Web Call

ED: If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory. We’re talking today about the history of healthy eating in America and it’s time to go to the phones.

PETER: Hey guys, we have a call from a Washington, DC, and its Elizabeth. Elizabeth, welcome to BackStory.

ELIZABETH: Thanks for having me.

PETER: So, we’re trying to get right with our digestive systems. What do you got?

ELIZABETH: I was just wondering, I feel like every time I go to the grocery store there are all these products that are gluten free, or soy free, or dairy free, and–

PETER: Yeah.

ELIZABETH: I was just wondering what the history is with these sort of lack of a better word food avoidance diets. And if it went from medicine the pop culture, or pop culture to medicine, and what happened there?

PETER: Great question, Elizabeth. When and why did we get free with food? Ed, what do you think?

ED: Well it begins before we think of either the concepts of medicine or pop culture, as we know them now, Elizabeth. It’s actually imported from England in 1817 and of course, the first thing we’re supposed to be free of is meat. So meat-free diets were the beginning of things to avoid as a foundation of a diet. But it doesn’t begin quite so much for a concern for our digestive health, but because of the larger perspective that led to pacifism, abolitionism, and feminism of being sensitive to the suffering of others sentient beings.

PETER: Wow.

BRIAN: Elizabeth, I think that the guys will agree this is a bit of a 20th century phenomenon. If we’re talking about x free foods in order to deal with either allergies or intolerances or insensitivities. I think overall it’s probably a reaction to the manufactured processed techniques that really take off in the early 20th century for lots of our food. I see Ed, Ed is crinkling up his eyebrows.

ED: I kind of agree with you and kind of don’t.

BRIAN: I smell trouble.

ED: Well the way you phrased it, you are necessarily right, is that as soon as we start thinking about allergies and intolerances and insensitivities, those are 20th century concepts. The idea of avoiding food, various kinds of groups for various kinds of reasons. Now of course, we won’t talk about the largest religions in the world have done this for millennia, we want to point out. But the idea, Brian, the very vocabulary you are using is the one that Elizabeth is seeing at the grocery store. It is the merger of pop culture and medicine.

So what’s interesting is not so much the idea that certain kinds of foods are bad for us or bad for society or bad for the world and should be avoided, what’s new is the grid of explanation that we’re laying down over it.

PETER: Yeah and where we come from before all of this, before 1817, is a notion of balance. Not of selecting things and eliminating things. I like what you said about reform in the 19th century, Ed, because in a way free is associated with self control and restraint. You’re not free unless you’re exercising that, you’re not a free autonomous individual. The more things we deny ourselves, the more free we are and the interesting thing is that we are making all these choices, we feel like we’re controlling our bodies and our lives and our health, but we’re responding to cues that we’re getting from the outside, including from industry about what’s good for us.

So you might feel that this is the moment in which you’ve really achieved control, but believe me, you’re also being controlled by the marketers.

BRIAN: So my theory, Elizabeth, is that the explosion of gluten free, for instance, in the last 10 or 15 years, is just part of a very long process of customization, of taking a mass-produced product and really tailoring it for individuals.

Let’s take the history of the TV dinner, which starts in the 1950s. You bought your TV dinner and you had your meat, you had your potato, and you had your dessert. And there were very few choices. If you go into the supermarket today, it is just staggering the number of choices that you have. And I think this whole taking things out of food is part of a movement to say, you know, I’m still going to buy my food at Wegmens, let’s say, which sells a lot of gluten-free products, but when I shop at Wegmens, I want them to tailor that food to me even though it’s mass produced.

PETER: Or we are making the choices though and the more things we choose not to do, the more we have affirmed our unique identify.

ED: This is not to say that these intolerances are not real. I’m lactose intolerant and if I have any kind of milk product, I explode. It is to say that I can now buy mass produced goods that cater to my particular genetic biological makeup.

MALE SPEAKER: To give you an amusing sense of the usage of the word free, I was at an event one time and the waiter brought up a dish and I say, what do we have here. He says, this is a veggie-free tata. I said, veggie-free?

PETER: No veggies–

ED: I actually see asparagus in it. So my guest and I looked at it a little while and then we realized what he had heard as he left the kitchen was it’s a veggie fritata. But his idea is so common, it’s the concept of free, that he applied it even the veggie-free. So, to any marketer out there in the world, I share with you, feel free to use veggie-free as a marketing technique. Thank you, Elizabeth.

BRIAN: And remember let freedom ring in the supermarket aisles.

ELIZABETH: Thanks so much.

BRIAN: Bye, bye.

ELIZABETH: Bye, bye.

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