Why people flip out about food

Food is personal. Food is cultural. Food is political.

Food like so many things in our lives exist in many dimensions, it cannot be extracted out of any of them. It naturally follows that people go from zero to crazy in less than second when it comes to food. Like so many other topics, food sends people over the edge until they can no longer even think clearly. It becomes a strictly emotional issue that can conveniently be tied to other ideas that let us hide our emotions, like ethics, religion, and freedom.

Enter science! Although a great many people on both sides of the political spectrum don’t like to side with science when it doesn’t support their view, I still rely on it heavily. That said what does science and facts have to say about food? In the United States approximately one third of our land is used as agricultural grassland (USDA, 1997). As many people have pointed out before, that is a lot of land and energy being used to support an unnecessary dietary choice. The other side of that is the health benefits of not eating, or eating very little, meat.

But all of those things are well known and relatively old hat for anyone interested in food. What I find more interesting is the relationship with food. What I’ve got in mind here is confirmation bias. The long and the short of confirmation bias is that if you believe something you’re more likely to believe something that affirms that. Think on that for a minute. You’re more likely to be receptive to hear/see/think things that confirm what you’re already thinking than things that challenge you. This is part of why propaganda is so powerful. Sociology provides enough insight into what the general populace is thinking. By playing upon the worst parts of human psychology it’s relatively easy to whip people into frothing mass. Add to that people’s inclination to follow orders and you’ve got a big mess.

What’s all this have to do with food though? It breaks down like this. Advertising (propoganda) tells us how to eat. We internalize those messages. Those messages are part of our culture. What happens when science tells us we’re wrong? We ignore it, we downplay it, we feel guilty about it. We do everything except actually make a change in our life because it’s too damn hard to do the right thing in the face of everyone you know. The result, people form communities of like-minded individuals and then don’t want to talk to people who don’t think/feel/eat the same way. It’s all horribly obvious, stupid, and lethal. We all know, we’re all living it every day.