Unemployment was common and the lines to get a plate of food were endless.
It was an America that is difficult to imagine today, but poverty and hunger were rampant during the Great Depression, the period after the New York Stock Exchange crash of October 1929.
Nor could it be imagined before: the US was the country of prosperity and abundance.
“Until then there was an attitude of laissez faire“It was not the government’s role to feed people, even if they were hungry,” Andrew Coe, co-author with Jane Ziegelman of the book, tells BBC Mundo. A Square Meal. A culinary history of the Great Depression (“A Complete Meal. A Culinary History of the Great Depression”).
“The Great Depression was the first time in American history that the federal government decided it had a responsibility to feed the hungry,” he says. “And that was a huge change.”
In addition to directly delivering food, something that had already been happening since Herbert Hoover’s administration, one of the first measures that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government thought of was to find a way for American families to feed themselves while spending little.
This is how the 7.5-cent meals of the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, emerged, with dishes as creative as they were eccentric and bland, such as gelatin salad – literally, gelatin filled with pieces of fruits and vegetables.
The food was little and bad.
And those were the beginnings of the Standard American Diet, a concept adopted by some academics that in English translates as Standard American Dietor SAD, something that in that language means “sad.”
The threat of war
As the 1930s progressed, totalitarian regimes were consolidated in Europe and concerns about the outbreak of a new world war, which finally began in 1939, increased.
It was then that the US government realized it was facing a terrible problem.
His young men, those he could send to fight, were malnourished.
“Many men were rejected from the army for being underweight. Domestically, this was a threat: We can’t defend our country if we don’t have healthy men out there,” says Christopher Gardner, director of Nutrition Studies at the Prevention Research Center at Stanford University in California.
Therefore, they thought that they had to provide Americans with a better diet, something that ended up resulting in more calories.
More calories would mean more energy and therefore greater strength and better health.
To make that happen, Roosevelt sent different bills to Congress to increase the productivity of agricultural lands.
“During the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration attempted to get rid of old farming practices that used horse-drawn plows by mechanizing agriculture,” Coe says.
A rural electrification program was implemented and the incorporation of refrigerators in homes was promoted.
In turn, the government invested in roads and railways.
“They wanted to modernize the American food industry in both production and distribution,” he adds.
Thomas Parran, the nation’s top health authority at the time, attended the U.S. Grocery Manufacturers Association convention in November 1941 and told them that the number one problem in nutrition was “empty hunger for sufficient calories.” , the lack of necessary food.”
He pointed out that hunger was still a problem in the country and that this was reflected in less energy, mental and physical, and that these consequences should not be attacked through medication.
“The solution to malnutrition of the population as a whole is not for us to become a nation of drug consumers, but for there to be an adequate supply of all the food we need at prices we can afford; that, as merchants, they should make it easier for us to select what we need in the categories we can afford; “That, as advertisers, we should be educated about what is good for everyone and what will drive a profitable brand,” Parran told the businessmen, as reported at the time. The New York Times.
The government’s intention to make food cheaper was once again on the table.
And there was another government policy that outlined the new food.
“One of the things the federal government did was ask food companies, and especially bakeries, to add vitamins to foods,” Coe says.
“It was kind of an excuse to make ultra-processed foods because if you could add vitamins to the food, then you didn’t really have to worry or focus too much on the quality of the rest of the ingredients,” he says.
At the end of World War II in 1945, a process of suburbanization began in the United States and what Coe calls “supermarketization.”
“Suddenly, food was not sold in the corner store or farm stand, but in large, modern supermarkets with rows and rows of refrigerated containers, boxes and products. The Great Depression marked the beginning of the modern era of food in which we now live,” says the writer, an expert in American culinary history.
Thus a new concept emerged: TV dinners.
Ready-to-eat dishes
The popular Swanson brand called “TV dinners” the boxes that included an aluminum tray with pre-cooked foods that only had to be heated and in 25 minutes they would be ready to eat.
These TV dinners, also called “convenience food” by industry marketing, not only had the advantage that they eliminated the work of preparing them, but they were also cheap.
“If we go back to the 50s and 60s, with prepared meals, mothers did not need to be at home to cook. They could have a job, be independent,” says Gardner.
To lower their cost even further, the food industry began to replace whole ingredients with parts of those ingredients, breaking the nutritional chain that they brought, and to make them attractive to the palate they added sugars, salt and poor quality fats.
Foods went from being natural or processed – butter or oil are processed products, to give examples – to ultra-processed.
“From an American perspective, that was a big change and it led to this prepared food: low cost, high calories, but not necessarily high quality,” says the Stanford professor.
To all this, Gardner adds a new milestone. Between 1971 and 1976, then-Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz asked farmers to abandon crop diversity and focus specifically on planting corn and soybeans “close-to-close.”
“Do this monoculture, it will be very efficient, and if you do it, we will help you and give you loans for a combine to go row after row over huge tracts of land and work them in one go,” Gardner describes.
From that, the amount of calories per hectare that could be produced increased considerably.
And both corn, with which, for example, high fructose corn syrup is used as added sugar, and soybeans began to play a predominant role in ultra-processed foods.
“The Standard American Diet has become a convenience food diet. Even the foods that we borrow from other cultures, if you look at Chinese food, Mediterranean food, French food, they’ve Americanized them, they’ve made them convenient and affordable,” says Gardner.
Coe does not agree that there is a Standard American Diet due to the differences in nutrition that exist between the numerous communities that coexist in the country, but he does agree with the history of how it came to be today.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) describes ultra-processed foods as “very convenient (ready to consume, almost everlasting), very attractive (hyperpalatable) for consumers, and very profitable (low-cost ingredients, long useful life) for their manufacturers.”
“But these processes and ingredients also make ultra-processed foods typically nutritionally unbalanced and prone to being consumed in excess and displacing other (…) food groups,” the agency says.
It is the industrial bread that you buy in the supermarket, some cereal bars, cookies, desserts, cake mixes, instant pasta, nuggets, soups and a long etcetera. In addition to frozen and prepared or semi-prepared meals, of course.
The limit of satiety
Gardner explains that by adding salt, sugar – which can come under various names – and fat to these prepared foods, dopamine reward pathways are activated in the brain and it becomes addictive.
“Our innate ability to feel fullness and satiety can be bypassed with certain layers of food and manipulation to make it so good that you simply didn’t realize you had eaten enough and overeat.”
“The American diet became: look how cool we are! “We have the technology to make fast food, it’s very affordable, it tastes great, it’s super convenient and it’s open 24/7.”
“We have lost culinary knowledge, we have lost common sense,” he laments.
Ultra-processed foods have five times less nutritional density than unprocessed foods and twice the energy density, according to a study from the University of Washington published in 2019.
The researchers also collected food prices in the US between 2004 and 2016 and found that the cost of 100 calories of ultra-processed foods was US$0.55, compared to US$1.45 for unprocessed foods.
That is, buy the Raw ingredients to eat healthy cost almost three times as much as buying a ready-made frozen dish.
Furthermore, they found that “ultra-processed foods did not increase in price as much as unprocessed foods over the 12-year period.”
The cheap food policy has direct consequences on pockets.
Americans spend less than 10% of their budget on meals at home, according to the US Department of Agriculture. In Mexico, for example, more than a quarter is spent.
Freedom and choice for the consumer
David Chavern, president of the Consumer Brands Association, the main union of food and beverage industries in the United States, defends the journey they have made to provide options to consumers.
“Just as we expect and embrace innovation that fosters safety, accessibility and affordability in every other aspect of our lives, the way we put food on the table should be no different,” he wrote in a column published months ago in the place RealClear Policy.
“We need to address the obvious problems with the term ‘ultra-processed’. “It does not carry a solid, agreed-upon scientific definition, nor does it refer to a specific process or determine nutritional value,” he said.
Chavern added that by questioning ultra-processed foods, consumers’ autonomy to choose what best suits their dietary needs is being “undermined.”
“Let consumers decide how they want to fill their cabinets,” he urged.
71% of the food and beverage offering in supermarkets and stores in 2018 was ultra-processed, according to a study by Northwestern University in Chicago and the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
Ultra-processed foods are not only in supermarkets. They are also ingredients used by restaurant chains such as those that sell hamburgers or pizzas, which in search of reducing costs and making them super tasty use them in their recipes.
58% of total caloric intake comes from ultra-processed foods in the US, while in Brazil it represents 20% and in Chile or Mexico it is around 30%, according to a report from the Global Food Research Program.
The number of daily calories per capita measured from food supply in the United States rose from 3,044 in 1961 to 3,911 60 years later, almost 30% more, according to the FAO.
It is the highest in the world, according to that organization.
The global average daily calorie supply in 2021 was 2,959, almost a thousand less than in the US. The Latin American average is very similar to the world average.
According to the US Department of Agriculture, approximately a third of those calories are wasted or not consumed due to spoilage, so the average American effectively consumes 2,600 calories daily.
That not only exceeds the recommendation made by the government, but it exceeds in foods such as meats, eggs and grains, and is far from fruits, vegetables and dairy products.
Weight consequences
Non-communicable diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart attacks increased in the United States with the increase in the consumption of processed and ultra-processed foods.
The American Heart Association said in 2022 that “although U.S. food assistance policies and programs are designed to improve food security, there is growing consensus that they should have a broader focus on nutritional security.”
The United States has an obesity rate of almost 43% in adults, one of the highest in the world, and if we add those who are overweight, there are 3 out of every 4 inhabitants, according to the latest figures published by the World Health Organization.
One in 10 is severely obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Blacks and Latinos have the highest rates of obesity in the U.S., and the poor tend to have higher rates of obesity than the wealthy, according to the CDC.
In 1960, obesity was only 13% and severe obesity was practically non-existent.
Coe does not believe that the way we eat will change too much in the future.
“The companies that produce these ultra-processed foods are extremely large, they are some of the largest corporations in the US and also in the world,” he says.
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