THE PERILS OF PLENTY

253
CHAPTER
23
THE PERILS OF PLENTY
These same forces – improvements in transportation, preservation,
and distribution – liberating Americans from seasonality also con-
tinued to free them from the dictates of regional geography.
Harvey Levenstein (1993)
1
IT IS WORTH REPEATING that many of the breakthroughs in nutritional
science paradoxically occurred during the depression years of food riots,
soup kitchens, and breadlines, where the hungry in the cities shoved aside
dogs and cats to get at the contents of garbage cans, and rural folks ate wild
roots and plants. These were years when morbidity and mortality rates
caused by pellagra, scurvy, and rickets were rising alarmingly, and bowleg-
gedness continued to be a common sight.
2
Needless to say, it was not a time for experimenting with foreign foods,
nor were the food-rationed war years that followed. Despite rationing,
however, Americans ate better than ever during the war although this did
not prevent the “experts” from touching off a brief episode of vitamin hys-
teria, beginning in 1943 when the Food and Nutrition Board erroneously
told Americans – now back to work with plenty of money to spend – that
their diets were dangerously defi cient in many of the chief nutrients. Such
foolishness only underscores the fact that the functions and chemistry of
vitamins and minerals were still poorly understood. So did proposals for
widespread vitamin supplementation, with bread, cereals, milk, and oleo-
margarine all fortifi ed during the war. It was a vita-mania pot that Adel
Davis would continue to stir in ensuing decades with her recommenda-
tions for an excessive, even dangerous, vitamin intake.
3

By 1994, vitamin
supplements constituted a four billion dollar industry.
4
254
A Movable Feast
Backyard barbeques came into vogue in the 1950s. By 1995, 77 percent
of American households had at least one grill generally presided over by
males who, at fi rst limited themselves to charring hunks of meat, slabs of
ribs, chicken parts, or, less ambitiously, hot dogs and burgers.
5
It was men
who bought the barbequing cookbooks that began appearing in the fi f-
ties, and some became sophisticated cooks who promoted themselves to
the indoor kitchen. Frequently more culinarily adventuresome than their
wives, many led their families into foreign cooking.
By the 1960s dark clouds had once again built up on the health horizon,
even as Americans were congratulating themselves on being the best-fed
people in the world. In 1953, University of Minnesota physiologist Ancel
Keys had ominously correlated high rates of coronary heart disease with
high intakes of animal fats,
6
and in the United States coronary artery dis-
ease ( CAD ) rates had spiraled upward with CAD death rates rising from
180 to over 200 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.
7
There were also cancer concerns. Worries about cancer-causing additives
in foods prompted a 1958 amendment to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic
Act of 1938, which forbade the use of additives that had not been used
long enough to be “generally recognized as safe” ( GRAS). At the behest of
Congressman James J. Delaney, an amendment was inserted that became a

controversial clause (the Delaney Clause), which stated that if any amount
of an additive was shown to produce cancer in humans or in test animals
then no amount of the additive could be used. Needless to say, food pro-
cessors were not amused by the joke that everything seems to give mice
cancer, and they correctly pointed out that humankind would not be here
if low levels of carcinogens could not be tolerated. Paracelsus, a Renais-
sance physician, wrote a long time ago that all substances were poisons and
it was the dose that mattered; an important truth, but no Congressman
wants to be known as voting for cancer.
8
If the apparent upsurge of these chronic diseases did not give Americans
enough to fret about, they also found themselves battling obesity in a way
they never had before. “Plenty” was multiplying. By the late 1960s, the
average output of meat per breeding animal was double that of the 1920s;
the average Wisconsin dairy cow was yielding ten quarts of milk a day
instead of the six it had provided in 1940; and the average farm acre was
producing seventy bushels of corn, up from twenty-fi ve in 1916.
9
Paradoxically, however, while many wrestled with the problem of too
much to eat, others were not getting enough. The Field Foundation report
The Perils of Plenty
255
entitled Hunger U.S.A . and the television documentary Hunger in America,
both released in 1968, touched off President Nixon’s “war on hunger” as
well as a debate over the methodology used by hunger studies.
10
Yet, despite
the “war” there seems little doubt that food insuffi ciency remains a chronic
problem for some 35 million Americans. During the fi rst four years of the
new century hunger was either present in or a threat to about 12.6 million

American families (a bit over 11 percent of U.S. households). Obviously,
this has nothing to do with food shortages. But it has everything to do with
poverty caused by joblessness, the cost of housing and other basic needs,
and a welfare system that does not put up a safety net.
11
Some defenders
of the system, however, take a perverse delight in pointing out that obesity
is more pervasive among the poor than among the affl uent, brushing aside
that the poor feed disproportionately on cheap and fatty fast foods.
12
In the 1940s, obesity was defi ned as “overfatness,” implying that one
could be overweight but not “over-fat.” But in the following decades such
niceties were tossed overboard – people had become suffi ciently concerned
about their waistlines that sales of low-calorie and diet products skyrock-
eted and books on weight control became best sellers. In 1962, 40 percent
of American families were using low-calorie or diet products on a regular
basis; by 1972 the percentage had jumped to 70.
13
There was good reason for concern. Over the past two centuries the
fat intake of those on a western diet had risen fi ve times, while their sugar
intake had leaped fi fteen times. Americans who were taking in less than
2,000 calories daily at the end of the eighteenth century were swallowing
over 3,000 toward the end of the twentieth century – and by 1995 more
than half of them had achieved the “ideal” weight of an earlier America,
when slimness was regarded as a sign of ill-health and products, like Groves
Tasteless Chill Tonic, promised to add “much admired heft to the fi gure” by
making children and adults “as fat as pigs.”
14
By the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century, there was such plenty that
a mean of almost 4,000 calories was available on a daily basis for every

man, woman, and child in the nation (up from 3,700 in 1990), represent-
ing over a third more than the caloric RDA for men and over twice that for
women.
15
Moreover, the calories in question have increasingly come from
highly processed calorie-dense foods, which means that they reach the
stomach in such a compact form that we generally get more of them than
we need before ever feeling comfortably full.
16
For the sake of comparison,
unprocessed plant foods such as cereals, pulses, potatoes, vegetables, and
256
A Movable Feast
fruits comprise around 61 percent of the calories consumed in Crete, and
74 percent of those in Greece. But in the United States only 37 percent of
energy is derived from these unprocessed foods.
17
These are some of the reasons behind the so-called “obesity epidemic”
that has ambushed the nation, and yet another, some say, is that food is
too cheap for our own good. In 1965, Americans spent an average of 18.5
percent of their income for food – down from 24.4 percent in 1955. This
represented the lowest percentage ever, as well as the lowest in the world – a
situation that has not changed.
18
Paradoxically then, life-giving food has become life-threatening and not
just for Americans. The World Health Organizations’ ( WHO) fears that the
obesity epidemic would be globalized during the fi rst part of the twenty-
fi rst century were realized in the very fi rst year of that century when it was
reported that the number of overweight people in the world had reached
a bit over a billion, matching almost exactly another billion that are badly

nourished and underweight.
19
Westerners, of course, are in the “globeisity” vanguard with America, the
United Kingdom, Russia, and Germany all having overweight majorities
that seem to be getting heavier by the day, thanks to an energy intake that
far exceeds output.
20
Hunter-gatherers expended great amounts of energy
in fi nding their food; farmers did the same in growing theirs. Modern
Westerners, by contrast, although metabolically still hunter-gatherers, use
little more energy in food acquisition than it takes to push a cart around a
supermarket and open their wallets at the checkout counter.
Caloric needs used to be based, in part, on occupation-related energy
expenditures, but today’s labor-saving machinery has sharply reduced
occupational caloric requirements, just as automobiles and elevators have
reduced those previously needed for walking and climbing. Television and
computers lure us even further into physical inactivity, and the conse-
quences of a growing gap between energy intake and energy output have
become terribly evident in the onset of the so-called “chronic” diseases that
beset us – coronary artery disease, adult onset diabetes, high blood pres-
sure, and cancer.
21
The following unsettling numbers lurk behind these modern killers.
Between 1988 and 1991, one-third of America’s population was over-
weight; by 1995 estimates indicated that around 55 percent were over-
weight, and if the young were excluded then 63 percent of men and 55
percent of women over the age of 25 were either overweight or obese.
The Perils of Plenty
257
In 1999, according to an article in The Journal of the American Medical

Association, 21 percent of male and 27 percent of female Americans were
not just overweight but obese, and obesity was killing upwards of 300,000
U.S. citizens annually.
22
In 2001, 65 percent of all Americans were over-
weight, double the percentage of a few decades earlier, and then in the
spring of 2004, USAToday told travelers that diet and physical inactivity
were doing in 400,000 Americans annually and that obesity was edging out
tobacco use as the nation’s number one killer. In 2005, the promised revi-
sions to the Food Guide Pyramid corrected its earlier silence on exercise by
urging that people exercise between 30 and 90 minutes every day.
23
Such numbers also lie behind businesses like the weight-loss industry,
already doing 5 billion dollars worth of business in 1990. Good for that
business, too, was a 1996 Harris Poll report that 74 percent of Americans aged
28 and older perceived themselves to be overweight.
24
If these perceptions
seem high, it is a fact that since the 1980s the number of extremely obese
Americans has quadrupled despite “low-carb” diets, Slimfast, Richard Sim-
mons, and jazzercise. This has given new meaning to the term “personal
expansionism” which has stimulated the clothing industry (in 1985 the
most common size for women’s sportswear was an 8; in 2003 it was a 14);
health-delivery systems (around 250,000 operations to help obese people
lose weight are performed annually, and demand for obesity surgeons is
skyrocketing); and Medicare, which has tossed its old policy that obesity
is not a disease in the wastebasket (thus opening the door to millions of
claims for stomach surgery and diet programs). It is also responsible for
such novel enterprises as the construction of larger and sturdier couches,
chairs, and toilet seats, the manufacture of seat-belt extenders for airlines,

extra-wide umbrellas, bathroom scales that can weigh people up to 1,000
pounds, and the production of super-sized caskets with cemeteries offering
super-sized plots.
A search for substitute foods and ingredients may have originated for
reasons other than weight loss, but it has been spurred on by the current
dietary dilemma. Margarine, the fi rst successful substitute food, has been
commercially produced in America since 1873 as an inexpensive alterna-
tive to butter, although not without bitter opposition from dairy farmers
who, at one point, demanded that margarine be dyed purple to discour-
age its purchase. Unlike butter, margarine lacked vitamins A and D, so
that, after the vitamins were discovered, it became obligatory for marga-
rine manufacturers to add these vitamins.
25
By the 1950s, margarine was