The Book What I Eat Should Give Baby Boomers Food for Thought

[Guest guest]

The Book " What I Eat " Should Give Baby Boomers Food for Thought

This morning I was paging through husband-and-wife team Menzel's and Faith

D'Aluisio's fascinating new photojournalism book What I Eat: Around the World in

80 Diets, which documents the typical daily food consumption of people of

various ages from the United States and a variety of other countries.

But halfway through, the gorgeous color photographs of all that food started

making me hungry, and I had to stop and have lunch. OK, full disclosure: I had a

peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat bread, a banana, a grapefruit, and a cup

of New Orleans' Cafe Du Monde coffee with a splash of whole milk, totaling 760

calories. Fortunately, my 11-year-old son finished the last of the Almond Joy

candy bars in the cupboard last night, so I didn't have one of those as the

pièce de résistance. Even so, according to the book, I ate roughly the entire

day's caloric total for a Kenyan cattle herder, and nearly as much as the sole

meal enjoyed by a 70-year-old Hindu priest in India who has boiled water for

breakfast and dinner. So I'm feeling a bit slovenly.

That's the sort of perspective What I Eat provides. While it doesn't focus on

American baby boomers, there are eight featured in the book (oddly, they're all

men), and it's a little alarming to take a cold, sobering glimpse at what many

of us eat and drink. As you can see in this sample page from the book, everyone

poses with a platter or table containing their entire day's food and beverage

consumption. There's an Illinois-based long-haul trucker, who, at age 54,

consumes 5,400 calories daily and starts his mornings with a quart of coffee and

a glazed honey bun. Two heart attacks haven't changed his ways. There's a

44-year-old meat plant worker from Minnesota who eats two hamburgers a day but

no vegetables or fruit, except for a couple of bananas.

But perhaps the most disturbing case study is a 54-year-old former school bus

driver from Tennessee whose eating habits--he used to regularly consume most of

the three extra-large pizzas that he shared with his wife and son for

dinner--caused his weight to balloon to nearly 500 pounds, so that he became too

stout to fit safely behind the steering wheel. When the authors visited him, he

was stricken with severe back pain, type-2 diabetes and other health woes and

was trying to stick to a 1,600-calorie diet in a desperate effort to lose 100

pounds so that he would be eligible for weight-loss surgery.

Why do Americans eat this way? It's popular these days to blame our awful

dietary habits on some sort of insidious contemporary cabal between

agro-business, fast-food chains and breakfast cereal and soft-drink companies.

But the truth, according to this article on the evolution of 20th century

cuisine from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's website, is that Americans of

a century ago ate an even unhealthier diet than we do today. Historian Lowell K.

Dyson writes that Americans, rich and poor, ate what would seem today like

enormous quantities of meat, often laden with starchy or sugary sauces. Even at

breakfast, " the spread might include steaks, roasts, and chops, along with heaps

of oysters, grilled fish, fried potatoes and probably some scrambled eggs with

biscuits and breads, washed down with numerous cups of coffee. "

It's no wonder that long before the exhibitionist anguish and penitence of The

Biggest Loser, Americans already tended toward corpulent. Dyson notes that in

the late 19th and early 20th centuries, workingmen tended to be stout and their

wives matronly and, in the upper classes, the standard for men was set by

financier J.P. , whose ponderous belly, accentuated by a fashionable vest

and heavy gold watch chain, was admired as a sign of prosperity. (From the

economics website Voxeu.org, here's a revealing study on the historical roots of

the American obesity epidemic.) It wasn't until the insurance industry started

compiling statistics on heart attacks and other health problems in the early

1900s that we first started to get a hint that we were digging our graves with a

knife and a fork (to borrow a phrase from the lyrics of one of my favorite early

80s British new wave rockers, Dave Edmunds.)

Boomers may have inherited over-consumption from our ancestors, but it doesn't

mean it has to be our future. What I Eat helps us to see that living in a

healthier fashion isn't so much about starving ourselves as it is about what we

eat--and what we do when we're not eating. One of the most uplifting sights in

the book is the photo of Ernie , a carpenter and stand-up paddle surfer

from Orange County, Calif., who consumes 3,500 calories a day, but it comes from

egg whites, salmon, vegetables and brown rice. At five feet, ten inches tall,

he's a sinewy, fit-looking 165 pounds. Of course, he also works at a physically

vigorous job and spends his free time burning up calories and building muscle

and aerobic fitness out on the water. In the process, he even catches some of

the fish that he eats for dinner.

Obviously, not everybody can attain that sort of lifestyle, but wouldn't it be

great if we would at least try? The authors of What I Eat say their goal is to

raise awareness " so that people who are fortunate enough to be able to make

choices will hopefully make better, healthier choices for themselves, and

ultimately for the planet. " In order for there to be enough resources for all of

us, they write, we have to shift away from getting our gratification from sheer

consumption of great quantities of food.

But, as the photos in the book drive home, you can eat mindfully and still eat

pretty well. Some of the healthier American meals in the book--such as

Virginia-based sustainable farmer Salatin's repasts of organic, locally

grown foods and Maine lobsterman Sam Tucker's venison stewed in ale and seasoned

with chili sauce--look as delicious as they are nutritious.