Many people believe that women started to use convenience foods in droves in the 1950s. But as Shapiro documents, women then as well as now were responsible for the vast majority of meals in homes, and they initially avoided many prepared foods for fear that they'd appear to be shirking their duty as housewives
.
Boxed cake mixes were a prime example. When they first hit the scene in the 1950s, a homemaker needed to add only water. Women dreaded the guilt of serving such a cake, not to mention the depressing faux egg flavor. So despite initial interest, sales remained stagnant. Researchers found that cooks wanted more involvement with their cakes in order to have the necessary pride of ownership that goes with baking. Food scientists never cared for the outcome of cakes using dried egg whites anyway, so they changed the formula so that home cooks could participate by adding eggs. How delightful! Women could have their boxed cake and contribute, too. With that subtle change, the sales of cake mixes skyrocketed.
Even now, many boxed foods require the addition of eggs, milk, butter, oil, or margarine, even though it's unnecessary given the state of food science. But by requiring those ingredients, they give the perception of “cooking” without too much fuss.
However, the “shortcut” of boxed cake mixes typically includes twenty-two to thirty-three ingredients, many of them polysyllabic chemicals. A friend of mine majored in chemistry in college and later went to work for a major food company. To this day, he refuses to eat ultraprocessed foods. One reason is that the method to approve food additives requires that individual ingredients be tested and weighed in isolation, and as a result no one has any idea how they all interact together.
“When it comes to food additives, we're the mice,” he said.
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That isn't all bad. Scientists love mice. Well, they make great subjects, anyway. In
The End of Overeating,
author Dr. David A. Kessler documents the decades-long pursuit of scientists working for food manufacturers to fine-tune heavily processed and fast-food fare. Their goal: to hit a “sweet spot” of the holy trinity of fat, salt, and sugar, trying to turn just the right keys to unlock a dopamine response in your brain. Dopamine triggers neurotransmitters to provide an artificially enhanced pleasure response. Finding that combination for them is like the scene in old movies where a guy uses a stethoscope to listen for clicks in a huge bank vault. Suddenly, he hears the last click and, voilà ! The safe opens.
The goal of food science isn't flavor but consumption. “When scientists say a food is palatable, they are referring primarily to its capacity to stimulate the appetite and prompt us to eat more,” Kessler noted.
For example, eat a handful of blueberries and you're easily satiated by the natural sugar. Not so with an ultraprocessed frozen blueberry waffle. Even the scent that escapes the toaster has been carefully orchestrated to heighten your anticipation. Perhaps you don't even think it tastes great, yet you still want another one . . . and perhaps another one. This odd response triggered in the brain led researchers to find that rats fed a steady diet of junk food quickly become addicted to it. Waiting for their dopamine fix from high-sugar, fatty, and salty treats, they rejected their normal “rat chow.” Some of them starved to death. Notably, serious habit-forming drugs such as cocaine or heroin trigger the same response in the rats.
Targeting this reaction is the reason why more than three-quarters of the sodium that Americans consume comes from ultraprocessed convenience and fast foods. Does a cup of soup really need 38 percent of an adult's recommended daily salt intake to taste good? No. Does a piece of frozen lasagna need three teaspoons of sugar, the equivalent of the amount in a glazed doughnut? No. But both do if the manufacturers want you to buy more soup and more lasagna.
This explains cravings for potato chips or fast food. It's also why some children reject nonprocessed food. It takes very little time for tiny haywired brains, hungry for dopamine, to reject anything other than what might match the high-fat, high-salt, and high-sugar makeup of chicken nuggets, a frozen pizza, or a box of macaroni and cheese. Jodi's son came to mind. “It's so hard,” Jodi told me about trying to feed her son something other than his preferred kid's diet. “I do my freakin' best to be patient, but then we have these scenes. So I admit it, a lot of the time I just give in and give him what he wants.”
Many nutritionists believe toddlers should consume no more than 1,000 milligrams of sodium a day; the USDA cites 1,500 milligrams. Yet one can of Campbell's condensed alphabet vegetable soup contains 2,100 milligrams. That cup of soup has a teaspoon and a half of sugar, the same amount that's in a slice of apple pie.
Most packaged foods are engineered to mimic a pharmacopoeia of flavors, even if you're expected to consciously taste only one. The more complex the flavor, the more you'll eat. This explains complicated variations of fried chicken or dipping sauces for chicken nuggets. But research suggests that when one or two flavors dominate, people eat less.
“There's the obvious fact that the single most important thing about food is taste,” says Dr. David Katz, author of
The Flavor Point Diet.
“If we know that limiting food to simple flavors causes people to fill up faster, it really makes sense that having a wide variety of flavors engineered into foods would make people fill up slower and need to eat more. If you are choosing simpler foods . . . you will fill up faster on fewer calories.”
All of these are great reasons to learn to pay attention to labels and focus on cooking simple foods. So for the next class, I brought in Beve Kindblade. She had been a nutritionist for nineteen-plus years and I liked her pragmatic approach. The crew wouldn't be cooking, so I lured them in with dinner. But what to serve for dinner when a nutritionist comes calling? We made lentil soup and organic greens topped with a quick strawberry vinaigrette and baked up some fresh whole wheat baguette that Mike was experimenting with at home.
Beve started by casually asking the group some questions. “So just what brings you to a class like this?”
Gen went first. “So it's kind of funny, but my mother was insulted when she found out that I was taking a cooking class,” she said. Growing up, her mother had asked her to make dinners on Monday nights. “She said, âI taught you how to cook! Why do you need a class? What did I do wrong?' So I had to say, âOh, yes, Mom, you're right, you taught me. I just wasn't listening.'”
“Did she teach you anything?” Beve ask.
Gen thought about it. “The only thing that I really remember was tuna curry. It's a can of tuna mixed with curry powder and sour cream. But I still don't know how to make that either.”
“That sounds kind of disgusting,” Terri said.
“It kind of was,” Gen said. “That's probably why I didn't learn to cook from her.”
“I enjoy going out a lot more than I like cooking,” Terri told Beve. “I feel like the hassle of cooking for just me isn't worth it. But now that I've got high blood pressure, my doctor wants me to cut sodium, and that's hard to do if you eat a lot of fast food, which I do.”
“I know what you mean,” Dri said. “I don't eat a lot of fast food, but I have to say that when I cook, I tend to make a lot. Maybe it's from growing up in a big family. Then I eat too much of it or I have leftovers forever.”
Beve listened to all their stories with genuine interest. Then she spoke about herself, her voice full of Southern twang. Her decision to go into the field came from her own “What's in the box?” moment. Growing up in North Carolina farming country, Crisco was a pantry staple used for everything. “Heck, I even won the Crisco is Cooking Award and still have the trophy! So why would a
shortening
get me interested in nutrition, anyway? Because I asked one simple question: How is it made?” She learned that Crisco was a man-made product that shifted natural liquid plant oil into a solid that doesn't really exist in nature. “My response was, If it doesn't exist in nature, how does my body know what to
do
with it? But no one then could really answer my question. That's how my career got started.”
The group paid rapt attention to the down-to-earth Beve. “My goal is to bring people back to the joy of eating. The best medicine for you is good food. I have eight hundred patients, and when I see most of them, they're wiped out.” Her youngest patient is three years old; her oldest, ninety-one. She orders labs to find nutritional issues such as those involving blood sugar, vitamin D, or potassium. A couple of people nodded. Terri noted that she'd heard about vitamin D on
Oprah
. “It's funny, this kind of stuff has to get on
Oprah
or
Dr. Oz
before people start to believe it, doesn't it?”
Some of Beve's information was new to me. “If you consume coffee, you should wait an hour before you eat anything because the caffeine will stall your body from getting nutrients from the food,” she said. “Increasing fiber is one of the best things you can do in your diet. If you eat pasta, make it one hundred percent whole grain. Fiber helps drop your sugar. I have one client whose weight can fluctuate by sixty pounds just based on how much rice he eats.”
Most people have cravings due to deficiencies. “If you increase protein in your diet, cravings for carbohydrates and sweets go away. It doesn't matter if the protein comes from meat, fish, or beans.” For people who eat meat, she suggests consuming half as much, but spending the same amount of money to buy better quality. Grass-fed beef doesn't hike up cholesterol or estrogen levels and includes more omega-3 fatty acids than traditional beef. “If you normally use a pound of ground beef in spaghetti or eat an eight-ounce steak, halve the amount and buy grass-fed beef instead.”
She advocated reading labels on everything. “A âhealth nut muffin' sold at a coffee shop near my office had more sugar than cake does,” she said. But the name would lead one to believe that it's healthy. “You want muffins? Make your own and cut down the sugar. Learn to make your own salad dressings, too.”
“We did that! I make vinaigrette all the time now,” Gen piped up. “It's so easy.”
Beve nodded. “Yes, it is. By learning to make some simple things you'd normally buy prepared, you'll be amazed at how easily you can avoid ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup, cornstarch, the hydrogenated oils, sodium, that sort of thing. We consume way too much soy in our diet, especially soybean oil.”
Dri took a lot of notes. She had been practicing every lesson at home. Weight had been an issue for her for years, and part of her interest in cooking was to simply eat a healthier diet. “I'm finding that as I make more of my own food, I don't want some of the things that I used to eat. I mean, I look at boxes of pasta or rice dishes and I think that doesn't even appeal to me anymore.”
Terri nodded. “The thing with me, though, is that I would probably not be good at memorizing a lot of rules, or I don't want to change what I'm eating too much. I mean, after listening to all this, I'm thinking that fast food, for sure, simply has to go.”
Beve's basic rules were simple. “My clients can eat almost anything as long as a serving exceeds three grams of fiber and has less than six grams of sugar and more than six grams of protein. That pretty much eliminates ninety percent of the prepared stuff you find in the supermarket.”
Most convenience foods fall short of the fiber requirement not only due to the nature of processing but also because the ideal shelf-stable foods lack fiber. Their softer state makes them easier to freeze and ship, as well as faster to consume. Plus fiber fills. That's not good for manufacturers who want you to eat a lot. That's their profit margin.
I had seen a presentation called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” by Robert H. Lustig. He argues that sugar in any form is bad news. “When god made the poison, he packaged it with the antidote. Sugarcane is a stick. You can't even chew it,” he said.
When I mentioned that to Beve, she agreed that everyone consumes too much sugar, often without knowing it. “Food labels don't help.” Sugar is listed in grams on nutrition labels, and there's no “daily requirement” for sugar. “Why not? You don't really need fructose. You can get all the sugar you need from carbohydrates, dairy, and fruit. The last thing you need is sugar added to food. But if you're going to eat something like cake, make it from scratch, not a box.” Her reasoning, in part, is that you'll see the sugar you're creaming into the butter. “Most sugar is so hidden that you never know it's there.”
Lisa had been sitting next to me. She got up and started looking at the labels on various items in the kitchen. She quietly came back, sat down, and whispered, “How much sugar is in a gram, anyway?” I didn't know. I later checked. Four grams equals a teaspoon of sugar, so a tablespoon is twelve grams. As I began to routinely note the sugar on every can, jar, or bottle I picked up, I was surprised to find the sugars lurking in foods I didn't necessarily consider sweetened, such as granola bars, yogurt, or even ketchup; a tablespoon of the latter contains a full teaspoon of sugar.
Beve fielded a hail of questions. Are frozen fruits and vegetables a good choice? “Sure,” Beve answered. “Sometimes frozen vegetables are actually better than fresh vegetables, as they haven't been shipped a long distance and may have more nutrients still intact.”
What about fat? “Fat isn't necessarily bad. Some fats are good. I think everyone could use eating half an avocado every day,” she said. “Trans fats, anything that's hydrogenated, that's not good. But you're better off eating a little fat than eating a lot of something that's nonfat. Often nonfat stuff has additional sugar in it.”