The Food Scout

Forgive me if this has already occurred to you, but it just hit me the other day: The food industry’s rally in recent decades to cater to the consumers’ top priorities to make food more convenient and affordable has had an unwelcome consequence: Obesity.

See, when we were pressed for time in the past and there were no drive-thrus, cup holders, pocket sandwiches, curbside takeaway programs , supermarket delis, club-store cafes, or single-serve products, we had to just starve until we could sit down and eat. And before there were combo meals, free refills, big bowls of pasta, dollar menus, and super-gulp 89-cent sodas, we were limited by our pocketbooks as to how much and how often we could rely on the convenience of restaurant meals as substitutes. No more.

Now it’s almost as economical, and certainly more convenient, to rely on QSR and takeout food for meals as it is to plan, shop for, cook, and clean up for 21 meals per week. Or at least we’ve rationalized it that way.

So combine our instinctive need to gorge with the ubiquity of tasty and appealing food that is available anytime, anywhere, and not matter what we are doing, at a price most of us can easily afford, and there you have it.

It’s hard to believe that over just 50 years ago, one of the most popular cookbooks of all time was “How to Cook a Wolf,” in which M.F.K. Fisher explained all sorts of clever and practical ways Americans could keep the wolf of hunger away from the door at a time of money and ingredient scarcity.

If we could work out an industry-friendly paradigm where food is a little less convenient and a lot more expensive (excluding those people who are food insecure, of course), our obesity problem might become a little less insurmountable. Under the current model, however, corporations think they can only thrive if they can get consumers to eat more pounds of their product than were eaten the quarter before, which means unfortunately, that it’s not really in the food industry’s best interests for consumers to get a handle on their eating disorder, because then the growth would stop.

Though I will personally hate to see it go, it’s time to say goodbye to cheap food and the “all you can eat” lifestyle and start to put a premium on food and eating — the way we put a premium on quality electronics and automobiles. It will go a lot further than just taking the fat out of foods or dressing them up in a pseudo-healthy way that’s not going to make anyone much skinnier.