can be felt in supermarkets and dining rooms, through the media and throughout the manufacturing, marketing and retail world.
Changing tastes
”Go back 40 years. To talk about food then was strictly to talk about what tasted good. That was mainly the case for more than 300 or 400 years.
”Today the government is concerned, the trade associations are concerned about getting accurate info to us, and the newspapers and radio are jammed with nutrition, food risk, health.”
Nutrition burnout, however, is one of the biggest problems. Information overload is the problem. A public so confounded by conflicting messages and non-stop ”food alerts” runs the risk of simply turning off and reverting to familiar and comfortable-and, often, unhealthful-food styles.
”The public definitely has the message loud and clear-nutrition is important,” says Evelyn Tribole, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association based in Irvine, Calif.
”But the big gap that has to be filled is the application: How do I eat healthy and have it taste good?”
Flavor, she says, remains the overriding challenge. According to a Gallup survey conducted last year for the ADA, people continue to link issues of cholesterol and health with reduced pleasure.
”But I`m here to say that you can have your cake and eat it, too,”
Tribole argues. ”It doesn`t have to be an all-or-none situation.
”Today, the emphasis is on what to put into the diet, rather than no-no- no. Hopefully you`ll put enough good into the diet that will squeeze out the less valuable food choices,” she says.
Old-fashioned values are melding with modern issues. Nancy Byal, Better Homes and Gardens food editor, works with Food Marketing Institute, a supermarket trade group.
In conducting an ongoing series of consumer behavior panels, Byal found that we appear to be learning to balance good health with pleasurable eating. Readers are requesting recipes with less fat, leaner cuts of meat, more grains and fresh produce, Byal says.
Seven percent of those responding to a recent BH&G poll said that one or more vegetarians were part of their households. More than 40 percent said they`re concerned about the way veal is brought to market. There`s also an upswing in interest in family meals, made-from-scratch cooking and material aimed at family traditions.
(Better Homes and Gardens often is considered a bellwether of nationwide trends, not only because of its massive research undertakings but also because the magazine`s Midwestern base tends to reflects attitudes in the nation`s heartland. One of 10 American households subscribes to the magazine.)
Echoes of `The Jungle`
Social change as it relates to diet isn`t just a blip in the Baby Boom curve, says Ellen Haas, director of Public Voice, a Washington D.C.-based consumer action group.
She sees awareness of nutrition integrating with other priorities-flavor, convenience, ethical questions and safety-as part of a century-long trend.
”At the time of the turn of the last century, with `The Jungle,` the muckraker Upton Sinclair found all these problems with the Chicago meatpacking industry. Then the Pure Food and Drug Act (of 1906) followed. But we rode the crest for the rest of the century, and nobody did much to change things since.”
But during the past 10 years, nutrition and food safety have galloped ahead of other priorities such as convenience and flavor.
”But nobody ever expected (nutrition and safety) to be up there, all alone,” Haas says. ”Certainly the economic issues of a working mother or a single parent who has three children to feed the moment that parent comes home-that`s very important. As is getting something onto the table they`ll actually eat.”
Today the public is learning that it can eat better and more easily. The new era calls for better education in how that can be done.
Advertising and entertainment media have yet to respond, says Sue Foerster, chief of the nutrition and cancer-prevention program for the California Department of Health Services.
Foerster wants to see more day-to-day attention to positive lifestyle habits through role models. But she sees herself and other health
professionals up against a well-financed food industry still sending out negative health messages.
”We`re bucking the kinds of advertising we`re exposed to every day in hundreds of ways. So when we`re thirsty, too many of us don`t think of grabbing a container of juice or some water; we go for a Pepsi or Coke, just as when we`re hungry we go for a Big Mac instead of an apple. Because that`s what televison tells us we should want when we`re hungry or thirsty.”
Looking for leadership
It`s time for positive role models to step forward. Just as Arnold Schwarzennegar is campaigning for fitness for kids, we need Cher and James Earl Jones to speak out in favor of healthful foods.
”We`ve noticed that a lot of the prime-time shows have taken some step,” Foerster says. ”Now, `L.A. Law,` at their regular meetings don`t have doughnuts but a bowl of fresh fruit. But this still holds pretty much true: In 1988, a study that assessed all food advertising during prime-time TV, as well as all the foods depicted during the shows themselves-both advertising and subliminal modeling-showed that something like 3 percent of the advertising was for fruits and vegetables.”
Ethical and environmental concerns are rising steadily. Which is why, says NBC network announcer Casey Kasem, he and others are starting to speak out on ecological issues, animal rights and vegetarianism. He does so wherever possible as a spokesman for groups such as the Farm Animal Reform Movement.
”I think our changing attitude regarding (sensible eating) is long-range and intelligent in many respects: ethically, for health and environmental reasons.
”I sense that I have a responsibility to make others more aware. What we eat can change us and the world-spiritually, socially and ecologically.”
